The next global climate change conference will take place in Durban from 28 November to 9 December 2011. High on the agenda – also for South Africa – will be geo-engineering as well as the need for a new development path that is more inclusive and less dependent on the exploitation of non-renewable resources. Some of these plans might have unpredictable side-effects.
Two weeks ago, The Guardian in London published an article about geo-engineering in which it claimed that lighter-coloured crops, aerosols in the stratosphere and iron filings in the ocean are among the measures being considered by leading scientists for “geo-engineering” the earth’s climate.
This is according to leaked documents from the United Nations (UN) climate change body.
In a move that suggests the UN and rich countries are despairing of reaching agreement by consensus at global climate talks, American, British and other western scientists will outline a series of ideas to manipulate the world’s climate to reduce carbon emissions.
But they accept that even though the ideas could theoretically work, they might equally have unintended and even irreversible consequences, according to The Guardian report.
The papers, leaked from inside the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ahead of a geo-engineering expert group meeting in Lima in Peru this week, show that around 60 scientists will propose or try to assess a range of radical measures, including:
