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William Cedric Arthur's avatar

These two Ted Talks are about geoengineering. Geoengineering is a technique used to make the temperature of the earth decrease by sending particles into space to reflect some of the sun’s rays back into space.

Naomi Klein is against geoengineering. For her, the products used for geoengineering pollute the earth and that this is useless to solve pollution. Moreover, she said that the scientists who are behind this technique are not sure if this will work. On the other hand, Danny Hillis is for geoengineering. In his opinion, chalk can be used to do geoengineering.It is a safe product because we put it in baby food and because it will be dissolved in rainwater in a few years. He found out that it will be necessary to send 10 telegrams a year of chalk into space in order to undo the effects of the CO2 caused by humans which is equivalent to the debit of a hose pumping water.

We agree with Danny Hillis. We think that geoengineering can be a good idea and that it must be exploited in the future. But Naomi Klein also has good arguments, we are not sure it will be 100% safe, maybe it will have unknown side effects. So more research must be done in order to know if geoengineering can be a solution to reduce the temperature.

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Ryan CASSISI's avatar

In both videos, the presenters are giving their opinions about geoengineering. They have divergent points of view. Geoengineering consists in reflecting some of the sun’s rays back to space by shooting particles in the atmosphere in order to cool the planet.

On the one hand, Naomi Klein is strongly against the use of this technology. According to her, the current projects are not reliable solutions to cope with global warming. Indeed, solving pollution issues with more pollution is not a solution. Moreover, scientists have no idea of the side effects that this technology could unleash, nevertheless geoengineering appears more often in the headlines as an escape hatch.

On the other hand, Danny Hillis tries to clear up some of the misunderstandings about geoengineering. He specifies geoengineering consists in creating artificial clouds, which we already do for instance with plane flights. The creation of these artificial clouds necessitates putting chalk up in the atmosphere. As stated by Danny Hillis, chalk is one of the most common minerals on earth in addition to being safe. Shooting 10 teragrams of chalk up in the atmosphere per year is all it requires to undo the effects CO2 has caused to the earth temperature.

In my opinion, geoengineering should be more explored because it could possibly be a solution to reduce the increasing temperature of the planet or at least be a time saver so more of the population can adapt their lifestyles to pollute less.

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