Hubris, climate engineering and climate control Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control

摘要

As two decades of GHG mitigation policies have not been able to stem the increase in global emissions, it has recently become fashionable to discuss climate engineering as an apparently cheap and simple alternative to emissions mitigation. Although an undercurrent had always existed in climate policy since Freeman Dyson suggested massive afforestation in 1977, the debate became serious after chemistry Nobel laureate Crutzen (2006) advocated stratospheric aerosol cooling of the Earth, and then reached the scientific mainstream with the publication of an overview by the venerable Royal Society (2009). The 5th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report will treat climate engineering as a cross-cutting issue, and this has triggered vigorous debates within the writing teams. The first field experiments of ocean fertilization have been undertaken, and stratospheric aerosol seeding experiments are being prepared (Stilgoe, 2011).