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    Geo-engineering Discussions Heating Up

    Two recent Op-eds in two of our nation’s leading papers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have intensified discussions about geo-engineering as a potential solution to global warming. Fred Ickle and Lowell Wood (subscription required) lambaste all parties involved in developing an international treaty on global warming because they have focused only on mitigation and have intentionally ignored “climate geo-engineering”. Ken Caldeira took a different stance arguing that while we should continue to try to apply regulation with the goal of transitioning to a new, clean energy system, we should also set aside 1% of research funding to large-scale techno-fixes just in case we’re unable to reduce emissions enough to limit the impacts of climate change.

    While I agree with Caldeira that we shouldn’t remove these options from the table, it’s important to recognize that every hypothesized solution so far has the potential of creating new problems. Do we really want to solve one problem while creating a catastrophe of a different variety?

    Some of the potential solutions I’ve seen include James Lovelock and Chris Ripley’s recent letter to the editor in Nature who advocate for the use of pipes “to increase the mixing of nutrient below the thermocline with the relatively barren waters at the ocean surface.”


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