Global warming is largely caused by rising amounts of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere.

Many scientists and engineers think we could continue to have industrial growth by countering the effects of these greenhouse gases through man-made processes — so-called “geoengineering”.

For example, the Pinatubo Option mimics the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which released sulphur and cooled the Earth.

The geoengineering proposal would send up 5.3 million tonnes of sulphur per year by plane, so as to fully compensate for the expected 21st-century warming, at a cost of $50bn per year. This is just one of the ideas discussed in Hack The Planet (Wiley, £17.99), in which Eli Kintisch casts a critical eye over the array of schemes and asks how risky they are and if they will work. Some are wacky and belong in sci-fi, but scientists alarmed at global warming and potential catastrophe are considering all possibilities.

In addition, Kintish outlines four possibilities for catastrophically quick climate change — the slowing of the global ocean conveyor belt; the collapse of the ice sheets; extreme drought; and a sudden massive methane release.

I particularly liked the pages printed with a sombre grey background, interspersed between the chapters, which describe examples of where mankind has interfered with Nature, trying to solve a problem, only to find that the situation had been made worse. Each one is a timely reminder of our fallibility.

The gall fly was introduced in the American West to reduce invasive spotted knapweed, but deer mice ate the gall fly larvae over winter when they normally died off due to a lack of food, so there was a plague of deer mice and with them an increase in disease. As one of the scientists working on that project said: “We don’t know what we’re doing when we mess up natural systems.” However, although we might get it wrong, doing nothing is not an option, because mankind just might not feature in Gaia’s own solution.