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Geoengineering: Direct Mitigation of Climate Warming
Citation:
HEMMING, B. L. AND G. S. HAGLER. Geoengineering: Direct Mitigation of Climate Warming. Chapter 9, Global Climate Change--The Technology Challenge. Springer, New York, NY, ISBN:9048131529:pg273-300, (2011).
Impact/Purpose:
book chapter
Description:
For Frank Princiotta’s book, Global Climate Change—The Technology Challenge With the concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) rising to levels unprecedented in the current glacial epoch, the earth’s climate system appears to be rapidly shifting into a warmer regime. Many in the international science and policy communities fear that the fundamental changes in human behavior, and in the global economy, that will be required to meaningfully reduce GHG emissions in the very near term are unattainable. In the 1970s, discussion of “geoengineering,” a radical strategy for arresting climate change by intentional, direct manipulation of the Earth’s energy balance began to appear in the climate science literature. With growing international concern about the pace of climate change, the scientific and public discourse on the feasibility of geoengineering has recently grown more sophisticated and more energetic. A wide array of potential geoengineering projects have been proposed, ranging from orbiting space mirrors to reduce solar flux to the construction of large networks of processors that directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Simple estimates of costs exist, and some discussion of both the potentially negative and “co-beneficial” consequences of these projects can be found in the scientific literature.
