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rfmcdonaldMy previous post on terraforming includes images of newly Earth-like worlds to be produced in the far future. For our civilization to make it to that future, among other things, the global environment has to remain stable without any mass catastrophes. And increasingly, it seems that given continued economic growth and growing consumption, the only way to ensure this will be through geoengineering, the large-scale use of technology and engineering to help ameliorate anthropogenic environmental change. extensive interview at Wired, Eli Kinitsch calls geoengineering "a bad idea whose time has come." Andrew Barton went into detail about this earlier this month.
Environmentalists are quite divided on the subject, some welcoming technological intervention that could help save the Earth, others seeing it as a substitute for the root causes of global environmental issues. Certainly there's going to be side-effects. Some researchers found that seeding the oceans with iron to encourage the growth of carbon dioxide-consuming plankton load the oceans with neurotoxins, while the consequences of using sulfur dioxide to block sunlight can be expected to have side effects, and many of these techniques--which include using giant mirrors in space to reduce the amount of sunlight striking the Earth--almost certainly will have massive problems. It will have to be a global effort, for coherence's sake; the effort might even produce what Anatoly Karlin of Sublime Oblivion calls an "ecotechnic dictatorship", a government committed to spending massive resources on geoengineering regardless of the popular will.
What do you think? Is geoengineering a good idea? Would you combine it with other methods of fighting global environmental change? Do you think that there's any hope for us, for that matter? (I'd like there to be hope, if only because I'd love it if we could put the knowledge we acquired in tending after our Earth to work elsewhere.)
Thoughts?
To put it bluntly, geoengineering is terraforming Earth - that is, humanity taking an active role in the management of the planetary biosphere. At this point I feel it's necessary, part of our maturation as a species; we're at a stage where we're going to affect the environment no matter what we do, so we might as well invest in our future by keeping it as stable as we can. That having been said, though, geoengineering is not perfect. Throwing new variables into an already complex situation can easily produce chaos.
But when the alternative is watching those billions of tons of methane sequestered in Arctic permafrost be vented into the atmosphere, I'll take the chance of chaos. The most likely method of early geoengineering, because it's comparatively cheap, will probably be stratospheric injection of sulfur dioxide to create a cooling effect - the same sulfur dioxide, incidentally, which helps create acid rain.
Environmentalists are quite divided on the subject, some welcoming technological intervention that could help save the Earth, others seeing it as a substitute for the root causes of global environmental issues. Certainly there's going to be side-effects. Some researchers found that seeding the oceans with iron to encourage the growth of carbon dioxide-consuming plankton load the oceans with neurotoxins, while the consequences of using sulfur dioxide to block sunlight can be expected to have side effects, and many of these techniques--which include using giant mirrors in space to reduce the amount of sunlight striking the Earth--almost certainly will have massive problems. It will have to be a global effort, for coherence's sake; the effort might even produce what Anatoly Karlin of Sublime Oblivion calls an "ecotechnic dictatorship", a government committed to spending massive resources on geoengineering regardless of the popular will.
What do you think? Is geoengineering a good idea? Would you combine it with other methods of fighting global environmental change? Do you think that there's any hope for us, for that matter? (I'd like there to be hope, if only because I'd love it if we could put the knowledge we acquired in tending after our Earth to work elsewhere.)
Thoughts?
