Planet climate engineering is a topic that draws more and more attention as of late, since the environment seems to be marching on an abrupt downward road, and none of the highly-praised latest eco-repairing solutions seems to actually change anything for the better. A lot of pollution combatants have emerged on the climate stage in the last years, promising to deal with carbon dioxide emissions, ocean pollution, energy consumption and alternatives, non-recycling, animals and plants extinction, deforestation and the like, but seriously, have you noticed any change?

A last week's meeting saw a team of 40 engineers and scientists address exactly the same issue and searching for a valid and viable solution to all this mess. The group included the winner of a Nobel prize, the chemist Paul Crutzen, who came up with the last-resort idea of spreading sulphate particles in the higher parts of the atmosphere in order to reflect a large part of the Sun's light, which would help the Earth cool down a bit. While not causing any harm to the planet, it would also prevent the environmental decline from reaching an irreversible negative stage.

Both technical and ethical aspects and consequences were discussed. But, even with the risk of something going wrong, all the proposed approaches are calculated not to do more harm than good, and certainly not more damage than it has already been done. Definitely, humankind needs to have such last-resort techniques up its sleeve, ready and available in case something goes terribly wrong with any of the climate changing factors. Yet, while there are plenty of theoretically applicable solutions to the environmental problems, a legal global authority that would have the right to enact them still remains to be designated. The congregation of scientists and engineers attending the workshop held at Wildbad-Kreuth, in the Bavarian Alps, eventually concluded on the necessity of a “rigorous assessment and authorisation by an international governance institution,” a worldwide protocol with representatives from most countries, which would be rightfully empowered to send particle mirrors high in the atmosphere or fertilize ocean algae in order to get rid of all the carbon dioxide.