Green and Bold: Conversations from the CSU Spur Climate Hub

This episode of Green and Bold explores an emerging climate frontier: pulling methane, a greenhouse gas responsible for 30% of global warming, straight out of the atmosphere. Guest Dr. Megan L. Melamed, Program Director for Methane Removal at Spark Climate Solutions, walks through the four leading removal approaches, how close any of them are to real-world deployment, and the biggest scientific and technical hurdles still standing in the way.

• NASEM Report on Methane Removal
• Spark Climate Solution's Website & the Methane Removal Program's Page
• Megan L. Melamed's Profile at Spark Climate Solutions
• Megan L. Melamed's LinkedIn

This episode of Green and Bold heads to Antarctica, where the potential collapse of the Thwaites, or "Doomsday," glacier could raise sea levels by six feet or more and displace hundreds of millions of people. Guest Dr. Brent Minchew, Professor of Geophysics at Caltech and co-founder of the Arête Glacier Initiative, explains the science behind stabilizing ice sheets, the barriers and criticisms facing this emerging field, and the thorny questions of who would decide to deploy such a technology and who would pay for it.

• Brent Minchew's work at Caltech
• Arête Glacier Initiative

Dr. Lisa Dilling, Associate Chief Scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, joins Green and Bold to discuss stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), a type of solar radiation modification that involves adding reflective particles to the stratosphere to cool the planet. They cover what we can learn from natural parallels like volcanic eruptions, the biggest research gaps around SAI's local impacts, and the key risks and questions that need answers before deployment.

Studying the impacts of Solar Radiation Modification

In this opening episode, CSU Climate Hub Director Veera Mitzner talks with Dr. Jim Hurrell, Scott Presidential Chair of Environmental Science and Engineering at Colorado State University and former director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, about the changing attitudes of the atmospheric science community towards climate intervention, also known as geoengineering. They also discuss why research on these technologies is increasingly important, what some of the most critical challenges are, and why we shouldn’t consider implementation before making more progress on reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.

National Academies Report: Reflecting Sunlight: Recommendations for Solar Geoengineering Research and Research Governance

Green and Bold is the new podcast of Colorado State University's Climate Hub, featuring some of the most innovative scientists and leaders driving climate solutions. At a time when climate action is often portrayed as losing momentum, Green and Bold tells a different story. We spotlight a growing community of people who are working every day to advance evidence-based pathways toward a more climate-resilient future.

Season one dives into the cutting edge of climate intervention, often called geoengineering. We ask leading experts the hard questions: What do we know about these technologies and pathways and their ability to save us from the most devastating impacts of climate change? Could they distract us from the urgent efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or has the time to invest in them arrived? And what research still needs to happen before we can trust the answers?