As the dangers of climate change continue to grow, so has interest in geoengineering – deliberate tinkering with the earth’s climate system. However, actually doing it on a scale that matters is fraught with peril from unintended consequences of disrupting the delicate interactions between the Earth’s atmosphere, ocean, land, and sea ice.
As the political winds shift and efforts to reduce the causes of climate change are scuttled, a growing wave of younger scientists and engineers across the world are pursuing higher education studies in climate geoengineering. Students at many universities are tinkering in laboratories trying to develop methods for reducing the amount of heat in the atmosphere.
It isn’t just grad students either. The U.K. government last year allocated millions of dollars in funding to investigate climate geoengineering. This was the first time that a state funding body invested significant amounts of money in geoengineering research, thereby pushing a once-taboo field into the mainstream and giving it legitimacy.
There are several controversial private startup companies working to commercialize stratospheric aerosol injection, a technique by which reflective particles are released into the upper atmosphere in order to deflect some of the sun’s heat away from Earth.
The current situation is very complicated. The Trump administration has taken the position that climate change is not real. Regardless, the planet is getting ever closer to climate tipping points from which it can’t recover. All of this makes the potential dangers of climate geoengineering seem like acceptable risks.
