Chris Rowan is a geologist specialising in the dark arts of paleomagnetism, and getting people to pay him to travel to exotic destinations for fieldwork. Having drilled up New Zealand during his PhD, and South Africa in his first post-doc, he now works at the University of Edinburgh.
Anne Jefferson has a love of all things water-related and blends hydrology, geomorphology, geology, and climate change in her work. She has a Ph.D. from Oregon State University and is now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
It seems that you can't look anywhere at the moment without seeing a report discussing the potential of 'geoengineering' our way out of climate change. Perhaps the most media impact was made by the Royal Society's largely sensible analysis, which has been nicely summarised for SEED by James Wilsdon.
As one of SEED's tame geobloggers, I was also invited to respond to this commentary , and you can read my thoughts here. You'll see that I worry that the whole debate has become a bit of a distraction what must be our long-term goal of creating a truly sustainable civilisation.
I'll use my soapbox here to add that some of the proposed options, particularly those that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, might potentially play a role in the medium to long term if we stabilise atmospheric CO2 levels too close to a potential tipping point for comfort. In the short-term, though - by which I mean the next couple of decades - we really should turn our eyes away from the shiny technological "fixes" being dangled before us.
Environment
Technology
Comments
I'm in a cynical mood today so I'll offer one possible scenario of geoengineering -- it will be big business by second half of this century. Large multinational corporations and/or state-owned entities will compete to construct and implement these efforts. Instead of sowing doubt in climate change they'll be hyping it up and lobbying to modify intergovernmental carbon-trading schemes that put $$$ in their pockets ... all under the guies of 'saving the planet'.
Like I said I'm in a very cynical mood today ... hopefully this scenario is fantastically delusional.
Posted by: BrianR | September 14, 2009 6:53 PM