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Geoengineering Alone Cannot Save The World
We need more than clever engineering to prevent climate disaster.
In the early days the yearly rise could hardly be seen. The annual cycle of carbon dioxide — the summer drop as forests bloom and soak up carbon, the winter jump as leaves wilt and rot — dominated the measurements. But the rise was there, nonetheless.
By the 1960s the cumulative effect of our global carbon dioxide output was becoming harder to miss. Now, sixty years later, the trend is obvious to all but the most unwilling to look. Over those six decades carbon dioxide levels have increased by almost a third, and every year the annual rise has grown larger and larger.
This is not a natural process. It is one almost entirely man made, thanks to our industrial, carbon spewing civilization. Every year we put tens of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We take almost nothing out.
The result is inevitable. The more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat the planet retains from the Sun. Year by year this heat adds up, slowly warming the planet.
