Dear Tom,
What is geoengineering?
— Brian Mann
Dear Brian,
Geoengineering is a new term in the jargon of the atmospheric sciences. It’s the intentional large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the Earth’s climate in order to counter the effects of global warming. It’s essentially a proposal to fight climate change with more climate change — and few atmospheric scientists support the idea. The rationale is that if mankind cannot soon reduce the production of greenhouse gases (the primary drivers of global warming) to a tolerable level, then a technical fix will be necessary: a geoengineered fix. One such proposal is to spray the upper atmosphere with sulfuric acid droplets that would bounce some incoming sunlight into space, thereby cooling the atmosphere.
