摘要：Anthropogenic global warming is a growing environmental problem resulting from
unintentional human intervention in the global climate system. If employed as a response
strategy, geoengineering would represent an additional intentional human intervention in
the climate system, with the intent of decreasing net climate impacts. There is a rich and
fascinating history of human intervention in environmental systems, with many specific
examples from ecology of deliberate human intervention aimed at correcting or decreasing
the impact of previous unintentionally created problems. Additional interventions do not
always bring the intended results, and in many cases there is evidence that net
impacts have increased with the degree of human intervention. In this letter, we
report some of the examples in the scientific literature that have documented such
human interventions in environmental systems, which may serve as analogues to
geoengineering. We argue that a high degree of system understanding is required for
increased intervention to lead to decreased impacts. Given our current level of
understanding of the climate system, it is likely that the result of at least some
geoengineering efforts would follow previous ecological examples where increased human
intervention has led to an overall increase in negative environmental consequences.
