Then, this planet, what is waited for to prevent superheating? The British daily The Independent ventured in an opinion poll at the climatologists. A questionnaire had been addressed in December to know which opinion the harbingers of climate have from the géoingénierie. A discipline which dreams to frustrate the global warming by techniques aiming at reducing the solar radiation on the planet, or at bringing down the content of carbon dioxide of our atmosphere. While the géoingénierie made it laugh more of one, she is promoted.

Behind the engineering of climate, there is a simple idea. While governments fail to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and while nothing seems to stop warming, it would not be better to take the bull by horns and to bring down pressure, manu militari? Where from a catalogue of techniques, going of the bet to orbit of thousand thousand million glass blades or injection in high atmosphere of dusts, to reduce the solar energy which irradiates our planet. Where the sowing of the plankton with the aid of iron or of urea to reinforce the pumping of the atmospheric carbon by the oceans (1). To know the opinion of the scientists, Independent therefore launched an inquiry, very safe with value of opinion poll. Eighty specialists of climate however agreed to answer, among whom the Nobel prize of chemistry Paul Crutzen (for its jobs on the ozone layer) is raised, and fervent supporter of the géo-engineering, or his British associate James Lovelock, who offers to move deep waters of the ocean to dope the plankton. (2)

He takes out again from the inquiry that more half of the scientists who answered considers that the hour is so serious as it is necessary to envisage the " Plan B " for climate to perfect techniques of cooling. One of three refuse this idea, considering that it would divert the humanity of the reliable only means of struggle against warming: reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A tenth of the scientists is still considered as “without opinion”. To think about arguments of some and others, Independent names some extracts of answers made by quarantine researchers.

(1) Read by the same author: Who seeds the iron, harvests problems perhaps, of 12/15/2008.

(2) Idea refuted by researchers who think that to take back up waters charged with nutriments to feed the plankton would also make go back to the surface the carbon buried in the bottom of the oceans.

Picture: © Denis Delbecq