The Growing Case for Geoengineering

As climate change accelerates, a handful of scientists are eager to move ahead with experiments testing ways to counteract warming artificially. Their reasoning: we just might get desperate enough to use this technology one day

Let's hope we can avoid reaching a point where
 geoengineering becomes unavoidable.

David Mitchell pulls into the parking lot of the Desert Research Institute, an environmental science outpost of the University of Nevada, perched in the dry red hills above Reno. The campus stares over the tops of the downtown casinos into the snow-buried Pine Nut Mountains. On this morning, wispy cirrus clouds draw long lines above the range.

Mitchell, a lanky, soft-spoken atmospheric physicist, believes these frigid clouds in the upper troposphere may offer one of our best fallback plans for combating climate change. The tiny ice crystals in cirrus clouds cast thermal radiation back against the surface of the earth, trapping heat like a blanket—or, more to the point, like carbon dioxide. But Mitchell, an associate research professor at the institute, thinks there might be a way to counteract the effects of these clouds.

Read the MIT Technology Review story by James Temple - “The Growing Case for Geoengineering.”

(It looks far from promising at present, but surely humanity will exhibit sufficient sense to avoid the need for geoengineering - Robert McLean)