all Harvard University Center for the Environment stories

Expert: Lift taboo on Earth engineering

404132862 — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:46:52 -0400

The effects of climate change are so uncertain and potentially long-lasting that policymakers should begin examining options that include geoengineering, an area that has so far been off-limits, according to a former Harvard researcher who is now a professor at the University of Calgary, Canada.

Geology is destiny

404132862 — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:51:17 -0400

As a teenager in Toronto in the 1950s, Paul Hoffman would spend hours in the Royal Ontario Museum studying its collection of rocks and minerals. He became a passionate collector, trading rocks with friends and exploring abandoned mines in search of crystals.

During his freshman year at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Hoffman landed a summer job with the Ontario Department of Mines, which dispatched him on a four-month journey to map rocks in northern Ontario. It was 1961 and his first field season.

Planning to save a changing world

50443248 — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 10:41:55 -0400

Climate change is not only altering Alaska’s natural world, it’s also affecting how humans interact with it, particularly those whose culture and traditions have pointed the way for generations to survive in the sometimes inhospitable far north.

Terry Chapin, a professor of ecology at the University of Alaska’s Institute of Arctic Biology, said that climate change is already affecting Alaska in many ways. Sea ice is retreating, salmon are migrating farther north, forest fires are increasing, permafrost is melting, and forest pest outbreaks are becoming more frequent. While those changes are having a dramatic impact on the natural world, Chapin said they’re also affecting the people who live in remote villages around the state.

Reservoir system proposed to meet needs

50443248 — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:12:16 -0400

A former Massachusetts water official is proposing a new network of central Massachusetts reservoirs to meet population-driven demand that he says will outstrip current supplies in the coming decades.

Climate options must include ‘all of the above’

404132862 — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 16:06:21 -0500

Climate change has so much momentum behind it that “either/or” discussions about options are meaningless because it’ll take all we can do just to arrest carbon dioxide at levels double those in preindustrial times, a top climate scientist said in a talk last month.

U.S. energy answers there for the taking, says Amory Lovins

404132862 — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:02:11 -0500

As U.S. automakers plead for a government bailout, the next great automotive revolution is already under way, as Japanese automakers plan for a generation of lightweight cars that vastly increase mileage and whose advanced materials pay for themselves through dramatically streamlined assembly and smaller engines, a leading energy expert said yesterday.

Global warming threatens his nation's existence, a president warns

404132862 — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:55:55 -0400

During a talk at Harvard, the leader of the South Pacific island nation of Kiribati laid out an extraordinary plan that would scatter his people through the nations of the world as rising sea levels submerge the islands they have called home for centuries.

Policy can empower technological climate change solution

404132862 — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:12:00 -0400

The chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming struck an optimistic tone about the planet’s climate crisis last night, saying that an energy revolution is in the offing if government can just get the policy right.

Engineered weathering process might mitigate climate change

404132862 — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 14:34:16 -0500

Researchers at Harvard University and Penn State University have invented a technology, inspired by nature, to reduce the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by human emissions.

By electrochemically removing hydrochloric acid from the ocean and then neutralizing the acid by reaction with silicate (volcanic) rocks, the researchers say they can accelerate natural chemical weathering, permanently transferring CO2 from the atmosphere to the ocean. Unlike other ocean sequestration processes, the new technology does not further acidify the ocean and may be beneficial to coral reefs.

Foraging for forest frogs

404132862 — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:31:20 -0500

In the dark of the Sri Lankan cloud forest, the researchers’ only guides were the headlamps they used to light up the night, illuminating the cold, gray mist that drifted through the trees.

They looked carefully as they walked among the trunks, the beams from their headlamps casting left and right, up and down. They examined rocks and branches, leaf litter and shrubs, tree trunks, and leaves high in the canopy. By and by, they found one, then another — small tree frogs that froze in the light and went suddenly silent.

Harvard brings the Earth to high school

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:16:26 -0400

Steam vents in Yellowstone National Park are part of the area’s unique environment, seen in a case study exploring Yellowstone and the reintroduction of wolves into the park. This case study is part of a new environmental science course for high school science teachers.

Harvard scientists and media specialists unveiled an online environmental science course Monday (Oct. 1) aimed at high school teachers and, through them, high school students — the future inheritors of the Earth’s environmental problems.

The course, called “The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science,” features a scientific “dream team” of experts from Harvard and elsewhere who describe their fields, relevant problems, and potential solutions in a series of online videos.

Current U.S. renewable energy goal too low, says head of national lab

50443248 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:34:55 -0400

The head of the U.S. government's renewable energy lab said Monday (Feb. 5) that the federal government is doing "embarrassingly few things" to foster renewable energy, leaving leadership to the states at a time of opportunity to change the nation's energy future.

Dan Arvizu, director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Colorado-based National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said a brief opening exists to dramatically increase the energy generated from renewable sources in the coming decades, but said more resources and a national policy promoting renewable energy will be needed to make it come true.

World's largest oil firm chief touts research to make fossil fuels 'cleaner'

50443248 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:39:26 -0400

The head of the world's largest oil company said that renewable sources can't meet the world's growing energy needs so research dollars should be aimed at both developing renewable sources and at making fossil fuels cleaner.

Abdallah S. Jum'ah, president and chief executive officer of the Saudi Arabian Oil Co., also known as Saudi Aramco, said that expected growth in the industrialized world coupled with a growing global population and industrialization of the developing world will significantly increase global energy needs over the next 25 years.

Deep-sea sediments could safely store man-made carbon dioxide

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:13:59 -0400

An innovative solution for the man-made carbon dioxide fouling our skies could rest far beneath the surface of the ocean, say scientists at Harvard University. They've found that deep-sea sediments could provide a virtually unlimited and permanent reservoir for this gas that has been a primary driver of global climate change in recent decades, and estimate that seafloor sediments within U.S. territory are vast enough to store the nation's carbon dioxide emissions for thousands of years to come.

Fossil fuels, conservation in energy future

50443248 — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:21:05 -0400

The BP Group Executive Director Iain Conn forecasts an energy future where fossil fuels still make up the bulk of world energy production, but in which demand is far higher, conservation more widespread, and the release of carbon dioxide controlled by new technology.

Conn, who delivered the March 8 talk - the second in "The Future of Energy" series sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment - said that global energy demand is projected to increase 60 percent by 2030, with much of the growth outside today's developed countries.