Week Eleven - Technological Solutions

Once a deal is passed the December in Paris is when the real work begins. Signing an agreement is only the beginning of our long road to climate recovery though. The next step to cleaning up our carbon mess will come in the form of geo-engineering.

Geo-engineering involves processes of manually fiddling with the knobs of the earth climate by means of reversing the warming we are seeing from too many greenhouse gases (GHGs) in our atmosphere or by physically taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it (the picture above is of an artificial tree that is being developed to capture and store carbon). Both of these approaches have proven controversial due to the effects seen in computer models that simulate what the world would be like if we implemented them. I would like to argue though that though the effects from geo-engineering might be devastating for some, geo-engineering should still be researched and used alongside GHG emission strategies in order for us to be able to stay below the crucial 2^oC benchmark set back in 2010.

At the current rate that we are putting carbon into our atmosphere, it is going to take us awhile to ween ourselves off of fossil fuels. In that time I believe that we should use geo-engineering as a way to take the carbon we are still putting into our atmosphere out. By doing so we will start to come closer and closer to becoming carbon neutral and eventually when we do ween ourselves off of fossil fuels we will already have the technology to take carbon out of the atmosphere and return to pre-industrial levels.

Though geo-engineering opposition states that this type of engineering could become out of control because we are messing with forces that humans only have a vague understanding about, I still believe that research into this area should still be allowed. With advancement in computer and technological systems coming to a point where we can model situations before we implement them, geo-engineering will become less and less of a mystery. The effects of a geo-engineering method could be understood before any such process is started and with new research comes new findings as well. We could very well find out more things than we ever imagined about our atmosphere and planet if we allow research in this area to continue. That is how science works. I mean where would be today if research into the mystery of electromagnetic waves was not allowed to be conducted? I know for a fact you wouldn’t be reading this in the same way you are now if that was the case.