3 ms·

I once asked a climate scientist for their opinion on 'climate engineering'. They weren't in favor of the general concept, never mind the individual schemes.

• kaybe 7y ago
  I feel like the community is slowly (edit: actually, not that slowly) changing their opinion. We were far to optimistic in our belief in the politicians. All but the worst of the current IPCC scenarios require some sort of carbon capture even now, and the IPCC reports in general are very optimistic (what we know for sure is less bad than what we suspect might be true). Carbon capture is classified as a climate engineering technique, and depending on how you do it it is feasible to accurately estimate the consequences. On the other hand, all techniques talked about so far need to be deployed on a massive scale, costing us a lot of resources, space and probably biospheres. The best cost estimates I've seen so far is ~200€/ton CO2 in monetary terms. The problem is that right now the research is not at the level it needs to be (another Manhattan project would be good), since there is no money in it. Solar management techniques are indeed hard to consider, and would need to be kept up forever, which means that as soon as a war or just recession happens, we'd still be doomed, so this can only be used to buy some time and will probably have severe side-effects.