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Published online 1 September 2009 | 461, 19 (2009) | doi:10.1038/461019a
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Climate-control plans scrutinized
The Royal Society reviews options for fighting global warming with geoengineering.
As atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide soar and political efforts to control emissions stagnate, one scientific academy says that it is time to consider radical intervention.
On 1 September, the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific organization, released its first analysis of a host of controversial methods for intentionally altering Earth's climate.
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This is as contraversial as it gets. We shouldn't start any experiment that be reversed. There are already too many people dieing due to our miscalculations, and we shouldn't add to their misery simply to satisfy our professional egos.
Another point is about funding. As the clock ticks towards Copenhagen, one of the unresolved questions is funding for adaptation. What is the assurance that some of the schemes being proposed will not divert desperately needed funds to address climate risk faced by the poor?
In my view, even discussing this decreases the likelihood that what should be done to reduce emissions — investing in clean energy technologies, energy conservation, protecting forests, etc. -- will be done. I fear that those who profit continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions will advocate for geoengineering with terrible results for the planet and everyone else.
I don't agree to the geoengineering. This project will seriouly afect the self-regulating capacity of earth. Although it may reduce the affection of greenhouse in some way, the effect that the project brings will be a disaster to humen-beings.
We can easily do the geoengineering project, however, the result is hard to predict. What was worse, once the project start, its effect may impossible to clear up.
Curbing carbon dioxide emission levels and geoengineering carry enormous risks. Both may be totally ineffective. More obvious solutions are curbing population growth, reforestation and reducing the human impact on the natural hydrological cycle. No action in the right direction will mean it is the turn of the human race to become extinct sooner than we think.
Geoengineering is a poor answer for climate modification. We already are doing plenty of inadvertent geoengineering by strongly changing the Earth's ecosystem as we add trace gases and particles to the atmosphere, runoff and fertilizer to rivers and oceans, and perform deforestation, desertification, and species annihilation. Imagine the number of lawsuits that would result from people claiming that geoengineering is responsible for their drought, for their failed crops, or destructive hail, hurricanes, or tornadoes.
It is much better to put our money and brain power to work at figuring out how to move people and life closer to the poles and away from uninhabitable hot zones. We also need to greatly slow the use of fossil fuels to extend their use over a much longer period so that we can simultaneously work on other energy sources with less issues than fossil fuels, and can figure out clever ways of mitigating the 'climate pollution' caused by fossil fuel use.
Life is tenacious, but surprisingly subtle as well; we should respect it in all its forms. Thousands of years from now the issue may be of natural global cooling; we then reverse our global warming strategy and move people and life back to the warm regions.
Unintentional consequences are likely to be much more severe than the original problem. Geoengineering raises only false hopes and it may fail anyway; it delays concrete actions that can make a difference now.