For the past several months I’ve been working on a television show for The Weather Channel. Hacking the Planet is the brainchild of my friend John Rennie, former editor in chief of Scientific American, and it features me and Cara Santa Maria, senior science correspondent for The Huffington Post. As host, John flies around the globe, talking [...]

Editor’s Note: Journalist and crew member Kathryn Eident and scientist Jeremy Jacquot are traveling on board the RV Atlantis on a monthlong voyage to sample and study nitrogen fixation in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, among other research projects. This is the fourth blog post detailing this ongoing voyage of discovery for ScientificAmerican.com. RV ATLANTIS [...]

Earlier this month, the World Economic Forum published its annual report on global risks, “Global Risks 2013: Eighth Edition.” At the 2013 WEF meeting at Davos, a session focused on emerging threats, called “X Factors: Preparing for the Unknown.” My colleague Philip Campbell, the editor in chief of Nature, and his colleague editors, identified these [...]

Earth’s average temperature has warmed by 0.8 degree Celsius over the last 100 years or so. The reason is increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. The concentration of CO2 has now reached 394 parts-per-million in the air we breathe—and would be even higher, roughly 450 ppm, if the oceans weren’t [...]

Controversial tests of geoengineering hardware, initially set to start in October, have been delayed. The British government agency that provides funding to the project issued the delay on September 29, in order “to allow time for more engagement with stakeholders.” In mid-September, a team of U.K. researchers leading a project called Stratospheric Particle Injection for [...]

Climate change is a foregone conclusion. The amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere from two centuries-worth of fossil fuel burning (and, apparently, with decades more worth to come, given the glacial pace of efforts to slow said emissions) is enough to substantially warm global average temperatures. And that leaves so-called geoengineering—the deliberate, large-scale [...]

p>Mimicking volcanoes by throwing particles high into the sky. Maintaining a floating armada of mirrors in space. Burning plant and other organic waste to make charcoal and burying it—or burning it as fuel and burying the CO2 emissions. Even replanting trees. All have been mooted as potential methods of “geoengineering“—”deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary [...]

If there’s one thing more potentially contentious than the international politics of global warming (which the world has spent at least the past 20-plus years dithering about), it’s the politics of the most radical suggestion to solve it: geoengineering. After all, he who controls Earth’s thermostat may well control Earth. And what’s good for one [...]

COPENHAGEN—The controversy at this climate summit revolves around two simple issues: Who cuts? Who pays? Of course, climate change does not distinguish between a ton of carbon dioxide emitted from cutting down a peat forest in Indonesia versus a ton emitted as a result of burning coal in Germany. Therefore, a relatively new term is [...]

As utilities fire up their "clean coal" machines and international negotiators haggle over the precise definition of a tree, only one entity has the courage to stand and deliver the hot air the world so desperately craves on climate change: the U.S. Senate. After a hectic couple of weeks, filled with Republican walkouts and Democratic [...]

AUSTIN—A new and unpublished analysis of the regional impacts of a hypothetical scheme to mitigate global warming via radical deforestation was unveiled here Sunday at a gathering of science journalists and writers, on the heels of a blogging firestorm about geoengineering and climate change in anticipation of the release of Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, [...]

Twenty-five years ago when Sir Richard Branson (sans the "sir," at the time) called up Boeing and asked for a spare 747, few would have predicted the brash entrepreneur would so radically disrupt the formerly staid business of air travel. Perhaps folks had higher hopes for the former record executives’ feature film production debut at [...]

“The Earth doesn’t need to change, we do” says Sheril Kirshenbaum. In today’s Ottawa Citizen, the University of Texas research scientist explains why we shouldn’t use “our only home” as a geoengineering lab. Kirshenbaum argues that there are simply too many variables that can cloud our ability to predict the outcomes of – for example [...]