Some scientists think we have gone beyond the tipping point with respect to runaway climate change or that we will lack the political will to carry out the necessary steps to reduce our usage of fossil fuels in time to prevent catastrophic outcomes. When all hope is lost where you gonna turn? Carbon-busters, otherwise known as Geo-engineers.

The idea behing geo-engineering is that we can engineer our way out of the global warming problem. I am familiar with two geo-engineering schemes for doing this.

One sheme put forward by atmospheric scientist and Nobel Laureate, Paul Crutzen, involves injecting clouds with sulpher dioxide to reflect sunlight back out into space and offset the effects of global warming.

A second scheme put forward by Klaus Lackner from Columbia University involves gigantic chimneys that would pump polluted air from the surroundings, scrub the carbon from it, and then prepare the collected material for sequestration. This idea is being proposed as a way to win the Branson prize of 25 million for a way to eliminate 1 billion or more tons of co2 from the atmosphere.

The second scheme seems much more promising to me especially if you imagine each major city in the world with enough carbon scrubbers to offset the amount they are putting into the atmosphere. Actually, each major city in the developed world would probably be obligated to operate more scrubbers than would be needed in order to help the less developed world - or finance the installation of scrubbers there.