Can We Fix It?

Hello,

Welcome to my first blog.

I begin this blog during the aftermath of the 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report’s release. The message of this report is clear – anthropogenic forces have caused much of the global warming that the Earth’s climate has experienced over the last century. Any gases emitted now will contribute to further warming. Limiting climate change is therefore an urgent matter and will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 2013).

The report has been described as the ‘most authoritative, credible analysis of climate change science ever’ (Davey, 2013) there are still people who remain skeptical of the issue of climate change never mind the urgency for change. I have to confess that before beginning my undergraduate Geography degree at University College London (UCL) I myself was a little skeptical about Climate Change however over the course of the past three years the realness and seriousness of the issue has become clear.

Armed with a better knowledge of the climate, I now understand and believe that something, well quite a number of things, need to be done to address climate change and fast. However, there are a multitude of the solutions, opinions and arguments that are put forward as the best way to take action and so it is hard to know where to start.

Two approaches, or proposed solutions, that have intrigued me are geo-engineering and renewable energy. I think that if we could find a way to fix climate change with the methods posed under those umbrella terms then we’d be on a winning path.

My interest in these options as providing a solution to climate change brought me to decide upon writing a blog about renewable energy and geo-engineering as a possible way to fix climate change. The question of 'Can we fix it?' is usually posed to the children’s cartoon character Bob The Builder, but (thankfully) in the case of this blog I ask this question in reference to climate change. 

Source: Telegraph

Over the course of the next few months I want to find out whether geo-engineering or renewable energy provide solutions to the issue of climate change.

In this blog, I will firstly explore the issue at hand - global environmental change. Following from this, I will explore the different methods proposed by geo-engineering and renewable energy. I intend to explore whether any of them are viable, examining their risks and questioning whether they provide the energy we need to sustain. Ultimately, I seek to find out whether they provide a viable option in addressing global environmental change now and in the future.

Thanks for reading, enjoy!

Millie