Kravitz has been researching climate engineering, also called geoengineering, since 2008, and his course will address climate models, climate engineering theory and methods, as well as broader social implications like climate ethics and justice.

He’s blunt when it comes to what geoengineering is and why it’s being considered.

“Climate change is happening. It’s looking pretty bad, and we’re not doing enough quickly enough to prevent it. And so people have looked at the problem and thought, ‘Are there ways that we could deliberately modify the climate to keep temperatures down, to keep down some of the worst effects of climate change while we get our act together and do something more permanent about the climate change problem?’ Broadly speaking those technologies are called geoengineering.”

There are multiple strategies and technologies that fall into this broad category, says Kravitz. Some are ideas inspired by natural processes while others are purely human in origin. One strategy proposed by climate scientists aims to mimic the effects of an atmosphere after a volcanic eruption, an event that ejects large amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere. The sulfur combines with water to form droplets called aerosols that reflect solar radiation, thus cooling the earth.

It would be an understatement to call climate engineering a controversial topic. As pressing a problem as climate change is, to what lengths is it ethical to tamper with nature in order to solve or mitigate climate catastrophe?

Kravitz is no stranger to the debates that exist within and outside of the scientific community on this topic. “I went to a conference in 2017 where the opening talk was a lecture on Prometheus – playing God. This is big stuff. We’re talking about modifying the world for everybody. How do you talk about informed consent in that case? There are going to be winners and losers – what do you do about the losers? The geopolitics of it are very interesting.”

“A lot of the conferences that I go to are interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary because [climate change] is a broad, human-scale problem. I’m friends with political scientists, psychologists, economists, all working on this one topic but from different perspectives. Seeing how all of that intersects has been fascinating.”

This area of study will only expand as scientists, economists, psychologists, and many others, put their heads to the problem of our rapidly heating planet.

Story by Devyn Blandford