Now that we’re busy hacking the planet, we need all the help we can get. We humans are pretty good at solving complex problems like choosing the next move in chess- better than most machines. But as Gary Kasparov notes in Clive Thompson’s Wired piece on the Cyborg Advantage, “a weak human with a machine can be better than a […]
“Cities are green. Nuclear energy is green. Genetic engineering is green. (Brand 2009).” In 1968 Stewart Brand‘s Whole Earth Catalog was embraced by a generation trying to get back to the country, get off the grid, and grow their own. Now it’s 2010, and the quote above, from Brand‘s new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (2009) makes clear […]
Our planet is heating up in a hurry! Call in the Earth doctors! Let’s fix the planet! Now that we’ve pushed Earth systems out of the comfort zone, Earth and environmental scientists are increasingly being called on to address the big questions that affect all of us, like “How can we keep the planet habitable for humans?”. While the simple […]
Even if we manage to slash our carbon emissions, planet earth is going to get a whole lot warmer this century. But maybe we can just chill the planet! For more than a decade, Ken Caldeira and many others have been discussing geoengineering solutions to global warming by cooling the planet using technical means – especially by altering the albedo, […]
We live in interesting times. We’ve now realized that our activities are changing global climate and thereby harming both ourselves and the rest of the biosphere. And we are begining to do something about it. International efforts are assessing and attempting to manage our climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions and many institutions and even individuals are taking action to become “carbon […]