With global temperature records broken for months on end, and the severity of extreme weather events routinely attributed to climate change, you might think any technological developments with the potential to stop global warming would be welcomed the world over.

But the pursuit of geoengineering – attempts to modify the climate for the purposes of reversing climate change – is a hugely divisive issue. So divisive, that we’ve decided to explore the debate on geoengineering in two episodes of The Conversation Weekly podcast.

In this first episode, we talk to scientists working on different potential geoengineering technologies who argue the case for researching these interventions. In our second episode, we speak to researchers mounting a campaign against a particular type of geoengineering called solar radiation management.

For Hugh Hunt, geoengineering is a “band aid, this thing we need to do to buy us time”. Hunt is deputy director at the Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge in the UK, led by his colleague Shuan Fitzgerald. They’re leading a team of scientists exploring potential engineering strategies to reduce global warming.

In arguing the case for climate repair, Hunt points to a graph first set out by scientist John Shepherd in 2010. Now referred to simply as the “napkin diagram”, it suggests that aggressive emission reductions,........

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