How Does Giving the Earth a Window Shade For a Climate Fix Sound?

I ran across this jaw dropping article the other day on NPR’s website. Its titled, “Scientists Debate Shading the Earth As Climate Fix”. I wanted to share it with you all because I thought all of you might find it to be quite interesting. Check out part of it below…

Engineering our climate to stop global warming may seem like science fiction, but at a recent National Academy of Sciences meeting, scientists discussed some potential geoengineering experiments in earnest.

Climate researcher Ken Caldeira was skeptical when he first heard about the idea of shading the Earth a decade ago in a talk by nuclear weapons scientist Lowell Wood.

“He basically said, ‘We don’t have to bother with emissions reduction. We can just throw aerosols — little dust particles — into the stratosphere, and that’ll cool the earth.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that’ll never work,’ ” Caldeira said.

But when Caldeira sat down to study this, he was surprised to discover that, yes, it would work, and for the very same reasons that big volcanoes cool the Earth when they erupt. Fine particles in the stratosphere reflect sunlight back into space. And doing it would be cheap, to boot.

Caldeira conducts research on climate and carbon cycles at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University. During the past decade, he said, talk about this idea has moved from cocktail parties to very sober meetings, like the workshop this week put on by the National Academy of Sciences.

“Frankly, I’m a little ambivalent about all this,” he said during a break in the meeting. “I’ve been pushing very hard for a research program, but it’s a little scary to me as it becomes more of a reality that we might be able to toy with our environment, or our whole climate system at a planetary scale.”

Attempting to geoengineer a climate fix raises many questions, like when you would even consider trying it. Caldeira argued that we should have the technology at the ready if there’s a climate crisis, such as collapsing ice sheets or drought-induced famine. At the academy’s meeting, Harvard University’s Dan Schrag agreed with that — up to a point.

“I think we should consider climate engineering only as an emergency response to a climate crisis, but I question whether we’re already experiencing a climate crisis — whether we’ve already crossed that threshold,” Schrag said.

In reality, carbon-dioxide emissions globally are on a runaway pace, despite rhetoric promising to control them. University of Calgary’s David Keith suggested that we should consider moving toward experiments that would test ideas on a global scale — and do it sooner rather than later.

“It’s not clear that during some supposed climate emergency would be the right time to try this new and unexplored technique,” Keith said.

The rest of the article continues here.

jennl | My Bio & Articles

Jennifer is a freelance writer, and has written for various health and environmental blogs, which includes running her own green living blog. Currently she is studying to become a C++ Programmer.