Posts Tagged ‘geoengineering’
“Adaptation and mitigation are two sides of the same coin. If mitigation is about preventing the unmanageable, adaptation is about managing the unavoidable.”*…
Adapting to climate change is quickly becoming part of everyday life. Nabig Chaudhry outlines seven trends we’re seeing for 2026 and beyond…
Within the climate and scientific communities, there’s growing concern about how quickly the world is approaching (and may exceed) 2°C of warming. 2024 was the first calendar year in which global average temperature exceeded 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. The impacts of rapid warming are becoming harder to miss: The climate is changing quickly almost everywhere, local and global climate risks are growing, progress on mitigation has become more politically constrained and uncertain, and many of our systems and policies aren’t prepared for the conditions ahead.
Growing climate risk is increasing the demand for new technologies, tools, strategies, and ways of thinking about climate adaptation. Since publishing our Insights on Climate Adaptation in 2025 report, the practice of climate adaptation has continued to develop, as more people, communities, organizations, and institutions work to understand and respond to climate risks.
People use different language to describe climate adaptation (including climate resilience), but the work centers on helping people, communities, and organizations manage the risks of a changing climate. Those activities are expanding, and we can already see signs. For example, new funding and investment vehicles are emerging, such as Tailwind Futures, and adaptation is receiving more dedicated space at major climate convenings, including The Adaptation Forum, a co-hosted gathering of thought leaders in the adaptation space during Climate Week NYC 2025.
In my role as Director of Climate Adaptation Research at Probable Futures and through my PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley, I speak with experts, read emerging research, and study adaptation developments every day. Through these conversations and insights, I’ve reflected on which adaptation trends are likely to emerge and strengthen…
Chaudhry npacks seven different trends; here, let me highlight two. The first is one that (Roughly) Daily has visited before, insurance…
Elevating insurance as a force in adaptation planning, policy, and behavior
Insurance is a valuable adaptation tool, as it can transfer risk, support recovery after climate shocks, and help signal where danger is increasing through premiums, deductibles, coverage limits, or insurer retreat. It can also shape incentives, because the way risk is priced can influence whether and how people and institutions reduce exposure, strengthen buildings, or avoid certain kinds of development.
As climate risks grow, damage to property and homes becomes more frequent and severe. Property owners are experiencing those shocks both physically (flooding, fire, wind damage, etc.) and financially as insurance markets adjust and recalibrate in response to changing probabilities and severities. Insurance markets have begun reflecting climate risk, and those changes are starting to influence where and how people build homes and infrastructure, where they invest in property, and where they choose to live.
A useful example of how insurance is beginning to influence adaptation efforts in the public sphere is Strengthen Alabama Homes, a program of the Alabama Department of Insurance. The program provides grants to help homeowners retrofit their homes and roofs to reduce wind damage from extreme winds and storms. Homeowners who participate can receive discounts on the wind portion of their homeowner’s insurance premium, which makes insurance not only a tool for recovery but also a tool for encouraging adaptation before exposure occurs.
Insurance pricing is one way climate risk is made visible, priced, and acted on through adaptation. I expect that insurance will increasingly influence adaptation planning, policy, and behavior, not only by helping people recover after climate shocks, but by shaping the choices people make before those shocks occur. The development of the insurance industry will therefore be an important factor in adaptation. If insurers become a source not only of risk pricing but also of risk information, adaptation guidance, and incentives to reduce risk, they could help more people act before losses occur. But that would require a meaningful shift in the role of insurance companies, from mainly pricing and transferring risk to also helping people reduce it…
The second goes to the contentious topic of geoengineering…
Expanding debate around the role of climate intervention
As warming continues, risks keep growing. We have more, clearer, worrisome signals that irreversible change, tipping points, and local climate changes so severe that adaptation is impractical if not impossible, are not far off. In response, people and institutions are starting new conversations about global-scale responses. One of those responses is climate intervention, sometimes called geoengineering.
Climate intervention generally refers to intentional efforts to alter Earth’s systems in order to counteract some of the effects of climate change. It can include approaches that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as well as approaches that reflect a portion of sunlight back into space, such as stratospheric aerosol injection.
Its relationship to adaptation is uneasy, but important. If climate intervention is, at its core, an effort to manage the otherwise unmanageable risks of global climate change, then is it another tool for adapting to climate change, or is it something fundamentally different? There is no consensus, and there may never be, not least because global action will cause uneven responses locally. We don’t know much about the potential impacts of some climate interventions, how they could affect different regions unequally, or what long-term consequences they may have for Earth’s climate and natural systems.
There are good reasons to have informed conversations and do fundamental research on intervention. People with adaptation expertise can help explore, illuminate, and explain what climate intervention could mean for society and nature. There are also likely to be benefits for adaptation professionals to participate in these conversations and research projects. Even if climate intervention is never widely deployed, the debate itself may shape adaptation thinking, climate policy, research funding, public trust, and international governance.
