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A review by nelsonminar
The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton
3.0
Oh how I wanted this book to be great! But instead it's merely good. Still important and worth reading, but not earth-changing.
The book starts from a strong premise; if you believe global warming is an urgent threat and that current efforts at carbon emissions limitation won't be enough to stop it, what else can we do? You have to consider geoengineering as a means to counter global warming.
Then the book launches into an excellent description of one of the most appealing geoengineering options; blocking out ~1% of sunlight by means of a veil of sulfurous gasses sprayed into the atmosphere by airplanes. It sounds crazy at first but the cost is very low, the effects are not scarily permanent, and it seems imminently doable without inventing new technology. It's worth talking about, if nothing else than because of the risk that some one country may decide to do it unilaterally.
So far so good with the book. But then it goes off the rails a bit. It provides a lot of interesting history of science context. Other ways that we have unintentionally engineered the climate, like all the effects of nitrogen fertilizers. Cold War discussions of various ways to affect global weather, including large scale cloud-seeding experiments, etc etc.
But the book never returns to what I hoped was its central purpose, a review of various geoengineering technologies and a discussion of their current plausbility. There's some of that but a lot more just speculation and philosophizing, much of which didn't seem insightful enough to be really exciting.
Still it's an important topic and I'm grateful to the author for writing an approachable book. Also with excellent citations and bibliography, should the reader wish to study more.
The book starts from a strong premise; if you believe global warming is an urgent threat and that current efforts at carbon emissions limitation won't be enough to stop it, what else can we do? You have to consider geoengineering as a means to counter global warming.
Then the book launches into an excellent description of one of the most appealing geoengineering options; blocking out ~1% of sunlight by means of a veil of sulfurous gasses sprayed into the atmosphere by airplanes. It sounds crazy at first but the cost is very low, the effects are not scarily permanent, and it seems imminently doable without inventing new technology. It's worth talking about, if nothing else than because of the risk that some one country may decide to do it unilaterally.
So far so good with the book. But then it goes off the rails a bit. It provides a lot of interesting history of science context. Other ways that we have unintentionally engineered the climate, like all the effects of nitrogen fertilizers. Cold War discussions of various ways to affect global weather, including large scale cloud-seeding experiments, etc etc.
But the book never returns to what I hoped was its central purpose, a review of various geoengineering technologies and a discussion of their current plausbility. There's some of that but a lot more just speculation and philosophizing, much of which didn't seem insightful enough to be really exciting.
Still it's an important topic and I'm grateful to the author for writing an approachable book. Also with excellent citations and bibliography, should the reader wish to study more.