As humanity fiddles while the Earth burns, we're giving ourselves fewer options for dealing with the problem of global climate change. We need a way to buy some time and that may mean geoengineering.

In general, geoengineering involves tinkering with our planet's natural systems to achieve a desired effect. With climate change, the goal is to offset the warming caused by greenhouse gases.

The knowledgeable nerds at Popular Mechanics have compiled a list of the front-runner technologies technologies.

• Pumping sulfur into the atmosphere to block solar radiation
  
• Using orbiting space mirrors to reflect sunlight
• Mixing more iron into our oceans' diet to spur the growth of carbon-munching phytoplankton
• Building ships that make white and fluffy sun-bouncing clouds
• Planting "artificial trees" designed to suck up and store carbon

Although space mirrors sound the most awesome, you would need an estimated trillion of them to do the job, not to mention the $400 trillion bankroll to get the project off the ground. Constructing fake trees seems a little silly when rehabing our (real) depleted forests could presumably accomplish much of the same aims.

Out of the available options, only iron-seeding the oceans could be currently implemented on the scale needed to nudge earth's chemistry. Given the heavy time and money costs involved in each of these approaches, it might make more sense to invest in green energy technologies that are available and scalable.

We should also remember that warming the planet took armies of cars and power plants and that the unintended consequences of those technologies are the very reason we are considering such extreme fixes.

Image: Popular Mechanics