Climate change requires people to consider risks and options, whether for mitigation, adaptation, or intervention. Treating strategies for managing the rate, pace, and impacts of climate change as distinct and separate is unlikely to lead to good outcomes. I am hopeful that there will be more collaboration across these new fields as society faces new challenges that have a common root cause. This may include more discussion about how these technologies should be governed, whether they should receive more investment, and whether climate intervention is a possible third leg alongside mitigation and adaptation…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The near-term future of climate adaptation: emerging trends.”
* U. N. Environmental Program
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As we prepare, we might recall (wistfully) that it was on this date in 1942 that Bing Crosby, with the Trotter Orchestra and the Darby Singers, recorded Irving Berlin’s song, “White Christmas.” According to the Guinness Book of World Records, this version is the best-selling single of all time with an excess of 50 million copies sold worldwide. (In fact, the version most often heard today is not the original. After frequent use, the master had become damaged, so on March 18, 1947, Crosby re-recorded the holiday hit.)
“How many things have been denied one day, only to become realities the next!”*…
In 1603, a Jesuit priest invented a machine for lifting the entire planet with only ropes and gears.
Christoph Grienberger oversaw all mathematical works written by Jesuit authors, a role akin to an editor at a modern scientific journal. He was modest and productive, and could not resist solving problems. He reasoned that since a 1:10 gear could allow one person to lift 10 times as much as one unassisted, if one had 24 gears linked to a treadmill then one could lift the Earth… very slowly.
Like any modern academic who prizes theory above practice, he left out the pesky details: “I will not weave those ropes, or prescribe the material for the wheels or the place from which the machine shall be suspended: as these are other matters I leave them for others to find.”
You can see what Grienberger’s theoretical device looked like here.
For as long as we have had mathematics, forward-thinking scholars like Grienberger have tried to imagine the far limits of engineering, even if the technology of the time was lacking. Over the centuries, they have dreamt of machines to lift the world, transform the surface of the Earth, or even reorganise the Universe. Such “megascale engineering” – sometimes called macro-engineering – deals with ambitious projects that would reshape the planet or construct objects the size of worlds. What can these megascale dreams of the future tell us about human ingenuity and imagination?
What are the biggest, boldest things that humanity could engineer? From planet lifters to space cannons, Anders Sandberg (@anderssandberg) explores some of history’s most ambitious visions – and why they’re not as ‘impossible’ as they seem: “The ‘megascale’ structures that humans could one day build.”
* Jules Verne (imagineer of many megascale projects)
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As we think big, we might send very carefully measured birthday greetings to (the other noteworthy) John Locke; he was born on this date in 1792. A geologist, surveyor, and scientist, he invented tools for surveyors, including a surveyor’s compass, a collimating level (Locke’s Hand Level), and a gravity escapement for regulator clocks. The electro-chronograph he constructed (1844-48) for the United States Coast Survey was installed in the Naval Observatory, in Washington, in 1848. It improved determination of longitudes, as it was able to make a printed record on a time scale of an event to within one one-hundredth of a second. When connected via the nation’s telegraph system, astronomers could record the time of events they observed from elsewhere in the country, by the pressing a telegraph key. Congress awarded him $10,000 for his inventions in 1849.
“The beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam: No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine”*…
Of all the things that humanity builds from concrete or stone, there are few structures that influence the surface of Earth quite as profoundly as a dam.
By blocking the flow of a river, we dare to defy gravity’s pull on water from mountain to estuary – and influence the trajectory of geology itself. A dam does so much more than submerge a valley to create a reservoir: it transforms a river’s natural course, accruing silt and sediment at an artificial barrier, and dampening water’s erosional force downstream
Their vertiginous walls, striking shapes and deep foundations will also leave a unique archaeological imprint. Some of these engineered monoliths are so enormous that they may be preserved for millennia.
Meanwhile, dams can also bring deep changes for the people who live nearby, and the generations that follow them. When a government in a distant capital decides to exploit its rivers, destruction of local homes, farmland and livelihoods often follows. For example, while the rest of the world focused on Covid-19 earlier this year, an entire ancient town in Turkey was lost to rising reservoir waters. Long after we are gone, future archaeologists will study such submerged settlements and may wonder why we let them go for the sake of short-term politics and energy demand.
The effects can be felt a long way from home, too. Damming rivers that wind through continents, like the Nile in Africa, can withhold valuable water and power from countries downstream, forever changing the trajectories of those nations…
Few human structures can change a landscape quite like a dam– a pictorial essay: “How dams have reshaped our planet.”
