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Could we control our climate?

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Humanity is facing the global challenge of our time – climate crisis – and we need radical creative thinking to tackle it. Giant mirrors in space and artificial volcanic eruptions are just two ideas being proposed.

What action would you take to limit future warming and save the planet? And what would be the consequences for society?

In this free course you will imagine a future in which humanity has taken radical action to tackle the climate crisis: by engineering the climate, using technology to ‘set the thermostat dial’ of the planet. This will help you understand many issues around humanity’s response to the climate crisis.

You will learn a basic grounding in the maths of climate science, so you can understand the nature of the problem, then move on to think about potential engineering solutions. In doing so, you will consider five broad questions:

What is ‘engineering the climate’?
Why engineer the climate?
How could we engineer the climate?
Should we engineer the climate?
Will we engineer the climate?

This course will develop your confidence and skills for online study, whether this is to explore environmental topics or as part of your preparation for other study.

This OpenLearn science course was produced with the kind support of Dangoor Education, the educational arm of The Exilarch's Foundation.

Enrolling on the course will give you the opportunity to earn an Open University digital badge. Badges are not accredited by The Open University but they’re a great way to demonstrate your interest in the subject and commitment to your career, and to provide evidence of continuing professional development.

Once you are signed in, you can manage your digital badges online from My OpenLearn. In addition, you can download and print your OpenLearn statement of participation – which also displays your Open University badge.

The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey. Once you complete the course we would also value your feedback and suggestions for future improvement, in our optional end-of-course survey. Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

explain the climate crisis challenges facing the planet
understand the concepts of climate change measurement and modelling, and be familiar with a range of predictions about the climate crisis and its impacts on humans and other life
understand the Paris agreement targets for future climate change, and the way these – and other climate crisis issues – are discussed and presented in the media
appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of different geoengineering methods for controlling the climate, together with social, physical and governance issues surrounding their implementation
design the ideal future climate, and reflect on how this decision was made.

Earn this free Open University digital badge if you complete this course! The badge can be displayed, shared and downloaded as a marker of your achievement. The badge is awarded for completing the course and passing the quizzes.

First Published: 31/03/2021

Updated: 31/03/2021

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You can start this course right now without signing-up. Click on any of the course content sections below to start at any point in this course.
If you want to be able to track your progress, earn a free Statement of Participation, and access all course quizzes and activities, sign-up.

