Question: What is Geoengineering and how will it reduce the effect of climate change?

Katy Mee answered on 15 Jun 2010:

Geoengineering refers to deliberatly altering Earth’s climate to combat the effects of global warming, so essentially we’re talking about mad-made inventions specifically designed to alter our climate.

There’s a huge range of different geoengineering options out there – some are being trialled already, such as carbon capture storage. This is when carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels in power stations is pumped back underground into depleted oil and gas fields. This prevents the CO2 form being released into the atmosphere and thus reduces greenhouse emissions. There are other suggestions – for example building machines that can produce cloudsthus helping to reflect sunlight back out to space; filters by the side of motorways and major roads that suck in greenhouse gases emitted from cars and turn them into water etc.

This article describes some other geoengineering schemes and how they may or may not help with combating climate change:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=geoengineering-how-to-cool-earth

My opinion is that some of these schems may well work and at affordable costs – some will just be far too expensive. But we need to use geoengineering techniquies in combination with other practices. So for example, we still need to be developing new technologies or new ways of producing energy that don’t produce high levels of greenhouse gases in the first place, so for example, investing more in renewable sources of energy (wind power, tidal and solar energy, etc).