* Nobel laureate Charles H. Townes
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As we interrogate interruption, we might recall that it was on this date in 1570 that the All Saints Flood broke dikes and overwhelmed the Dutch (and parts of the German) coast. At least 20,000 people were drowned and many times that many left homeless; livestock was lost in huge numbers; and winter stocks of food and fodder were destroyed. In Zeeland the small islands Wulpen, Koezand, Cadzand, and Stuivezand were permanently lost.
“Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water”*…
The pillars of smoke from the Bel Air fire were visible around the city, and as the firefighters struggled through the canyons, most people could simply watch and worry. But Ralph Parsons, the wealthy founder of a wildly successful international engineering firm, was trying to end the Southern California drought — forever.
It was 1961.
The solution Parsons devised, a continental-scale plumbing project called the North American Water and Power Alliance, or NAWAPA, was never built, but it’s never quite gone away, either. Today it persists as a fantastical vision that could have been, and might in some form still be…
The North American Water and Power Alliance was an audacious proposal to divert water to parched western states that would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars and pissed off Canada. The abandoned plan that aimed to save America from drought: “Pipe Dreams.”
* “Noah Cross” (John Huston), Chinatown
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As we contemplate the commons, we might recall that it was on this date in 1832 that an act of Congress created Hot Springs Reservation, protecting the site’s thermal waters to be “preserved for future recreation,” in Arkansas. Established before the concept of a national park existed in the U.S., it was the first time that American land had been set aside by the federal government in this way, and so is considered by many to have been the first National Park. It officially became a National Park in 1921.
Pool of hot spring water in Hot Springs National Park
“Climate change isn’t an “issue” to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call.”*…
“Whitening” the ocean (to reflect more solar radiation) by widely dispersing films, foams, floating chips, or other reflectors– or by towing icebergs from the Arctic down to lower latitudes, so the whiteness of the ice would reflect the sun.
The 1990s were a critical decade for action on climate change, as world governments prepared to finalize the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement by 37 countries to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. They were also a decade when oil companies poured millions of dollars into government lobbying and public relations, trying to persuade the world there was little to worry about. In 1997, with the Kyoto accord almost complete, Mobil, the major American oil company, published an advertisement in the New York Times and the Washington Post: “Let’s face it: The science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil,” it said. “Scientists cannot predict with certainty if temperatures will increase, by how much and where changes will occur.” Around the same time, Exxon CEO Lee Raymond argued in a speech to the World Petroleum Congress that “the case for so-called global warming is far from airtight.” (In 1998, Exxon and Mobil would join in a $73.7 billion deal, the largest corporate merger in the world at the time.)
Recent reporting by the Los Angeles Times and others revealed, however, that Exxon’s rhetoric ran counter to its own internal conclusions about the risks of climate change, as the company reengineered oil platforms and pipelines to account for the rising sea levels that both top executives and the publicity department claimed didn’t exist. Today, even as Exxon endorses the scientific consensus on climate change, supports emissions limits, and even backs some form of carbon taxation, the company exudes a vague optimism, regarding the climate problem as something they can build their way out of…
Perhaps our best guess at the kind of solutions Exxon may have in mind can be found in an obscure 1997 study on the topic of geoengineering. During the peak of Exxon’s obfuscation, the company’s top climate scientists, Brian Flannery and Haroon Kheshgi, along with two other scientists who didn’t work for Exxon, coauthored a chapter in a book called Engineering Response to Global Climate Change. Using dense, technical language, they outlined more than a dozen planetary-scale fixes to global warming. Not every idea was their own—some were borrowed, at least partially, from prior scientific literature—and the scientists also cautioned that the proposed solutions were not necessarily ready to be implemented. “Geoengineering may well have unintended and unforeseen consequences,” they wrote.
Indeed, geoengineering was considered fringe science in the 1990s, not least because there was still widespread hope that carbon emissions could be reduced through global agreements like Kyoto. (President George W. Bush withdrew the United States from the accord in 2001.) It would take a decade before Scientific American declared that climate intervention had “gained respectability,” and almost 15 years until the United Nations’ climate-research body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, would begin publishing assessments on geoengineering options. That’s because while some of the ideas featured in the Exxon study were straightforward (planting trees, for example), a lot of them were quite insane…
Destroying the earth to save it? Review several of the oil giant’s visionary “solutions”: “Giant Mirrors. Ocean Whitening. Here’s How Exxon Wanted to Save the Planet.”
* Naomi Klein
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As we head for the hills, we might spare a thought for Robert McCorkle Netting; he died on this date in 1995. A geographer and anthropologist, he pioneered the field of cultural ecology. Among the many findings from his extensive field work, he argued that worldwide, small farms succeeded where large-scale agricultural enterprises tended to fail, the household being the most effective management unit. His methodology has been widely adopted, and his textbook, Cultural Ecology, is widely used.
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