By Mike Hulme (King's College London)
The Climate Engineering Conference in Berlin this August is providing a venue to debate in as open as way as possible the political, scientific, economic, ethical and cultural implications of this wide array of technologies. This is important to do because the consequences of implementing some of these technologies are wide-ranging and decisions should not be made by default or without public scrutiny. In my recently published book ‘Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case Against Climate Engineering, I critique one specific climate engineering proposal, namely to deliberately introduce sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere to regulate global temperature.
My argument is that the putative technology of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) offers a triple fantasy: first, that the risks of a changing climate can be defused effectively by regulating global temperature; second, that the world could ever agree on the level at which to set the thermostat; and, third, that the unintended consequences of such intervention are manageable. Creating a global thermostat as a response to climate change is an inadequate solution to a wrongly framed problem. READ MORE >>
© Source: ce-conference.org (Climate Engineering Conference 2014)
My argument is that the putative technology of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) offers a triple fantasy: first, that the risks of a changing climate can be defused effectively by regulating global temperature; second, that the world could ever agree on the level at which to set the thermostat; and, third, that the unintended consequences of such intervention are manageable. Creating a global thermostat as a response to climate change is an inadequate solution to a wrongly framed problem. READ MORE >>
© Source: ce-conference.org (Climate Engineering Conference 2014)
