It was while working at NASA that Professor James Lovelock devised the theory of Gaia, which views the Earth as a self regulating organism. This organism, consisting of the Earth's atmosphere, oceans and biosphere naturally maintains our climate and general biochemical conditions in a preferred homeostasis, or balance. Unhindered, oxygen and methane remain at stable levels in the atmosphere. Sea life produces iodine and sulphur in just the right quantity required by land animals. It is a global equilibrium resulting from a natural symbiosis.

With the arrival of mankind's industrial revolution and its resultant pollution, that equilibrium has been shattered. Gaia has an illness, Global Warming, and the most recent symptom of that illness is Climate Change. Like overstretched physicians treating a disease, some scientists are no longer seeking to cure the cause, but merely triage the symptoms.

Papers published recently in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society suggest that modifying the Earth's environment and climate may be necessary in order to adapt to the consequences of Global Warming. The suggestions made by the papers authors are wide ranging and radical, to say the least. One of the proposals is to seed the atmosphere to increase the formation of certain types of clouds that would then act like giant mirrors in the sky, reflecting solar energy back out into space. Another potential solution, according to the authors, is to chemically alter the oceans, possibly by adding iron, to increase their ability to absorb carbon dioxide.

This isn't the first time that deliberate artificial manipulation of the Earth's environment has been suggested. As Time Magazine reported in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen examined the possibility of deploying large amounts of sulphurous compounds into the atmosphere to create an artificial haze that could potentially cool the planet. Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institute for Science created climate models that suggested that such an endeavour might have the desired effect at a cost of billions of dollars and untold damage in pollution. However, even with the risks of such dubious schemes Caldeira says that: "Over the past couple of years, it's gone from an outsider thing to something that is increasingly discussed."

Further warnings came from the authors of this latest report. They admonish that there is absolutely no guarantee that any of these extraordinary schemes will produce the desired effects and that geo-engineering needs to be properly examined and assessed to make sure that it does not cause more problems than it solves.

Professor Lovelock went a step further, likening geo-engineering to 19th-century medicine as a tool that might sometimes work, but was generally too primitive to prevent disaster. "Whether or not we use ... geo-engineering, the planet is likely, massively and cruelly, to cull us, in the same merciless way we have eliminated so many species by changing their environment into one where survival is difficult," he says.

He points to the example of introducing aerosols into the atmosphere in an attempt to produce a cooling effect. "Even if it succeeds it would not be long before we face the additional problem of ocean acidification. This would need another medicine and so on ... Whatever we do is likely to lead to death on a scale that makes all previous wars, famines and disasters small ..."

All-be-it unintentionally, haven't we already started to geo-engineer the Earth through the on-going extraction of fossil fuels? Haven't we seen at first hand how difficult it is to control the results of such large scale meddling. Scientists seem to agree that whatever we do at this point there is likely to be massive change. We're seeing that change right now. While it's still in our power to cure the cause of the disease that is Global Warming shouldn't we try?

"Before we start geo-engineering, we have to raise the following question: are we sufficiently talented to take on what might become the onerous permanent task of keeping the Earth in homeostasis?"

"We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not it's malady"

- Professor James Lovelock

Further Reading:

• Is it a Bird, Is It a Plane...? Combatting Drought through Cloud Seeding
• Geo-Engineering - A Moral Hazard
• Geo-Engineering: Basic Principles, Some Thoughts, Some Questions
• Chemtrails: a Potential Disaster Used to Mitigate an Existing Disaster?
• Ocean Acidification Part II: Tipping a Planet Already in Peril
• Ocean Acidification Part 1: What's Happening to our Oceans and Why
• CO2 Pushed Deeper Into Oceans Than Previously Thought