Engineering Tunnel Vision

‘Today’s solutions are tomorrow’s problems’, with this spot on sentence my professor in environmental history concluded his rather dry lecture. A couple of days later I read: ‘The call for geo-engineering to tackle climate change is getting louder’. Geo-engineering involves purposely changing the composition of the earth’s surface or atmosphere. Two examples: Geo-engineers propose to dump a gigantic amount of iron into the oceans. The oceans are already our biggest CO2 sink and iron, apparently, helps the oceans to store even more CO2. Inserting iron in the oceans would therefore solve our climate change problems. The second idea is to artificially simulate the effects of a volcano by emitting a large amount of dust particles into the upper layers of the atmosphere. Dust particles tend to block the sunlight and therefore have a cooling effect on the earth; voilà, global warming solved.


In the engineer’s model these so called solutions might do a great deal in solving the global warming problem. However, a model is an oversimplified version of reality and therefore unable to take into account the complexity of system earth. Will the unforeseen side-effects of these ‘solutions’ not pose an even bigger threat than climate change itself? Our planet is not a test tube, there is no Planet B!