Geoengineering and Climate Change Mitigation
Within the past few decades, there has been no political or public discussion as heated and controversial as the debate over climate change. Climate disputes can be traced back all the way to 1837, when Louis Agassiz proposed a theory claiming that Switzerland had once been covered with large ice sheets, and have become a big part of the international scientific community since then (Archer and Rahmstorf 2010). Today, climate change is not only a scientific issue, but it has grown into an economic and political issue as well. The rising amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, most of which has been added through human activities, has caused a climb in the average temperatures around the planet. This can have huge effects on the future of the Earth as we know it, and these plausible effects of a rising temperature have resulted in a massive uproar in today’s society. There have been many proposed solutions to the current problem of climate change, such as alternate energy or emission cuts, but no solution seems to be as unbelievable, innovative, and interesting as geoengineering. Geoengineering, which is defined by New York Times journalist William J. Broad as the “rearranging of the Earth’s environment on a large scale to suit human needs and promote habitability,” dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century, and now holds an odd place in the scientific and political debate over climate change (1, Broad 2006). To many in the scientific community, most geoengineering ideas are seen as crazy and expensive. However, in order to fully understand geoengineering’s role in the climate change discussion, one must learn about the ideas that geoengineers have come up with in order to mitigate these changes. It is also necessary to understand which of these proposed ideas are realistic and which being considered seriously as contenders in the race to cure the warming of our planet. The most important part of understanding geoengineering is first