“By talking about geoengineering, I get more people interested in talking about climate change.” Trifonov_Evgeniy/iStock Ben Kravitz has studied geoengineering for the past seven years and doesn’t plan to stop anytime soon, despite ongoing controversy around the issue. That’s because even if geoengineering never happens in the real world, the concept alone is already playing an important role in the climate change story. “[Theoretical geoengineering] has allowed us to ask questions about how the climate system works that we didn’t even know we wanted to ask,” says Kravitz, a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “It’s actually in some ways changed the way I think about problems in climate science.” Kravitz’s interest in geoengineering began back in 2007, when he was a graduate student at Rutgers University. He attended a seminar on geoengineering by environmental scientist Alan Robock, and, immediately recognizing the importance of the work, asked Robock to take him on as a PhD student. Together, they started the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP), an international collaboration that runs identical geoengineering simulations on some of the world’s most advanced climate models. Kravitz and Robock came up with GeoMIP after realizing that different models running different experiments were coming up with conflicting predictions—a problem if those predictions were ever going to inform real-world decisions. Read the rest at Grist. Read article here: Why We Should Talk About Geoengineering Even If We Never Do It

This article is from: 

Why We Should Talk About Geoengineering Even If We Never Do It