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Pessimism is growing about humanity’s ability to save the planet as world leaders prepare to convene for climate change talks at the COP26 summit in Glasgow on October 31. Faced with increasingly apocalyptic projections, some scientists are calling for plans to cool the planet with geoengineering. But is this a realistic path out of the nightmare?
UN climate experts were unanimous in their latest report published in August: Unless we keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the earth will be racked by heatwaves, cyclones and storms, entire species will be wiped out, and large swathes of humanity will have to leave their homes when coastal settlements go underwater.
As despair growths about humanity’s ability to avoid this fateful threshold, researchers are looking at geoengineering as a potential means of reversing the damage.
“Geoengineering is a way of using various technological tools to cancel out the environmental effects of human actions,” explained Sofia Kabbej, a researcher in the Climate, Energy and Security Programme at France’s Institute of International and Strategic Relations.
Sci-fi or reality?
A range of ideas come under the umbrella of climate geoengineering. Some seem totally fanciful, even dangerous. But other technologies are already operational.
“There are two categories of geoengineering,” said Roland Séférian, a climatologist at France’s Meteorological Office.
The first – and most controversial – involves ways of “modifying solar radiation”, Séférian noted. One such idea is to “reproduce what happens during volcanic eruptions when clouds of dust emerge in the sky and form a kind of screen between the sun and the earth, cooling the atmosphere in the process”.
As things stand, this is still just an idea scientists are thinking about. But for several years a team of researchers at Harvard University led by…
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Source : france24
