As global challenges go, significantly reducing the amount of harmful greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans is most certainly among the most daunting. Those gases, especially carbon dioxide, to a large degree are leading to increasingly threatening climate changes, including global warming.
Experts warn the combined effects of these changes will have detrimental impacts on the planet’s environmental health and habitability, leading to hardships for much of the world’s population. But some of the actions needed to prevent those dire circumstances would mean upending many conventional practices in economics, commerce and industry, as well as running against the grain of strongly held political and cultural viewpoints.
One approach science and engineering organizations are using to calm consternation about such societal disruptions is to focus on achieving the technological advances needed to prevent climatological chaos.