Geo-Engineering And Climate Change Essay

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When most people think of climate change, they think of polar bears and melting ice caps. Most people do not think of the families in North Dakota who lost their homes to floodwaters in 2009 or the twenty million people left homeless after the catastrophic 2010 monsoon in Pakistan. However, these disasters are the real consequences of climate change that we are facing. Climate change is the warming of our planet to dangerous temperatures as a result of the accumulation of greenhouse gases such as carbon and methane. However, the warming of our planet does not just mean hot days are hotter. As the earth’s average temperature rises, extreme weather events will become more frequent, allergy seasons will become longer, cities will experience more smog, farmers will face widespread crop failure, our infrastructure will begin to fail us, and humans will be left hopeless on a dying planet. …show more content…
Geo-engineers have discovered that if they put sulfates into the stratosphere, the temperatures in the lower atmosphere would lower and climate change would be reversed. By using geo-engineering, the symptoms of climate change would be remedied rather than the causes. However, geo-engineering is a last resort due to its complications. For starters, there is the ethical issue over who gets to control the geo-engineering and how much geo-engineering is necessary. This could cause tensions between nations to rise and even provoke war. Another complication is the idea of moral hazard. This means that when people realize that geo-engineering can remedy climate change, there will be a significantly reduced effort at cutting emissions. Geo-engineering is a highly controversial topic and although it could solve the issue of climate change, carries heavy baggage of its own. For this reason, many geo-engineers agree that our efforts should be concentrated on cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonizing our energy

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