posted 02-27-2004 10:42 PM            

Undoing The Damage

A fine mess we've gotten ourselves into: pollution, global warming, depletion of natural resources, a hole in the ozone layer. The list goes on. So the question arises: Can we humans keep doing what we are doing to our environment and still avert global catastrophe?

Some think so.(!!!!-Ed) In the past decade a handful of scientists and engineers have offered some big, bold, and highly controversial schemes to avert impending global environmental problems. These grand (if not grandiose) projects dubbed "geoengineering" range from the ortho-tech to Star Trek ,from massive reforestation efforts geared toward absorbing excess carbon dioxide to lofting a hundred or more 100-km-wide mirrors into orbit around the Earth to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the surface, thereby ofsetting the heating caused by the co2 emissions.

Don't mistake these proposals for the fantasies of bored academics. Many of the ideas have been thoroughly worked out (!!!!-Ed) and appear feasible.

See link:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-2.1/huyghe.htm