Introduction

Geoengineering is a name for various proposals to deliberately manipulate the Earth’s climate to counteract the effects of global warming. The National Academy of Sciences has defined geoengineering as “options that would involve large-scale engineering of our environment in order to combat or counteract the effects of changes in atmospheric chemistry”:

• Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP), National Academy of Sciences, Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming: Mitigation, Adaptation, and the Science Base, Section 28: Geoengineering, 1992.

The 2007 IPCC report concluded that geoengineering options, such as ocean fertilization to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, remained largely unproven. It was judged that reliable cost estimates for geoengineering had not yet been published:

• IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007, Working Group III, Mitigation of Climate Change, C. Mitigation in the short and medium term (until 2030).

However, there is still considerable interest in geoengineering, because many people deem it difficult to reduce carbon emissions in time to prevent dangerous global warming.

References

• Geoengineering, Wikipedia.

• Geoengineering faces ban is an excellent article in Nature News summarising some of the latest geoengineering developments.