From a scientific view, it is undeniable that global temperatures are rising in a way which will have massive impacts on our future environment. There are many technological-fixes which could be developed and employed as a way to slow or reverse the warming temperatures—for example, the development of a device which removes carbon emissions from the air—but as this class has covered extensively, there are major implications to technological-fixes which keeps them from being an ideal solution. Most prominently is the fact that they create an illusion of a solution while the real problem continues; if we pour our resources into creating a technological-fix for climate change, there will be no focus on stopping the actual, social causes which have gotten us to this point. This is not to say we shouldn’t try developing any sort of technological fix, particularly a socio-technological fix, because some progress is infinitely better than ignoring the issue altogether.
Climate science is nowhere near its infancy. As Michael Reidy highlighted in his article, the evidence has been present since the 1800s, heavily researched by John Tyndall, including his published findings that “any changes to the constitution of the atmosphere ‘would produce great effects on the terrestrial rays and produce corresponding changes of climate’” (Reidy, p. 13). Though Tyndall’s work was lost for much of history, its presence proves that climate change is not a new discovery. Even if it was, the reports which are being made today hold enough validity that climate science is not only reliable, but crucial to our future.