Cider + Geoengineering

This year, Black Friday had a special promotion: free copies of the US government's Fourth National Climate Assessment! With exciting details on coming devastations to the economy, individual health, worsening extreme weather events, irreversible ecosystem changes to the oceans/Arctic/etc, it perhaps did not inspire much holiday spirit. And the proposed means to avoid these effects essentially comes down to massive and immediate changes to energy production, when we have demonstrated little appetite for far more modest adjustments to our way of life. But curious minds (and science fiction) have proposed other ways to make planet-sized changes, which can generally be brought together under the category of "geoengineering."

Geoengineering, or more particularly "climate engineering" / "climate intervention", is an attempt to imagine how we might change the settings of the climate model in order to achieve different results. If the main drivers of climate change are the over-production of carbon dioxide and the heating by solar radiation, can either of those be reduced? Cloud seeding, orbital sunshades, even painting parking lots white...reflecting the sun can take many (and some rather silly-sounding) forms, while various forms of carbon sequestration may have been part of the oft-derided "clean coal" initiative, but have a proven winner in the form of reforestation (aka planting lots of trees).

But with as much complexity and interdependency in climate systems, how certain can be we that, say, dumping massive amounts of iron oxide into the oceans will actually solve the problem we intend (reducing acidification) without having other, possibly even worse effects? Who gets to approve a proposal like seeding the upper atmosphere with aerosols, which after all has global (and likely regionally inconsistent) impacts? And, the nut that no one thus far has managed to crack: how will any of this be paid for?

We will look over a variety of the proposed solutions, gauge their likelihood and possible risks, and even imagine other ambitious projects like using solar power installations to re-green the Sahara. And we can turn to examples from science fiction to both imagine how we might succeed (like Kim Stanley Robinson's tales of terraforming Mars) or the dystopias we might create (from Blade Runner, The Matrix, and WALL-E to the maligned Highlander 2).

For the end of the year, we are also taking stock of our format: schedule, venue, topics, etc in hopes of making changes in the new year to encourage a larger turnout. So even if you can't make it Thurs the 20th, free free to join in via the comments or on our Discord with your input and suggestions.

Come out and let's discuss changing the world!