Scientists are debating whether iron fertilisation can lock carbon into the deep ocean over the long term, and have raised concerns that it can irreparably harm ocean ecosystems, produce toxic tides and lifeless waters, and worsen ocean acidification and global warming.

The Saami Council’s opposition stems from a belief that geoengineering is the wrong way to approach climate change. “The way of thinking that humans are entitled to change and manipulate our surroundings has actually brought us into the climate crisis in the first place,” Larsson Blind said.

IT DOESN’T WORK: None of the technologies have a track record, all of them come with major risks and unknowns, and in some cases the effects would be obviously catastrophic.

WEAPONIZATION: Computer models show that geoengineering interventions can have regional winners and losers; to the extent that geoengineering successfully changes climate patterns in a predictable way, it will inevitably be weaponized.

DETRACTS FROM REAL SOLUTIONS: By promising a quick fix, geoengineering threatens to delay the implementation of a transition away from fossil fuels, and could redirect funding and investments away from real climate solutions. Some geoengineering proposals require vast amounts of energy, which means less climate-friendly energy for everyone else.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND BIODIVERSITY: Many geoengineering proposals require the intensive exploitation of vast amounts of land (in the case of BECCS, twice the size of India!). Those projects would inevitably displace millions of people and potentially wipe out entire ecosystems.

So you see, I’m not quite sanguine about our ability to engineer solutions to the many-headed hydra of a problem that is biophysical breakdown on this planet. Humans barely understand how nature works in many fundamental ways, including our own biology. We can’t engineer what we can’t understand. We probably can’t engineer biological systems at all. No, I have more confidence in nature fixing itself than in humans fixing nature.