Course content

- Introduction and guidance
- Current section:
  Introduction and guidance
  This free badged course, Could we control our climate?, lasts 24 hours, with 8 ‘sessions’. You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week there is no problem with pushing on to complete a further study session. The eight sessions are linked to ensure a logical flow through the course. They are:What is engineering the climate?The planet is changingWe are causing changeFuture of the planetWays to engineer the climateDesign and implementationShou...
  - What is a badged course?
  - How to get a badge
- Acknowledgements
- session1Session 1: What is ‘engineering the climate’?
- Current section:
  Introduction
  In this session, you will begin to investigate what ‘engineering the climate’ means, as well as the nature of climate itself. You will also look at the challenges for predicting and engineering climate change.By the end of this session, you should be able to:understand the concept of climate engineering to counteract human-caused climate crisisappreciate that ‘climate’ can be defined as the probability of different types of weather, and that more years of weather data...
- 1 An engineered world
  - 1.1 What do we really mean by climate engineering?
  - 1.2 Modifying the Earth’s energy budget
- 2 What is climate?
- 3 How certain can we be?
  - 3.1 Climate dice
- 4 What are the challenges?
  - 4.1 Identifying change
  - 4.2 The complexity of climate
- 5 End-of-session quiz
- 6 Session 1 summary
- References
- Further reading
- Acknowledgements
- Session 1 practice quiz
- SEO URL
- session2Session 2: The planet is changing
- Current section:
  Introduction
  Do you believe the climate is changing? If so, how can you be sure?Measuring global warming and, more broadly, climate change, is an essential part of monitoring the world we live in. We depend on planetary resources and weather, and we can be very sensitive to change, particularly in developing countries where people are more vulnerable. Ecosystems can also be vulnerable. If we used geoengineering or any other climate action, we would need to monitor whether the changes were as we expected....
- 1 Trusting sources of information
- 2 Taking Earth’s temperature
  - 2.1 Global warming through time
  - 2.2 Changes in local and extreme temperatures
- 3 Changes in Earth’s water
- 4 Effects on life
- 5 End-of-session quiz
- 6 Session 2 summary
- References
- Acknowledgements
- Session 2 practice quiz
- session3Session 3: We are causing change
- Current section:
  Introduction
  If the planet is changing, how do scientists know how much of the change is down to us? This session, you will examine IPCC assessments of the human contribution to climate change. You will continue to consider why geoengineering may be necessary, as well as how we might possibly control climate ourselves. By the end of this session, you should be able to:understand the principles of attributing past climate change to different factorsunderstand the concept of a climate forcingdescribe...
- 1 Deducing the causes of climate change
  - 1.1 The global whodunnit
  - 1.2 Forcing the global thermostat
- 2 Radiative forcings – increasing temperature
  - 2.1 The Sun
  - 2.2 Greenhouse gases
- 3 Radiative forcings – cooling temperatures
  - 3.1 Industrial sulfates
  - 3.2 Volcanic sulfates
- 4 Internal variability
- 5 Putting it all together
  - 5.1 Climate models
  - 5.2 Deducing the culprits
- 6 End-of-session quiz
- 7 Session 3 summary
- References
- Acknowledgements
- Session 3 practice quiz
- session4Session 4: Future of the planet
- Current section:
  Introduction
  Trying to predict the future is a mug’s game. But increasingly it’s a game we all have to play because the world is changing so fast and we need to have some sort of idea of what the future’s actually going to be like because we are going to have to live there, probably next week.Adams (2002)This quotation from science fiction author Douglas Adams highlights the point that this session is not only about the specific predicted risks of climate change, which might motivate us...
- 1 The climate forecast
- 2 Different possible futures
  - 2.1 Representative Concentration Pathways
  - 2.2 The world’s climate models
- 3 Predictions for the planet
- 4 Predictions for life: Natural systems
  - 4.1 Ocean acidification
- 5 Predictions for humans
- 6 End-of-session quiz
- 7 Session 4 summary
- References
- Acknowledgements
- Session 4 compulsory badge quiz
- session5Session 5: Ways to engineer the climate
- Current section:
  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 geoengineeringunderstand how geoengineering could reduce how much of the Sun’s energy reaches the Earth’s surfaceunderstan...
- 1 Tipping the energy balance scales
- 2 Energy from the Sun
  - Energy reaching the Earth
- 3 Reducing energy in
- 4 Increasing energy out
- 4.2 Ocean fertilisation
  - 4.3 Other possibilities
- 5 End-of-session quiz
- 6 Session 5 summary
- References
- Acknowledgements
- Session 5 practice quiz
- session6Session 6: Design and implementation
- Current section:
  Introduction
  So far you have studied the detection, attribution and predictions of climate change and several possible methods of geoengineering to counter it. Now you will consider how to design these methods and put them into practice, not only scientifically but politically. By the end of this session, you should be able to:appreciate there is a range of climate models of different complexities for different needsexplain complex scientific predictions in a concise and accessible form suitable for a po...
- 1 Climate models
- 2 Geoengineering scenarios
  - 2.1 Change in surface air temperature
  - 2.2 Rainfall
- 3 Field experiments
  - 3.1 Field experiments in SRM
  - 3.2 Field experiments in CDR
- 4 Geoengineering in the real world
- 5 End-of-session quiz
- 6 Session 6 summary
- References
- Acknowledgements
- Session 6 practice quiz
- session7Session 7: Should we engineer the climate?
- Current section:
  Introduction
  By asking whether we ‘should’ engineer the climate, the question we are really asking is, what is the best or the right thing to do? But deciding what is best for Earth’s climate and how to achieve it is, of course, extraordinarily complex. This session you will study how you might choose and implement different geoengineering methods, the risks of unwanted side-effects, and some contradictory and controversial media reporting of climate predictions.By the end of this sessi...
- 1 Choose wisely
- 2 Uncertainties
  - 2.1 Uncertainty in predictions
  - 2.2 Science is not like sausage-making
- 3 What are the risks?
- 4 Climate predictions and the media
- 5 End-of-session quiz
- 6 Session 7 summary
- References
- Acknowledgements
- Session 7 practice quiz
- session8Session 8: Will we engineer the climate?
- Current section:
  Introduction
  Is geoengineering likely to be attempted in the future? In 2015 the US National Research Council (NRC) released a major report on Climate Intervention (Figure 1: National Research Council, 2015a; 2015b). This was seen as a shift towards serious planning for implementation: Start of QuoteRather than presenting climate engineering as an extreme response to be avoided if at all possible, the report normalises climate engineering as one approach among others. Hamilton (2015)Geoengineering is cer...
- 1 Are climate models wrong?
- 2 Public opinion
- 3 Climate targets
  - 3.1 Paris Agreement
  - 3.2 Our current path
- 4 Decision time
- 5 End-of-session quiz
- 6 Session 8 summary
- Where next?
- Tell us what you think
- References
- Acknowledgements
- Session 8 compulsory badge quiz

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