UK Government is funding five, small scale geoengineering field experiments: three on marine cloud brightening, and one each on Arctic refreezing, and stratospheric aerosols totalling $78 million U.S. The article advocates for the common understanding of the nature of geoengineering in academic and public thought, “Deliberately altering the atmosphere, a shared global resource, is fraught with ethical, geopolitical and practical problems. It is and always has been a crazy idea.” The author goes on to qualify this trope in view of the recent advancements in activation of degradation of Earth systems (also known as activation of tipping responses), that generally result in collapse of degraded systems if the thing that caused the degradation is not removed (climate restoration), “However, many consider the failure to control carbon emissions means not intervening in this way is an even crazier idea. They consider it necessary to avert the collapse of ecosystems and society. Perhaps solar geoengineering is the price we must pay for our wholly inadequate climate change response to date.” This nearly ubiquitous concept that geoengineering is a crazy idea, unfortunately, is almost always a prerequisite to publication in both popular and academic literature because of reticence of publisher to recognize other truths that disregard the centuries and millennia that humans have been geomanipulating Earth’s systems, from clearing half the world’s forests to doubling greenhouse gas concentration in our sky, that have resulted in the climate warming we must now use temporary emergency engineered cooling solutions to bring back under control.
First published in The Conversation by Robert Chris on June 4, 2025
https://theconversation.com/five-geoengineering-trials-the-uk-is-funding-to-combat-global-warming-256515
Image: Screen capture from The Conversation
