That the human race has had an effect on this planet is beyond contestation. We have been altering our landscape to our needs since ancient times.
Any history book will tell you about the annual flooding of the Nile in Ancient Egypt where farmers carefully controlled the river waters inundating their land or the building of the Grand Canal in China linking the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, which was built in the sixth century.
Ancient mine sites in Spain, aqueducts in Italy, and irrigation systems in Iraq have all had significant impacts on the surrounding countryside. In more modern times, the dams we build on rivers flooding whole valleys and significantly impact regional climates are further testimony to our ability to change the planet.
Consider the Colorado River, which is so heavily utilized it no longer empties into the Gulf of California. In effect, human engineering has turned the river into a swiftly moving lake - albeit a very long and skinny one.
We have also built canal systems to move goods, which have allowed invasive species of fish and other aquatic organisms into the Great Lakes. Our roads and highways have broken up natural habitats around the world.
All of this engineering has been necessary for the sustenance of our species.
The conversion of forests to farmland is required to grow crops but it also changes water patterns, hydrological cycles and localized climate. Many of these activities have had unanticipated consequences, sometimes with devastating results.
But on the whole, our ability to alter the planet around us and have it meet our needs has allowed the human population to blossom to its present 7.2 billion people. For the most part, people around the world have access to clean water and good food.
So it is perhaps not surprising to find a number of scientists over the years have proposed solving some of our larger problems with geo-engineering or climate engineering. In modern terms, this is "the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth's climate, in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming" according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
As the above impacts of the human species on the environment will attest, humans have engaged in large-scale manipulation for much of our existence. We are now thinking about how to manipulate environmental processes in a deliberate fashion to produce a particular effect - decreasing the impact of climate change.
This is not actually new as ideas go. As early as the 1840s, James Pollard Espy suggested creating artificial volcanoes in the Appalachian Mountains which would lead to rainfall along the eastern seaboard of the United States and a cooler climate.
In the 1890s, Svante Arrhenius recognized the consequences of the combustion of carbon and suggested alternatives to try to mitigate a greenhouse effect. In the 1960s, Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir tried using a combination of silver iodide, potassium iodide and dry ice to seed clouds to bring greater precipitation and snow to the mountains of California.
Most recently, a British Columbia company dumped iron into the ocean in an attempt to increase algae production.
Many of these geo-engineering projects are outlandish and can have unintended consequences. For example, if the water content of the atmosphere is released in California then interior states could suffer from drought conditions.
This past week, researchers at the University of Arizona have proposed building 10 million independent pumps which would be floated in the Arctic Ocean to enhance ice formation. The idea, according to physicist Steven Desch, is to create buoys with a wind turbine which would float in the open water in the summer but when winter comes, they would be trapped in the ice.
There they would draw water from 1.5 metres below the surface and spray it on the ice. The scientists have calculated this could result in an increase in the thickness of the ice pack by as much as a metre.
The sea ice would take longer to melt in the summer and might help stabilize the planet's climate.
Of course, sea water contains salt and arctic sea ice doesn't. The freezing process would result in the creation of particularly concentrated brine which would inhibit ice formation and that doesn't seem to have been taken into account in the idea.
Unintended consequences have a nasty habit of slaying ideas.
But the big problem with these sorts of suggestions is the price tag. At $500 billion it sounds preposterously expensive and lends credence to the idea that addressing climate change is not fiscally feasible. Most geo-engineering solutions follow the same pattern.
The answer to the issue of climate change can't be more massive alterations to our planet. It has to lie in doing a better job of controlling the emissions from our daily lives.
We need to learn to do more with less if we are going to stop altering the planet.
