MIT to Host Symposium on Engineering Climate Change

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will host a climate engineering seminar this week called "Engineering a Cooler Earth: Can We Do It? Should We Try?," CNN reported today. An article on the CNN website said: "Climate engineering may sound a little Frankensteinian and worrisome, but it's not a new concept. Governments and militaries have tried over the years to control the weather for various reasons - and have mostly failed."

Judith Layzer, an MIT associate professor of environmental policy and symposium participant, was quoted as saying: "Very broadly, we're already engineering the climate. The question now is whether we should do it on purpose. That would involve taking action, inventing gizmos, and using them ideally to abate some of the warming that is expected to happen from global climate change."

Jim Fleming, a science, technology and society professor at Colby College, and a speaker at the upcoming symposium, was quoted as saying: "It's the inadvertent, 'engineering through pollution' argument, and I don't really agree with it. I'm a historian of science, and I believe humans have been intervening on purpose for much longer than people will admit. So one of the lessons of climate engineering, I think, is that some climate engineers insist they're the first generation to purpose this deliberate manipulation. I think history says otherwise."

In commenting on the long-term necessity for climate engineering, Layzer said it "is just another example of treating a symptom. Treating problems in a piecemeal way, actually you just move the problem from one place to another. If you take pollution out of the air, you still have it. You have to put it somewhere, so you put it in the water. Then you've polluted the water."