Abstract
It is a strange time on Planet Earth. For the first time in humanity’s recorded history, we no longer can feel totally secure in Mother Nature’s “balmy nest.” There are simply too many of us, and we all desire to live well. As far as we know, humanity is the first terrestrial species with the technological power to alter Earth’s global environment in a measurable way. We seem to be in a tight fix of our own making. Can we do anything about it?
“We saw Thee in Thy balmy nest.
Young dawn of our eternal day!
We saw Thine eyes break from their east,
And chase the trembling shades away.”
From the poem “The Shepherd’s Hymn” by Richard Crashaw
(Adapted from an article by Robert G. Kennedy III, PE, Kenneth I. Roy, PE, Eric Hughes, David E. Fields, Ph.D.)
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Further Reading
There are many sources that describe the formation of fossil fuels from early terrestrial forests. One very readable source is John Reader, The Rise of Life, Knopf, NY (1986).
If you would like technical information on the interaction of solar electromagnetic radiation with natural aerosol particles in Earth’s atmosphere, an excellent reference is K. Ya. Kondratyev, Radiation in the Atmosphere, Academic Press, NY (1966). Many books deal with parameters controlling natural and pollutant aerosol atmospheric residence time – one is Laurent Hodges, Environmental Pollution, 2nd ed., Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, NY (1977).
You can access online descriptions of experiments with oceanic iron fertilization. The Wood’s Hole source is a news release dated April 16, 2004, with the URL http://web.archive.org/web/20061231181525/ http://www.whoi.edu/mr/pr.do?id=886 (accessed Nov. 22, 2013).
Research on urban albedo modification is summarized by Hashem Akbari, H. Damon Matthews, and Donny Seto in “The Long-Term Effects of Increasing the Albedo of Urban Areas,” Environmental Research Letters, Volume 7, Number 2 (2012), which is available online at: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7/2/024004/article (accessed Nov. 23, 2013).
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Matloff, G., Bangs, C., Johnson, L. (2014). Mitigating Global Warming Using Planetary Engineering. In: Harvesting Space for a Greener Earth. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9426-3_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9426-3_15
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