It's come to this

Some of the greatest minds of our time recently met in Harvard to discuss emergency measures for saving the planet from out of control global warming using geoengineering. It's a scantily understood discipline carrying great risks, but that's what we get when society stubbornly refuses to make gradual concessions to the carbon-intensive way of everyday (a.k.a. the easy way out).


So let's look at some of these promising alternative options:


1) Fertilize the oceans - put large amounts of iron particles into oceans, causing a surge in plankton growth. Plankton sucks CO2 (the main greenhouse gas) from the atmosphere, and eventually deposits it on the ocean floor where it stays for centuries.


2) Store CO2 underground - an idea developed by oil companies and already tested in practice. Basically, take the empty chambers in the earth's crust (empty cause we sucked the oil out), and pump excess CO2 into them, and cap it. Sounds simple enough, but we'll essentially be creating giant pockets of poisonous gas, ready to burst.

3) Make clouds more reflective - through a process involving tiny salt particles, we'd be able to increase the albedo (brightness) of clouds, making them more reflective. More reflective clouds would decrease the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface, and thus offset the effects of global warming. In order to actually do this, one method suggests an endless army of ships crossing the oceans and pumping vapour into the sky.

4) CO2 scrubbers - Prototypes of Co2 filtering devices exist today. One plan calls for fields of such scrubbers (roughly the size and shape of football uprights) strategically placed around the world to suck out CO2 directly from the air. The problem is, what to do with the CO2 one it's been captured? Disposal and transport costs would offset any benefit, although the inventor claims a chemical process could turn the captured CO2 into harmless limestone, but he's got a fortune riding on this idea, so of course he'd champion the cause.

5) Space Mirrors - An idea right out of the Simpsons...a giant mirror in space to block out a portion of the sun's light reaching the earth, and thus cooling it. Some mirror designs would simply cause a shaddow effect, while others are more permeable, and would only block out the most harmful sun rays, while allowing light to still reach the earth in all parts, without any shaddow effects. Interesting.

There are other ideas too, but hardly worth writing about.