- Climate Change Solutions: Intro to GeoEngineering

Catalog description

An exploration of earth systems solutions to climate change. Wicked problems have many components, necessarily demanding a variety of approaches for their solutions. Geoengineering, the deliberate large-scale intervention in Earth’s natural systems, refers to a suite of technologies and processes that could be used to reduce the amount of the sun’s energy reaching the earth or capture and sequester carbon from the atmosphere. But just because we can do something, how do we decide if we should do it? And when? And who is doing the deciding? In this course, we will learn about the geologic materials and processes that make these methods scientifically feasible. We will evaluate the deployability and efficacy of these approaches through an interdisciplinary lens, bringing in political, economic, sociological, and technological considerations. Using those many approaches, we will ask can we afford to use these technologies? …or can we afford not to?