Engineering the Climate

Notions of the impending climate crisis have pushed a set of highly contested techno-scientific measures onto policy agendas around the world. Suggestions to deliberately alter, to engineer, the Earth’s climate have gained political currency in recent years not as a positive vision of techno-scientific innovation, but as a daunting measure of last resort. The controversial status of various so-called climate engineering proposals raises a simple, yet pressing question: How has it has come to this? And, more specifically, how did such contested measures earn their place on policy agendas, despite enormous scientific complexities and fierce political contestation? Global societal problems, such as climate change, financial crises, or pandemics have brought the political relevance of scientific expertise to the foreground. This book speaks to scholarship in sociology and science studies, seeking to illuminate the essential entanglements between efforts to understand and efforts to govern such problems. By giving climate engineering a life of its own and following its dynamic trajectory as a contested object of expert work, this book sheds light on the reflexive and historically contingent interplay of science and politics as two distinct, yet increasingly interdependent, realms of society.

Penerapan Teknologi Budidaya Tanaman Stroberi Di Desa Pangkalan Kabupaten Indramayu

The geographical condition of Indramayu, which is in the lowlands, is not the right land for cultivating strawberry plants. But it is not impossible for this plant to grow and develop well. The purpose of this community service program is to provide technical guidance to improve the knowledge and skills of Pangkalan Village young people in cultivating strawberry plants by applying climate engineering technology. The equipment given in this activity is water cooling, air conditioning, temperature and humidity control, and spray machines. This activity can be said to be successful as seen by the skills of the participants in managing tools and growing and developing strawberry plants well.

Environmental Geopolitics of Climate Engineering Proposals in the IPCC 5th Assessment Report

Environmental geopolitics offers an analytical approach that considers how environmental themes are brought into the service of geopolitical agendas. Of particular concern are claims about environment-related security and risk and the justification of actions (or inactions) proposed to deal with those claims. Environmental geopolitical analysis focuses on geographical knowledge and how that knowledge is generated and applied to stabilize specific understandings of the world. Climate engineering is a realm in which certain kinds of geographical knowledge, in the form of scientific interpretations of environmental interactions, are utilized to support a selective agenda that, despite claims about benefiting people and environments on a global scale, may be shown to reinforce uneven relationships of power as well as patterns of injustice. This paper focuses on how the IPCC AR5 discusses and portrays climate engineering. This particular conversation is significant, since the IPCC is widely recognized as reflecting current, international science and understanding of climate change processes and possible responses. We demonstrate an initial, environmental geopolitical analysis of this portrayal and discussion around climate engineering proposals by observing how the role and meaning of environmental features is limited, how human agency and impact in these scenarios is selective, and how insufficient attention is paid to spatial dimensions and impacts of these proposals. This paper contributes to a larger conversation about why it matters how we engage in discussion about climate impacts and issues; a central argument is that it is vital that we consider these proposed plans in terms of what they aim to secure, for whom, how and where.

Review of "Ethics of Chemistry: From Poison Gas to Climate Engineering" by Joachim Schummer & Tom Børsen, eds. World Scientific Publishing, Singapore, 2021

BRINGING THE ETHICS OF CHEMISTRY TO THE CLASSROOM AND THE EXISTENCE OF A DOMAIN OF KNOWLEDGE Whoever has attempted to bring ethical discussions on chemistry to a student audience of chemistry and related fields knows of the problem: in contrast to the relatively robust bioethical literature, the literature of chemical ethics is poor, disconnected, and scattered all around the place even in rare cases that it exists. This is an interesting fact, especially if one considers the extended moral (and moralist) discussions over chemistry and its products, and that a great part of the bioethical challenges of the last forty years or so have been generated not by biology (or medicine) per se, but from their marriage to chemistry and its practices. The lack of ethics of chemistry literature dictates to the lecturer unprecedented levels of creativity and demands extra workload to be effective –and this, in times where ethics courses, in general, have become a necessity. It is this gap that the editors of this book (Schummer and Børsen, Ethics of Chemistry: From Poison Gas to Climate Engineering, World Scientific, 2021) have detected, and they strove to create a collection of case studies to cover it. In the introduction of the volume, the editors state teaching as the first aim of its existence –and add the establishment of the ethics of chemistry as an autonomous discipline in its own right.