Article Review
20 reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea By Alan robock Gihan Sami Soliman International-Curricula Educators Association 25/03/2015
Climate change and the terrifying scenario of a man-made doomsday (Victor, 2009) seems to be finally forcing humans into a sort of unity beyond localities, ethnicities and genders, and pushing for a new level of global governance. Robock provides twenty reasons why geoengineering may not be a good idea to tackle climate change. His argument hovers over all technical, economic, political, environmental and moral domains so as to reach the upfront conclusion representing the title of his book. Formulating his discourse into numbered subtitles, seems to imply a strong correlation between the twenty reasons and thus weakens the reader’s inclination for any counter discourse. Robock defines geoengineering as a deliberate adjustment of the earth’s climate so as to attain specific goals to neutralise the consequences of global warming and the “dangerous” anthropogenic activities. He traces back the history of the idea when it was introduced as a weapon during the Cold War then as a proposed project to make the arctic “more habitable”, and then recently to tackle the effect of man-caused climate change. Rocock lists several methods for intervention such as “Ocean fertilization”, “genetic modification” of plants to increase “biotic carbon intake”, carbon sequestration and storage techniques, “planting forests”, as well as some albedo techniques to cool off the earth. In spite of listing all such proposals, he builds his case against geoengineering based exclusively on two proposed albedo interventions and under very specific circumstances! by picking the two proposals of injecting stratospheric aerosols into the atmospheres and/or using “space-based shield” to reflect solar radiation away,