Terraforming Earth: Geoengineering Megaplan Starts Now

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now considers geoengineering to be respectable.  The reason is simple.  Unless our greenhouse gas emissions start falling soon, Earth will probably warm this century by more than 2 °C, at which point things get nasty – because human society might not be able to adapt.  But emissions are still rising. The upshot is we urgently need ways to suck CO2 out of the air.  This was the subject of the Oxford Conference on Negative Emission Technologies, held last month in the UK.

In conjunction with scientists attending that meeting, we've assessed the effectiveness – and cost – of the most likely methods. They include planting trees, shoveling crushed rock into the ocean, and building millions of chemical "sponges" to pull gas out of the air.

Terraforming Earth: Geoengineering Megaplan Starts Now