It’s multifaceted. Scientifically it’s too soon to say. Engineering-wise, it’s entirely doable. I’ve seen a couple talks in which they worked out how to do it with current technology and within budgets that are manageable by cooperating governments. Politically it seems like a toss-up, but I’m least qualified to comment on that.
My hunch on the science side (take this with a grain of salt, I’m a computer scientist in climate informatics, not a climate scientist) is that there will surely be undesired effects. I’m working on method development for identifying all of the downstream impacts, but it’s low TRL. I think we’ll end up needing to weigh the negative with the positive impacts unless we find some miracle silver bullet. Intervening in a system as complex as our climate makes it a good bet there will be undesirable impacts.
My guess is we’re ~10 years from confident estimations of what is/isn’t a good idea. Then we have to convince governments to act. That’s really slow. The marginally good news is, perhaps the right intervention can cool the earth fast enough (possibly at the cost of something like Ozone).
That said, we are already intervening in the climate with greenhouse gases. The safest intervention from here is to just stop/slow that. We know what the world is like with less GHG. We only get one shot at a habitable Earth, so while it is scary to try fixing it, it’s more scary to continue breaking it in my opinion. No one wants to act hastily though, we’re working on the science to make sure we know what we’re doing.
>That said, we are already intervening in the climate with greenhouse gases. The safest intervention from here is to just stop/slow that. We know what the world is like with less GHG. We only get one shot at a habitable Earth, so while it is scary to try fixing it, it’s more scary to continue breaking it in my opinion. No one wants to act hastily though, we’re working on the science to make sure we know what we’re doing.
Agreed 100%. Gambling with the only planet we have is tremendously stupid, yet there are many (including in this very thread) who advocate doing just that. The mind boggles.
Thanks for your response. I'm a former mechanical engineer turned software engineer who's currently studying data science while between jobs. I want to do something good for humanity, and your field sounds like it could be a good fit, and interesting. Are there many remote positions in climate informatics?
Yeah it’s a dream for me and I hope funding persists.
I wish I had a good answer. I’m a late-stage PhD student and I work full time at a national lab that is doing this work. I ought to start gauging the job market for when I defend my dissertation. With the current administration, there are several national labs interested in this problem. I have thought about looking at NOAA, NASA, NSIDC, etc as well. I’ve heard many of these government orgs are looking for data scientists for climate work, I suspect eventually there will be enough climate-data-scientists to hire them specifically. It’s all government I suspect; there’s not much for a private company to gain from climate research unfortunately.
