Session 5: Ways to engineer the climate

Introduction

How could we engineer the climate? This session focuses on some concepts behind manipulating the Earth’s energy balance, as well as some methods that could achieve it.

By the end of this session, you should be able to:

• appreciate the rate of energy reaching the Earth’s surface from the Sun, and how Earth’s energy balance can be manipulated by geoengineering
• understand how geoengineering could reduce how much of the Sun’s energy reaches the Earth’s surface
• understand how geoengineering could potentially reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.