From melting icebergs and rising waters to California wildfires and Houston hurricanes, the effects of climate change are becoming more intense and more frequent every day with the advent of more natural disasters and consequences of climate change. So what can we do about this? In order to mitigate the damage that natural disasters and climate change do to our environment, a new possible solution has emerged: geoengineering.
At first glance, geoengineering – a set of ways to alter the climate to stall or inhibit the repercussions of climate change – may seem counterintuitive. Why would we knowingly mess around with the climate after we have already caused irreparable damage? And yet, geoengineering may prove a viable solution to combat the environmental changes we are currently experiencing.
For example, one solution to combat global warming involves imitating the capacity of a volcano to cool by introducing more sulfates into the atmosphere [1]. Yet another example of geoengineering is ocean seeding. Marine phytoplankton has the ability to take carbon dioxide from the air and “sequester” it, meaning that the carbon dioxide is carried via phytoplankton to the bottom of the ocean [2]. Iron has also been associated with phytoplankton “blooms” or proliferation, as well – ocean seeding involves introducing iron particles to fertilize phytoplankton and cause more growth.
Even though these scenarios might help alleviate some of the consequences of irreversible climate change, environmental groups still express hesitation about these concepts because they fear that we would be further harming the planet by attempting to artificially change environmental circumstances. In the example of ocean seeding, researchers are concerned that creating phytoplankton blooms in one area would create ocean “dead zones” in another region[2]. There’s also the problem of deep-sea organisms, which might be negatively affected by the sequestration of carbon dioxide.
Another example of geoengineering that seems both promising and risky is putting satellites in the atmosphere to deflect the sun’s rays from Earth and reflect sunlight – this has been referred to colloquially as “space mirrors,” and is actually a component of presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s environmental plan. However, the problem with space mirrors is that they could cause uneven climate circumstances, such as less rainfall in one area but warm weather near the poles, neither of which is a desirable outcome [4].
Ultimately, there is a scientific consensus that the most effective solution to climate change would be to decrease our emissions of greenhouse gases. But in order to mitigate the worst effects of what damage we have already done, we may have to accept that we will need to significantly remodel what’s left of our ecosystem in order to survive. Further research in these areas is definitely necessary to fully evaluate these potential geoengineering methods. Hopefully, our situation on Earth will not come to a point where we will be forced to make such decisions to fundamentally change components of our planet’s climate.
References
Biello, D. What Is Geoengineering and Why Is It Considered a Climate Change Solution? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/geoengineering-and-climate-change (accessed Oct 11, 2019).
Gramling , C. In a climate crisis, is geoengineering worth the risks? https://www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-change-crisis-geoengineering-worth-risks (accessed Oct 11, 2019)
Kaufman, R. Could Space Mirrors Stop Global Warming? https://www.livescience.com/22202-space-mirrors-global-warming.html (accessed Oct 11, 2019).
Phytoplankton blooms appear as a milky turquoise swirl in the Arctic’s Barents Sea in 2016 (https://www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-change-crisis-geoengineering-worth-risks) by Jeff Schmaltz/Joshua Stevens, Lance/Eosdis Rapid Response. Public Domain. (ScienceNews)
Image: Phytoplankton blooms appear as a milky turquoise swirl in the Arctic’s Barents Sea in 2016 (https://www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-change-crisis-geoengineering-worth-risks) by Jeff Schmaltz/Joshua Stevens, Lance/Eosdis Rapid Response. Public Domain. (ScienceNews)
