The risk of climate change has stimulated research into a range of geoengineering ideas (the intentional manipulation of the climate to counteract global warming) to mitigate surface warming. Bio-geoengineering is the suggestion that the reflectance of incoming solar radiation by crops could be increased, thereby providing regional summer-time cooling of up to one degree Celsius …
Future land cover will have a significant impact on climate and is strongly influenced by the extent of agricultural land-use. Differing assumptions of crop yield increase and carbon pricing mitigation strategies affect projected expansion of agricultural land in future scenarios. In the CMIP5 Representative Concentration Pathway RCP4.5, the biogeochemical (greenhouse gas emissions etc.) effects of these land …
My undergraduate dissertation looked at the effects of reduced canopy capacity of grasses in HadCM3. The aim was to look at the potential side effects of increased hydrophobicity due to increased leaf wax, when enhancing the albedo of crop plants. This built on the proposal of creating a cooling effect from high albedo crops (see Ridgwell …
