Human Engineering And Climate Change Essay

So far, conventional solutions to global warming — new government policies and changes in individual behaviour — haven't delivered. And more radical options, such as pumping sulphur into the atmosphere to counteract warming, pose a great deal of risk.

There may be another route to avoid the potentially disastrous effects of climate change: We can deliberately alter ourselves, three researchers suggest.

Human engineering, as they call it, poses less danger than altering our planet through geo-engineering, and it could augment changes to personal behaviour or policies to mitigate climate change, they write in an article to be published in the journal Ethics, Policy and the Environment.

"We are serious philosophers, but we might not be entirely

If something goes wrong, I might get a lawsuit, but it is a localized problem. How do you test geo engineering?" Sandberg said. "How many Earths do we have to test on?"

What's more, a change that benefits one country may hurt another, he said.

Changing ourselves

The concept of human engineering isn't new. Sandberg studies the ethics of human enhancement, or "all the tools we have to mess with ourselves to improve our performance," as he puts it. "A lot of them are quite controversial, except the ones we don't recognize," he told Live Science.

Someone will tell you, "'I think it's horrible people take pills to become smarter,' but they are saying it over coffee," he said alluding to the alertness-enhancing effects of caffeine in the coffee. Supplementing salt with iodine is credited with preventing brain damage in infants, and as a result, boosting intelligence around the world.

Fluoride is put into water systems to protect our teeth, and we receive vaccines to protect against disease. Both measures — just like human engineering measures that could address climate change — carry risk, but they have been widely adopted, Sandberg and his colleagues point