Blogs

Public controversies over new energy technology developments can have wide-reaching consequences.

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Into The Anthropocene. The Science of Conservation.

Episode #3: Professor David Beerling, Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation (LC³M), speaks about a potential solution for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere which may also help rebuild the health of our soils.

Conservation journalist, Byron Pace, speaks with scientists, environmental advocates, conservationists, wildlife managers and a diverse array of global guests, to uncover the complex nature of the world we live. Into The Anthropocene aims to make the science of conservation more accessible, exploring stories and research from the frontline. Only through understanding our world can we improve our decision making and define the Anthropocene for the betterment of humanity and the planet.

Negative-emissions technology (NET) proposals are many and varied, and each has a unique mix of risks and co-benefits; therefore, there will be no single greatest barrier. But one important consideration that is often overlooked is the interaction with wider society and the general public.

A new public conversation about the urgency of climate change is important for people’s perceptions of CO2 removal technologies. But doing fieldwork in the midst of extreme weather is never easy… By Dr. Elspeth Spence & Dr. Emily Cox, Understanding Risk Group, Cardiff University.

On this week’s podcast, an ambitious Mars mission from a young space agency, and how crumbling up rocks could help fight climate change.

Researchers have assessed whether Enhanced Rock Weathering – a technique to pull carbon dioxide out of the air – has the potential to help battle climate change. Research Article: Beerling et al.

Listen in at 12:12

With global greenhouse gas emissions still increasing – and Covid-19 lockdown restrictions merely causing a short-term dip – the challenge of holding global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is looking ever more formidable.

Achieving this goal looks increasingly unlikely without taking previously emitted CO₂ out of the atmosphere – using carbon dioxide removal (CDR) or “negative emissions” techniques.

Hi and welcome to this week’s Fix the Planet. I’ve been chatting to people about a method of carbon-dioxide removal that doesn’t grab the headlines in the way that CO2-absoring machines and tree planting do: scattering pulverised rock over the Earth’s surface. Many rocks naturally absorb CO₂, but this doesn’t happen fast enough to avert the sort of dangerous warming we’re headed for.

“Essentially, it’s a natural process that happens anyway in the world, but at a comparatively slow rate,” says Mike Kelland, LC3M PhD Student at the University of Sheffield, UK. Breaking up the rock, a process known as enhanced weathering, increases its surface area and the rate at which CO₂ is absorbed.

Read David Beerling’s blog, with Oxford University Press, on why we actually have to start removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, safely and affordably, within the next 20 years. Drastic phase-down of our carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels will be insufficient to avoid catastrophic human-caused climate change. Enter, the kingdom of plants…
Hundreds of millions of years ago, plants bioengineered a cooler climate as the spread of forests lowered atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. We now think it may be possible to mimic those processes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere…

Guest post by Professor David Beerling and Professor Stephen Long to coincide with the Nature Plants paper ‘Farming with crops and rocks to address global climate, food and soil security’, published 19 February 2018. The paper tackles the under-discussed technique of CO₂ removal called ‘enhanced rock weathering’ and highlights the potential wider benefits for crop yields and soil health, and sets out a research agenda for the next steps.

Biology Letters has just published a mini-series on “Enhanced rock weathering: biological climate change mitigation with co-benefits for food security”. To coincide with publication, we asked Guest Editor, Professor David J. Beerling FRS, why he commissioned this series and what the research can tell us about the future.