http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008364.html
Link: WorldChanging: Geoengineering: A Worldchanging Retrospective.
Worldchanging Executive Editor Alex Steffen has become a respected voice of dissent in the global conversation about geo-engineering strategies. This fall, he re-enters the debate as part of the cast of front-line innovators featured in a new docu-style series from Discovery and Impossible Pictures. The program, called Discovery Project Earth, launches this Friday, August 22.
The series will profile some pretty extraordinary experiments aimed at slowing global warming, generating alternative energy and restoring natural resources. Cutting-edge thinkers around the world, including scientists, engineers and other innovators, stand at the helms of these most ambitious projects, which face no small amount of uncertainty in their quest to save all life on Earth.
Alex was tapped to comment both generally on the wisdom of geo-engineering and specifically on several of the climate-hacking initiatives featured in Project Earth. These plans read like the scripts of science fiction movies, but they are being worked on right now, to address what is perhaps the biggest challenge the human race has ever confronted. According to a press release issued by Discovery Communications:
From covering acres of Greenland's glaciers in protective blankets to stop it from melting to constructing space rockets to send tiny reflective lenses into orbit to planting thousands of saplings via a mass aerial drop to reforest barren areas, these are experiments on an epic scale. Each one will push the boundaries of science and technology, but will they produce groundbreaking environmental results?
Make no mistake: we need thinkers who are willing to go beyond the norm; who are willing to imagine on an epic, legendary, mythological scale; who aim to be the heroes who preserve life on this planet.But Worldchanging has always encouraged careful debate and long-term consideration when it comes to geo-engineering. Drastic measures that dramatically alter intricate systems and delicately balanced exchanges on the Earth, in our oceans, in our atmosphere and beyond are daunting, because altering the natural flow of ecosystems is how we created this disaster in the first place.
Whether or not you'll be tuning in to Project Earth, we've put together a gallery of Worldchanging's past coverage of geo-engineering. We hope that this modest anthology will help those who would like to follow the debate and our role in it, and to help many of you deepen your understanding of some of the most cutting edge, beyond-the-pale, and, we worry, the most dangerous ideas now in the arsenal for our fight against climate chaos....
(((I can guess right now how this kind of thing is going to play out – it'll be like South Ossetia. "You didn't expect us to just SIT ON OUR HANDS during a HUMANITARIAN CATASTROPHE, did you? Of course we had to send in the giant geo-space lasers...")))
