Lowell Lincoln Wood Jr. (born 1941) is an American astrophysicist who has been involved with the Strategic Defense Initiative and with geoengineering studies. He has been affiliated with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Hoover Institution, and chaired the EMP Commission. [1] Wood is a prolific inventor listed on 1,761 U.S. patents as of August 21, 2018. Wood passed Thomas Edison on June 30, 2015, becoming the all-time most prolific inventor from the United States based on number of issued U.S. utility patents. [2] [3]
Wood earned a PhD in geophysics [4] from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1965 for thesis titled Hyperthermal Processes in the Solar Atmosphere. [5] [6] He currently works for Intellectual Ventures. [3]
Wood meets and consults with global think tanks on global warming. He has suggested anti-global warming measures, including space mirrors, carbon sequestration in the ocean, employing stratospheric sulfate aerosols, and super-efficient nuclear reactors. Through Intellectual Ventures, he consults for Bill Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in support of their global vaccination program and other humanitarian projects. [3]
In 1981, he received the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award “for his outstanding contributions to national security in the areas of directed energy, inertial confinement fusion, underwater communications, nuclear weapon design concepts, and computer technology.” [7] In 1997, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. [8]
Ernest Orlando Lawrence was an American nuclear physicist and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron. He is known for his work on uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project, as well as for founding the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Melvin Ellis Calvin was an American biochemist known for discovering the Calvin cycle along with Andrew Benson and James Bassham, for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He spent most of his five-decade career at the University of California, Berkeley.
A space sunshade or sunshield is a parasol that diverts or otherwise reduces some of the Sun's radiation, preventing it from hitting a spacecraft or planet and thereby reducing its insolation, which results in reduced heating. Light can be diverted by different methods. The concept of the construction of sunshade as a method of climate engineering dates back to the years 1923, 1929, 1957 and 1978 by the physicist Hermann Oberth. Space mirrors in orbit around the Earth with a diameter of 100 to 300 km, as designed by Hermann Oberth, are intended to focus sunlight on individual regions of the Earth’s surface or deflect it into space so that the solar radiation is weakened in a specifically controlled manner for individual regions on the Earth’s surface. First proposed in 1989, another space sunshade concept involves putting a large occulting disc, or technology of equivalent purpose, between the Earth and Sun.
Planetary engineering is the development and application of technology for the purpose of influencing the environment of a planet. Planetary engineering encompasses a variety of methods such as terraforming, seeding, and geoengineering.
Climate engineering is the intentional large-scale alteration of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change. The term has been used as an umbrella term for both carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation modification when applied at a planetary scale. However, these two processes have very different characteristics, and are now often discussed separately. Carbon dioxide removal techniques remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and are part of climate change mitigation. Solar radiation modification is the reflection of some sunlight back to space to cool the earth. Some publications include passive radiative cooling as a climate engineering technology. The media tends to also use climate engineering for other technologies such as glacier stabilization, ocean liming, and iron fertilization of oceans. The latter would modify carbon sequestration processes that take place in oceans.
Intellectual Ventures is an American private equity company that centers on the development and licensing of intellectual property. Intellectual Ventures is one of the top-five owners of U.S. patents, as of 2011. Its business model focuses on buying patents and aggregating those patents into a large patent portfolio and licensing these patents to third parties. The company has been described as the country's largest and most notorious patent trolling company, the ultimate patent troll, and the most hated company in tech.
Steven Chu is an American physicist and former government official. He is a Nobel laureate and was the 12th U.S. secretary of energy. He is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research at the University of California, Berkeley, and his research at Bell Laboratories and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.
The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award was established in 1959 in honor of a scientist who helped elevate American physics to the status of world leader in the field.
The Virgin Earth Challenge was a competition offering a $25 million prize for whoever could demonstrate a commercially viable design which results in the permanent removal of greenhouse gases out of the Earth's atmosphere to contribute materially in global warming avoidance. The prize was conceived by Richard Branson, and was announced in London on 9 February 2007 by Branson and former US Vice President Al Gore.
Anastasios Melis is a Greek-American biologist at the University of California, Berkeley who elucidated the possibility of creating hydrogen from algae. He is currently The Grace Kase and Harry Y. Tsujimoto Distinguished Professor of Plant & Microbial Biology in the institution, elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Editor-in-Chief of the Planta journal.
