Terraforming Earth: How to Wreck a Planet in 3,000 Years (Part 1)
This appeared in Wired Magazine back in 2010
Wired Magazine (excerpt)
PART 1
There’s only one sure thing about terraforming: when you change a planet, there will be consequences, and not always the consequences you expect. We’ll get deeper into unintended consequences in part two of this series, when we examine more constructive terraforming methods.
http://www.wired.com/2010/09/terraforming-part-1/
Terraforming Earth, Pt. 2: The Law of Unintended Consequences
Humans can rearrange the shape of our planet almost as easily as the furniture in your living room (or the deck chairs on the Titanic). Of course, it doesn't always work out as planned.
A lot of Earth terraforming is a simple matter of moving water to places where there was no water, and moving land to places that were previously landless. On the surface, this kind of terraforming seems generally beneficial, especially compared to some of the more harmful methods mentioned in part 1.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5646575/terraforming-earth-pt-2-the-law-of-unintended-consequences
Slate
Terraforming Earth
Geoengineering doesn’t have to be science fiction.
The term geoengineering is relatively new. It follows and alters the word terraforming, coined by a science fiction writer 70 years ago to denote the act of making another planet more Earth-like. When I was writing my own Mars trilogy of novels in the 1990s, I described the deliberate alteration of that planet to give it an Earth-like biosphere; as I did so, it occurred to me that we were already doing to Earth what my characters were doing to Mars.
But to say that we were “terraforming Earth” was painfully ironic, suggesting as it did that we had damaged our home planet so badly we now needed to take drastic steps to restore it to itself. When geoengineering entered the lexicon, many bristled at the word’s hubristic implication that we had the knowledge and power to engineer anything so large and complex as our planet. Still, the term has stuck, and it has essentially come to mean doing anything technological, on a global scale, to reduce or reverse the effects of climate change.
Defined this way, the idea makes almost everyone uneasy—including the scientists who introduced it, most of whom agree that the best solution to our climate problem remains rapid decarbonization. But these scientists have also noticed that our progress on this front hasn’t been good. We lack the political mechanisms, or maybe even the political will, to decarbonize. So people are right to be worried, and some of them have therefore put forth various geoengineering plans as possible emergency measures: problematic, but better than nothing.
cont'd
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/onearth/2012/12/geoengineering_science_fiction_and_fact_kim_stanley_robinson_on_how_we_are.html
