Nitrogen and Geoengineering

Abstract

Proposals for the deliberate manipulation of Earth’s climate to tackle human-induced global warming — popularly named ‘geoengineering’ — have grown in number as fast as the frustration over continually rising greenhouse gas emissions has intensified. Where the line between conventional climate change ‘mitigation’ and ‘geoengineering’ is drawn varies from study to study, but here we consider it to be any single strategy that could deliver an annual change in global climate forcing equivalent to removing more than one billion tonnes of carbon (1 Pg C) from the atmosphere. To put this one billion tonnes of carbon in context, it is equivalent to over 3.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide or about one-tenth of global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning each year.