Newswise — With global temperatures creeping up the thermometer and sea level on the rise, climate change is already upon us. The focus of our response so far has been to try to minimize our influence on the environment. But a better way forward, writes William B. Gail in the May issue of IEEE Spectrum, is to develop the technological and political tools to actively manage--even engineer--climate on a global scale.
Engineering the climate could increase global crop yields through longer, more predictable growing seasons, alter large-scale weather patterns, deliver rainfall where it is needed, and limit the frequency and magnitude of floods and other natural disasters. It would also be a risky endeavor that requires an unprecedented global political will, improvements in our understanding of how the climate system works, more finely detailed computer models, and new "geoengineering" technologies that would allow us to manipulate greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere or the amount of light that reaches the Earth's surface.
These geoengineering techniques sound pretty far-fetched at the moment: swarms of screens in space that deflect sunlight away from Earth, millions of tons of sunlight-squelching particles injected into the air, and thousands of cloud-forming ships plying the world's oceans, to name a few. But scientists have only recently begun to take geoengineering seriously, and these technologies are unlikely to be what we finally deploy.
Unless agreements on how to manage the climate are reached in the next two decades or so, global politics will likely derail any effort to engineer the Earth, writes Gail. By then an accurate picture will emerge of which nations will succeed and which will suffer under the new climate we are headed for. Those that might face a climate that will enrich them will lose the incentive to cooperate on a global climate management scheme.
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