Our Geoengineering Future

(Illustration by Bruce Conway, Lightwatcher Publishing)

In a column posted at Salon.com, Elizabeth Svoboda contends that:

"Global warming demands more than do-gooder actions. It demands 'geoengineering' -- like blocking the sun's rays with stratospheric dirt."

This is a provocative and controversial position to take, and given the large readership of Salon, her article could have a significant effect in raising public awareness about geoengineering, for better or for worse.

Proponents of geoengineering assert that no matter how hard we try, the chances of averting wide-scale catastrophic impacts from global warming are almost nil. They argue that even if we are not yet past the tipping point for massive ice sheet melting and huge sea level rises, there is near-zero probability that political consensus can be reached for the kinds of worldwide economic and lifestyle changes that would prevent the worst effects of climate change. Therefore, the only realistic hope we have is to develop and prepare to implement geoengineering solutions.

Opponents argue from any of several positions, such as:

• Geoengineering is too unpredictable and too dangerous to consider, no matter what else happens;
• It will not be necessary, because we can make the required changes to slow climate change;
• It's all much ado about nothing -- climate change impacts will not be nearly as bad as alarmists predict.

Middle-grounders, like us at CRN, suggest that we should certainly look into the potential of various proposals for geoengineering, but that implementation, once deemed absolutely necessary, should be done as carefully and as reversibly as possible.

We'd like to know what you think.

What, in your opinion, are the most likely impacts of global warming and climate change? How bad will things get, and how soon? What options might we have to prevent or at least mitigate the damages?

CRN has created an online survey, ten questions long, that we hope you will take. It's titled "Climate Change Predictions." To access the survey, you'll need a password, which is CRN101 (case sensitive).

Click here to take the survey.

We'll report on the results one week from now.

UPDATE: As Walter, in a comment below, and others have pointed out to us, the survey software contains a glitch. We'll try to fix that for the next time, but for now we don't think it will negate the value of the current survey's results.

Mike Treder

Comments

[Walter]

Your "Climate Change Predictions" survey is broken. It's impossible to choose options on the same line, e.g., for the first question, "What will be the atmospheric concentration of CO2?" it is impossible to select "<350 PPM" for both 2050 and 2100.

You need to re-work the HTML code.

-Walter

[Tom Craver]

Heh - I particularly like the ideas of "burning sulfur" (acid rain anyone?) and injecting chemicals into jet contrails (google "chemtrail" for a wonderful bit of paranoia that would go into overdrive with that plan).