Six ways we’re already geo-engineering Earth
By Brandon Keim Email Author
March 23, 2010 | 8:00 pm Scientists and policymakers are meeting this week to discuss whether geo-engineering to fight climate change can be safe in the future, but make no mistake about it: We’re already geo-engineering Earth on a massive scale. From diverting a third of Earth’s available fresh water to planting and grazing two-fifths of its land surface, humankind has fiddled with the knobs of the Holocene, that 10,000-year period of climate stability that birthed civilization. The consequences of our interventions into Earth’s geophysical processes are yet to be determined, but scientists say they’re so fundamental that the Holocene no longer exists. We now live in the Anthropocene, a geological age of mankind’s making. “Homo sapiens has emerged as a force of nature rivaling climatic and geologic forces,” wrote Earth scientists Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty in a 2008 Frontiers in Ecology paper, which featured their redrawn map of the human-influenced world. “Human forces may now outweigh these across most of Earth’s land surface today.” …
