What is geoengineering
Reading time: 2 minutesTL;DR
In climate conversations geoengineering refers to bold ideas to change the earth’s climate system at massive scale through interventions.
Examples of this include putting a massive solar sail in space to shade the earth, layering the atmosphere with particles to dampen the sunlight, capturing carbon from the air with big machines, or global-scale tree planting efforts.
These ideas vary wildly and are often quite risky.
Explanation
In the world of IT systems we don’t just have one copy of an IT system. We have multiple versions, typically we call these Development (for building it), Test (where users test changes made) and Production (the live system most people use that has all the important stuff).
We don’t have that luxury with Earth - we’re doing everything in Production which is a bad practice.
Everything has risk, but the scale of these geoengineering ideas means the consequences may impact hundreds of millions if not billions of people if it goes badly. Worse, if we plunge into a geoengineering option and it makes things worse or cannot be reversed we will see problems beyond our lifetimes.
Controversy
These techniques are seen as risky and shouldn’t be considered solutions to use. So research and promotion of these ideas is frowned upon. Some scientists believe this is reckless as we may reach a point in the climate system where we need to deploy these. Without researching and testing and knowing about these techniques how can we deploy them in an emergency?
People who oppose these also point out that they are also sometimes used to justify continuing burning fossil fuels. If we can put up a big solar shade to lower the earth’s temperature why would we need to give up oil and gas? Well high level of CO2 causes us problems other than climate change for a start.