Posts in Geoengineering

As (bad) luck would have it, I sat in a North American airport on my birthday, trying unsuccessfully to get to South America, and reading a copy of USA Today. Perusing its pages from back to front, I encountered an editorial on page 11A calling for greater reliance on instant replay technology in baseball and then found a story on page 2A about cloud whitening.
Even if we permanently shut down the oil wells in the Gulf and put a cap on carbon, do we know how to move forward in constructing a sustainable energy future?
David Morrow, Robert Kopp, and Michael Oppenheimer, in Environmental Research Letters, have called for establishing an International Climate Engineering Research Review Board – an IRB for efforts to engineer the planet. I concur.
I worry a great deal about the uncertainty and risks associated with geoengineering. But here I want to focus on something else: the faulty framing of the problem from the outset.
Geoengineering is the latest controversial science to show up at Asilomar – a conference site now famous for hosting the first meeting of biologists calling for self-regulation of recombinant DNA experiments in the 1970s. At a meeting in late March, 2010, scientists exploring geoengineering will seek common ground on standards for proper conduct of experiments with the Earth’s climate system.

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