Cool Heads At The Carnegie Institution

There's an interesting opinion piece in The New York Times this morning. Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, thinks it may be possible to cool the globe by shooting small amounts of sulfate particles into the stratosphere. He likens the strategy to the cooling that followed the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. It blasted large amounts of sulfate particles into the sky, which then reflected the sun's rays away from the Earth.

I'll leave it to others to discuss the scientific merits of Caldeira's proposal. The purpose of this blog is to look at where you can get an education in the environment, and the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology certainly qualifies as one of those places. Housed on the campus of Stanford University, it has offered research opportunities to undergrads, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and their professors since 2002. You can check out some of its recent research topics here. For the post-doctoral crowd, its Web site notes an opening for an associate in global ecology to conduct research on permafrost feedbacks to the global carbon cycle. The application deadline was October 1, but the post is still up and it notes that later applications may be considered.