Change Needs to Happen

I suppose this is some sort of conclusion to my posts over the last few months. I've covered a variety of CDR and SRM techniques proposed along with some mitigation strategies also. I tried to deliberately avoid mitigation strategies such as wind and solar power as their pros and cons are already well established and I genuinely thought it would be a waste of your time to read posts about those schemes.

I'm of the opinion that geoengineering and mitigation are not, and shouldn't, be treated as mutually exclusive from another. When combined they can create a powerful 'team' to tackle anthropogenic climate change as a result of carbon dioxide increases. 
Personally I think that the best looking geoengineering scheme so far has to be that of carbon capture and storage, it posses the least amount of risk and can potentially lead to huge offsets in carbon dioxide and is currently where most investment lies. Other schemes are currently, very firmly planted in the modelling stage to assess their potential effectiveness. Even though modelling is a very powerful tool to synthesise observed data, there is a big limitation involved with it. As with any climate modelling (regardless of end goal) assumptions are made based on the theoretical relations and complex Earth system processes; which unfortunately makes models as weak as the data they're encoded with. The complexities of the Earth system, the ecology, biogeochemical cycling, and human systems will never be fully encoded into models.

Mitigation wise, I was genuinely interested in nuclear fusion as it is something that could change the face of the energy industry and the way we access power. However it seems ~30 years away from perfection (if perfection is achieved) and commercial usage is on a longer timescale. On shorter timescales it seems as if wholesale design changes in the construction industry have some promising initial results attached to it, there are some very clever and determined people in the construction industry and it is an industry which seems willing to change for the better! However as I've pointed out, sometimes mitigation schemes come with a human cost which is a total disgrace and shouldn't occur as a result.

I'm of my own personal opinion that the public, as a whole, are stuck in their ways when it comes to usage of finite resources. I simply think it comes down to a lack of education of the Earth and global change, lack of public interest in the subject which is understandable considering the current economic climate and poor investment into alternative resources making them much more costly than finite resources. 

I've really enjoyed researching the material for this topic, and there are so many more schemes and options out there which I haven't had the chance to cover as I'd have probably run into the hundreds in terms of posts. I therefore implore you to go out and take a look!

Just in reference to the wordle output of my blog, it was interesting to see 'et al' being the most commonly used words. It does imply that there is a large scientific community working in collaboration with one another to help tackle the issue of anthropogenic climate change.

Just remember this is The Only One We Have, so look after our Planet!

Thanks,
Sam.