Australian Broadcasting Corporation
For years scientists have been quietly working on extreme, last ditch solutions to slow global warming – just in case governments worldwide don’t get their acts together.
Cue scientists.
With the UN warning of climate catastrophe, it’s increasingly looking like a case of when, not if, we will reach for the once unthinkable fix: geo-engineering, or artificially hacking the climate.
We’re in deep shit and we need to dig ourselves out. For better or worse, geo-engineering is part of the mix going forward because we can’t get to where we need to be by conservation alone – Jason Box, Copenhagen-based ice climatologist and former IPCC lead author
Some climate hacking has moved beyond the research labs. In Switzerland, a start-up builds giant fans that suck carbon from the air. It’s then sold to a greenhouse where it’s absorbed by plants to make them grow faster.
In the not too distant future, imagine sprinkling iron filings into the seas to encourage carbon eating plankton… Or sending armadas of ships to pump sea mist into the sky to diffuse the sun’s rays… Or using high-altitude balloons to scatter sulphur in the atmosphere to lower the temperature – a bit like what happened naturally after the Mt Pinatubo volcano erupted in 1991.
All these and more are on the drawing board.
More at ABC.