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Purely my (possibly terribly misinformed) opinion, but geo engineering (used here to mean the bundle of blue-sky proposals to manipulate the climate intentionally after we've completely screwed it up unintentionally) is a red herring and, at best, a high-risk hail-mary. It is a red herring: in discussing climate change, it is brought up primarily as a reason not to worry about doing anything now, we'll fix it in post. The sheer number of otherwise smart, educated people who blithely assume that attempting to modulate a huge chaotic system we don't fully understand and can't model is a tribute to optimism and not much else. Add to that the fact that we only have one atmosphere on which to practice, and, well, I'm not optimistic. And that is before we get in to the (alluded to by the parent post) public choice questions on an global scale, something that history demonstrates is, politely, extremely difficult, extremely slow, mostly toothless and prone to cheating. To pick one example, we, as a species, cannot agree that leaving explosive objects scattered around to randomly maim and kill is, on balance, a bad idea. If, in 100 or whatever years, the options are go extinct slowly or pump tons of reflective gas into the upper atmosphere and see what happens, well, I'd vote to go for broke, too. But that is all the "geo-engineering" approach is at this point. |
If we could agree on global-scale engineering projects to manipulate the climate, we'd probably be able to agree on reducing dependence on fossil fuels...