To view prices and purchase online, please login or create an account now.



The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Oliver Morton
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:448
Dimensions(mm): Height 192,Width 130
Category/GenreConservation of the environment
Global warming
Environmental science, engineering and technology
ISBN/Barcode 9781783780983
ClassificationsDewey:363.73874
Audience
Tertiary Education (US: College)
Professional & Vocational

Publishing Details

Publisher Granta Books
Imprint Granta Books
Publication Date 7 July 2016
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

The risks of global warming are real, and potentially vast. The difficulty of doing without fossil fuels is daunting, and possible insurmountable. So there is an urgent need for new thinking on climate. To meet that need, a small but increasingly influential group of scientists is exploring proposals for planned human intervention in the climate system. A stratospheric veil against the sun; the cultivation of photosynthetic plankton; a fleet of unmanned ships seeding clouds: these are the radical technologies of climate geoengineering. It is chilling to think of such power, and such scope for misadventure or malice, in humans hands. And yet we are now at the point where we have no choice but to take them very seriously indeed. The Planet Remade explores the science, history and politics behind these strategies. It looks at who might want to see geoengineering put to use - and why others would be dead set against it. In the last two centuries, changes to the planet - to the clouds and soils, to the winds and the seas, to the great cycles of nitrogen and carbon - have been far more profound than most of us realize. Appreciating the scale of that change compels us to rethink not just our responses to global warming, but our relationship to nature. With sensitivity, insight and expert science, Oliver Morton unpicks the moral implications of climate change, our fear that people have become a force of nature, and what it might mean to try and use that force for good. The Planet Remade is about imagining a world where people take care instead of taking control.

Author Biography

OLIVER MORTON is Briefings Editor of the Economist, having formerly been Chief News Editor of Nature and Editor of Wired UK. He is the author of Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World and Eating the Sun: How Light Powers the Planet. He has written for many publications, including Nature, the Independent, National Geographic, the New Yorker, Newsweek, Prospect, and Wired. Asteroid 10716 Olivermorton is named for him.