Professor Brad Marston and DEEPS Manning Assistant Professor Daniel Ibarra were recently featured in the New Scientist’s article “Carbon removal schemes on farms could change Earth’s reflectivity.”
Professor Marston notes, “Adding charcoal to farmland, fertilizing the seas with iron and spreading rock dust are some of the approaches to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that are being explored to slow climate change. All of these require a significant fraction of Earth’s surface area to reach the enormous scales necessary to have an effect. We argue that an unexplored side effect, namely changes to the amount of sunlight that is absorbed by the altered surface, must be investigated as such radiative forcing may overwhelm the reduction in forcing from carbon dioxide removal.”
Read Professor Marston and Professor Ibarra’s paper “Removing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Using Large Land Or Ocean Areas Will Change Earth Albedo And Force Climate” here on Arxiv.org.
The BTPC’s Brenda Rubenstein, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Physics, has been appointed Director of the Data Science Institute at Brown. Professor Rubenstein will begin her directorship July 1, 2025. In his