http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1916965,00.html Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2009
Can Geoengineering Help Slow Global Warming?
By Bryan Walsh
As we pump billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we're doing more than warming the planet and scrambling the climate. We're also conducting what climatologist James Hansen has called a "vast uncontrolled experiment." In effect, we're on our way to engineering a world very different from the one we were handed. Belatedly, we're trying to turn off the carbon spigot, hoping that by incrementally reducing the emissions we've spent a couple centuries pouring into the air we can stop the climate slide before it's too late.
But what if we can't do that? What if it turns out that slashing carbon emissions enough to make a difference — and it seems that means cutting output at least in half by mid-century — is economically and politically impossible? Do we need a Plan B? (
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2008/top10/article/0,30583,1855948_1863706,00.html">See the top 10 green ideas of 2008.)
A small but growing band of researchers are beginning to say yes. If we geoengineered the Earth into a mess with our uncontrolled appetite for fossil fuels, maybe we have to geoengineer our way out of it — in effect, directly cooling the planet via a controlled experiment to counteract our uncontrolled one. Indeed, according to a just-published paper for the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate — a think tank studying inexpensive solutions to climate change — geoengineering might not only be a good way to bring rising temperatures under short-term control while we wait for the longer term fix of cutting carbon emissions to take hold, it might be the only way.
"The potential benefits of geoengineering are really very large," says Lee Lane, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a co-author of the paper.
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