The Royal Society defines geoengineering as “the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change” and divides methods into two types: carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere, and solar radiation management aimed at reducing heat coming in or reflecting more of it out.
[quote quote=”Some of the ideas put forward to block the Sun’s heat would be far-fetched even in a science fiction novel.” type=”text” ]
Techniques ranging from the intriguing to the wacky have been proposed to remove carbon from the atmosphere, including fertilising the oceans with iron filings to promote the growth of tiny marine plants that absorb carbon dioxide, installing in the ocean a vast number of floating funnels that draw nutrient-rich cold water from the deep to encourage algal blooms that suck carbon dioxide from the air, and construction of thousands of ‘sodium trees’ that extract carbon dioxide directly from the air and turn it into sodium bicarbonate.
Some of the ideas put forward to block the Sun’s heat would be far-fetched even in a science fiction novel. One is to send billions of reflective discs to a point in space known as L1 and located between the Earth and the Sun. Another is to launch hundreds of special unmanned ships that plough the oceans sending up plumes of water vapour that increase cloud cover. Or dark-coloured forests could be converted into light-coloured grasslands that reflect more sunlight.
end partial quote from:
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/the-frightening-politics-of-geoengineering
No comments:
Post a Comment