The plan to engineer a shorter, smaller human race to cope with climate change is almost as big and bold as the schemes of people working to convince themselves climate change won't affect them.

The plan, at this point still sketchy, has three engineers. S Matthew Liao is a professor of bioethics at New York University. Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache are fellows who study ethics at the University of Oxford. The trio launched their "be-littler" idea in a paper called "Human engineering and climate change", in 2012 in the journal Ethics, Policy and the Environment.

"This solution involves the biomedical modification of humans to make them better at mitigating climate change," they announced. They say this human engineering would be voluntary – "possibly supported by incentives such as tax breaks or sponsored healthcare."

The phrase "human engineering" has been in use for more than a century. But until now, it has meant designing or re-designing things to accommodate the way people already are. Liao, Sandberg and Roache reverse that definition. One of their proposed projects is to modify people, genetically or with drugs, so they "feel nauseous" if they eat meat, thus leading to a shrinkage of the meat industry (and its oh-by-the-way copious production of greenhouse gases.) Or, to make people smarter, which might induce them to produce fewer new people. Or, again, to modify people's minds, using drugs or other means, "to enhance our moral decisions by making us more altruistic and empathetic," in a way that would cause us to mitigate our climate-changing activities.

But their punchiest proposal is "making humans smaller". Their reasoning is simple: "Other things being equal, the larger one is, the more food and energy one requires". Bigger people also consume bigger amounts of energy indirectly, they say. Cars use more fuel to carry heavy passengers. Stout folk need more fabric to cover themselves. Weightier persons "wear out shoes, carpets, and furniture more quickly, and so on".

They explore whether it's best to reduce humans' average height, or weight, or both.

But, but, but... who in their right mind would choose to make their children smaller? Liao, Sandberg and Roache make a point of asking that question. Their answer? History is replete with examples of ideas which, while widely supported or even invaluable now, were ridiculed and dismissed... Pasteur's theory of germs... the telephone... heavier than air flying machines... computers.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prizes