Geoengineering: Approaching Climate Change as a Present-Day, Preventable Issue

Abstract

It’s easy to think of climate change as a contemporary apocalyptic prophecy or a potential future problem, but it’s not. Climate change is happening now, affects people around us on a daily basis, and can be stopped with a sufficient amount of combined effort, collaboration, and sound investments. One of those investments is in geoengineering, an umbrella term for a plethora of technologies that vary in scope, form, and application but all share the trait of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Proposed methods of this, some being more viable than others, include artificial cloud-brightening to increase the reflectivity of the clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere, capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the ground, and mass fertilization of the ocean with iron deposits in order to trigger algal blooms that would adversely lower the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Various sources, from Yale to Oxford to MIT, have already endorsed this concept and are working to refine it and put it into practice, as no version of our planet would be more secure from meteorological threats otherwise beyond our control than one with contemporary advances in geoengineering technology. Geoengineering is the best—and only available—solution to climate change, as it is the one remaining way to lower Earth’s CO₂ emissions to below 400 ppm, may be less partisan than previous solutions, and is sufficiently profitable and time-sensitive to counteract the resistance that has been felt against the idea of taking back our Earth thus far. Here’s why.