More Climate Scientists Now Support Geoengineering

ofcourseyouare writes "The Independent is a UK newspaper which has been pushing hard for cuts in CO2 emissions for years. It recently polled a group of 'the world's leading climate scientists,' revealing a 'growing support for geoengineering' in addition to cutting CO2 — not as a substitute. For example, Jim Lovelock, author of The Gaia Theory, comments: 'I disagree that geoengineering the climate is a dangerous distraction and I disagree that on no account should it ever be considered. I strongly agree that we now need a "plan B" where a geoengineering strategy is drawn up in parallel with other measures to curb CO2 emissions.' Professor Kerry Emanuel of MIT said, 'While a geoengineering solution is bound to be less than desirable, the probability of getting global agreement on emissions reductions before it is too late is very small.'"

Comments

Re:Terraforming Earth

[ScrewMaster]

I guess we're going to learn how to terraform other planets by starting out with this one.

Because we have to.

Well, let's hope it turns out better for us than it did for the Ganymeans. They were smarter than us, at a much higher technological level than we are, with FTL travel to escape the consequences when they failed and their planet became uninhabitable.

Re:What Could go Wrong?

[TapeCutter]

Yes 20yrs ago it was an interesting idea based on the observation that dust from deserts fertilizes the oceans (eg: 40M tons of dust is transported by wind from N. Africa all the way to the Amazon each year, so the Atlantic ocean already recieves a nice dusting in the summer. The results from dumping iron dust have been inconclusive at best, but even if it did work as well as the promoters claim the problem would then be scale and distribution.

The simplest answer given by the overwhelming majority of scientists who have looked at the problem (including Lovelock), is to cut back emmissions from ~10Gt/yr to ~3Gt/yr as fast or faster than we built them up, in otherwords moderate our current uncontrolled experiment in geo-engineering as rapidly as possible. However to some people the idea of emmission controls amounts to social-engineering and an economic acpocalypse, thus we get the political bullshit, half-truths, think tanks, and psuedo-skeptics that have accompanied any discussion of climate over the last couple of decades.