David Robert Nygren is a particle physicist known for his invention of the time projection chamber. He is currently a Presidential Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Arlington. He has worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1973. He has been called "the most distinguished developer of particle detection instruments in the country".
This is a list of climate change topics.
Solar radiation modification or solar radiation management (SRM), also known as solar geoengineering, are planetary-scale approaches to limit global warming by reducing the greenhouse effect, the atmospheric trapping of outgoing thermal radiation that would leave Earth to outer space. SRM includes mainly methods of increasing the reflection of incoming sunlight by the atmosphere back to space. Among the multiple potential approaches, stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is the most-studied, followed by marine cloud brightening (MCB). SRM also includes ground-based albedo modification (GBAM). Space-based concepts, such as space sunshades and space mirrors, are not currently included in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report as a relevant option. SRM is a form of climate engineering. It could be a supplement but would not be a substitute to the main climate change mitigation measures, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
Arctic geoengineering is a type of climate engineering in which polar climate systems are intentionally manipulated to reduce the undesired impacts of climate change. As a proposed solution to climate change, arctic geoengineering is relatively new and has not been implemented on a large scale. It is based on the principle that Arctic albedo plays a significant role in regulating the Earth's temperature and that there are large-scale engineering solutions that can help maintain Earth's hemispheric albedo. According to researchers, projections of sea ice loss, when adjusted to account for recent rapid Arctic shrinkage, indicate that the Arctic will likely be free of summer sea ice sometime between 2059 and 2078. Advocates for Arctic geoengineering believe that climate engineering methods can be used to prevent this from happening.
Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is a proposed method of solar geoengineering to reduce global warming. This would introduce aerosols into the stratosphere to create a cooling effect via global dimming and increased albedo, which occurs naturally from volcanic winter. It appears that stratospheric aerosol injection, at a moderate intensity, could counter most changes to temperature and precipitation, take effect rapidly, have low direct implementation costs, and be reversible in its direct climatic effects. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that it "is the most-researched [solar geoengineering] method that it could limit warming to below 1.5 °C (2.7 °F)." However, like other solar geoengineering approaches, stratospheric aerosol injection would do so imperfectly and other effects are possible, particularly if used in a suboptimal manner.
David W. Keith is a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He joined the University of Chicago in April 2023. Keith previously served as the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics for Harvard University's Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and professor of public policy for the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University. Early contributions include development of the first atom interferometer and a Fourier-transform spectrometer used by NASA to measure atmospheric temperature and radiation transfer from space.
Space mirrors are satellites that are designed to change the amount of solar radiation that impacts the Earth as a form of climate engineering. The concept was first theorised in 1923 by physicist Hermann Oberth and later developed in the 1980s by other scientists. Space mirrors can be used to increase or decrease the amount of solar energy that reaches a specific point of the earth for various purposes. They have been theorised as a method of solar geoengineering by creating a space sunshade to deflect sunlight and counter global warming.
Amit Goyal is a SUNY Distinguished Professor and a SUNY Empire Innovation Professor at SUNY-Buffalo. He leads the Laboratory for Heteroepitaxial Growth of Functional Materials & Devices. He is also Director of the New York State Center of Excellence in Plastics Recycling Research & Innovation, an externally funded center with initial funding of $4.5M for three years at SUNY-Buffalo. He is the founding director of the multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary RENEW Institute at SUNY-Buffalo in Buffalo, New York and served as director from 2015-2021. RENEW is an internally funded research institute at SUNY-Buffalo. For his contributions to UB, in 2019, he was awarded the University at Buffalo or SUNY-Buffalo President's Medal, which recognizes “outstanding scholarly or artistic achievements, humanitarian acts, contributions of time or treasure, exemplary leadership or any other major contribution to the development of the University at Buffalo and the quality of life in the UB community.” This is one of the highest recognitions given at the university.
Peidong Yang is a Chinese-American chemist, material scientist, and businessman. He is the S.K. and Angela Chan Distinguished Professor of Energy, as well as a Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Materials Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a Senior Faculty Scientist at the Materials and Chemical Sciences Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Director of the California Research Alliance by BASF and the Director of the Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute at UC Berkeley.
Kelly Wanser is an American entrepreneur, innovator and climate advocate. She supports research into climate intervention approaches as "emergency medicine" for climate change.