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Can Geoengineering Solve Climate Change

Efforts to combat climate change are failing despite the rise in the concentration of gases that trap heat in the atmosphere warranting the need for scientists and experts to consider geoengineering to deal with the issue. Geo-engineering is the deliberate manipulation of the climate to offset the effects of global change. Various issues have raised questions as to whether this is the best way to deal with climate change. These questions include ethical concerns for the environment and how people interact with it. The question of whether geoengineering can save the world largely depends on the suspicion and social disruption that will occur by changing how humanity interacts with nature. This paper weighs various effects of geoengineering to determine its lack of viability as a means of dealing with climate change.

An example of such a project is the great green walls that entail planting indigenous plants on edges of deserts in various locations to hinder the spread of desertification to nearby areas. The areas on desert edges are affected by the conditions of the planet and overworked by populations living there such that survival has become a problem. Green walls and its efforts are created for the sake of rejuvenating these areas and making a bigger portion of the planet habitable. The two biggest walls are found around the Gobi Desert in China and the Sahara desert in Africa (Simonsen, 2019). The success of this program is dependent on tracking changes in vegetation patterns for years using satellite images. The other ideas include attempts to block the sun and reduce the amount of heat reaching the earth and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Although these ideas appear promising, they are accompanied by a collection of potentially harmful outcomes. Because of the uncertainty surrounding the use of geoengineering to fix the climate, humanity should not pursue these means. There is no evidence that experts have enough knowledge to engage in geoengineering which raises the question whether a project such as large-scale cloud seeding will change the Jetstream and cause delays in the monsoon season in parts of Asia negatively affecting rice crops. Or whether the dumping of tons of iron along the coast of Chile will kill fishes. Opponents of geoengineering can only change their minds if these projects are tried and tested and will not impact negatively on the environment.

Geoengineering suffers the possibility of a moral hazard. Questions of morality include areas such as governance of research, unequal distribution of risks, sharing of benefits and harms, the likelihood of unilateral deployment, and the potential consequences to the environment (Biello, 2011). The idea of geoengineering is not a desirable solution to climate change because some world leaders may opt for it as a cheap means of dealing with the problem. These attitudes might weaken efforts to get to the root of the problem. There is also the issue that some of the plans suggested have misleading supposed benefits such as efforts to reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth, which will not do much to alter the effects of climate change on vegetation.

References

Biello, D. (2011). Can geoengineering save the world from global warming. Scientific American, 25.

Simonsen, S. (2019, February 4). Will these massive Geoengineering projects fix the earth—or break it? Singularity Hub. https://singularityhub.com/2019/02/03/will-these-massive-geoengineering-projects-fix-the-earth-or-break-it-more/