Can We Engineer the Earth’s Climate?

We Must At Least Explore the Potential

In Zócalo’s new Nexus feature, we’ll be inviting contributors to consider big ideas with a broad perspective, finding connections and context across disciplines and between recent events and long-past histories. Below, Jeff Goodell asks whether man can control climate, rather than blindly pushing it up the thermometer.

It doesn’t take much imagination to dismiss geoengineering as a sci-fi fantasy. The whole notion of geoengineering – which the British Royal Society defines as “the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system, in order to moderate global warming” – reeks of hubris …