Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Imagining Bucky and Geo-Engineering
Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content – the views are the author’s alone.
A retrospective exhibit about the life and inventions of R. Buckminster Fuller (a.k.a. Bucky) is about to open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City . Fuller was truly one-of-a-kind-an iconoclastic architect, inventor, engineer, and philosopher.
I still have vivid memories of a public talk he gave at Columbia University in the late 1970′s. He died in 1983. He is best known as the leading proponent, if not inventor, of the geodesic dome, the sturdy spherical structure, composed of triangular elements, that closely approximates a sphere.
It’s hard to imagine Bucky not being engaged by the modern problems of global warming. It would have attracted him on all fronts: the energy challenges, the technological challenges and the ‘geo-engineering’ challenges.
There Is a Time for Everything — And It’s Changing
Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content – the views are the author’s alone.
Colleagues of mine at Columbia have just published a large study of physical and biological changes recorded around the world since 1970 , during which the globe has been warming.
Carbon is intense
Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and is a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content – the views are the author’s alone.
On April 16 President Bush gave a speech laying out a new United States climate policy goal – stabilizing US emissions by the year 2025.
A Truly “Green” Building Technology
The symbolic color associated with environmentalism is obviously “green.”
From ‘green movement,’ ‘Green Party,’ ‘green collar jobs,’ to ‘Greenpeace,’ the color reference is to plants, chlorophyll, the green pigment central to photosynthesis, which is the basis of all life. Quite often, however, the chief environmental goal being advocated has little to do with plants, but rather promoting low-impact technologies, practices and lifestyles.
Turf Battles and Plant Physics
Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and is a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Reuters is not responsible for the content — the views are the author’s alone.
An interesting environmental debate is taking place with regard to the growing proliferation of synthetic turf sports fields in outdoor settings.
Essential Earth Science — from your garage
Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and will be a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Reuters is not responsible for the content — the views expressed are the author’s alone.
The root cause of all environmental problems-from beer cans floating on a lake to global warming-can be explained using the following two contrasting scenes:
But we need the cold
Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University who will be a regular guest blogger under the title “Exhausted Earth”. Reuters is not responsible for the content– the views expressed are theauthor’s alone.This is hisfirstblog:
As the Northern Hemisphere begins to exit the 2008 winter season, I have found myself once again witnessing a well-known social phenomenon relating to weatherthat I find discouraging as I work on the issue of global warming.
