As a follow-up to my thread about Nuclear power, here is one of Geoengineering. I subscribe to Wired and this was in this months issue.

Here is the first internet page of the article.

quote:

Can a Million Tons of Sulfur Dioxide Combat Climate Change? By Chris Mooney It was one of the largest public demonstrations in US history. On June 12, 1982, an estimated 750,000 protesters thronged Central Park in New York City, chanting "No nukes!" and bearing signs reading "Reagan is a bomb — both should be banned" and "Arms are for embracing." Some demonstrators called for unilateral US disarmament, others for renewing arms control talks with the Soviet Union. It was a diverse coalition that had been pulled together by Ken Caldeira, a 25-year-old activist and computer geek. Back then he was paying the rent doing software consulting on Wall Street, but his passion for the environment would eventually lead him to become one of the nation's leading experts on global warming. Around the same time, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco, Lowell Wood — then 41 and a protégé of the brilliant and controversial hydrogen bomb inventor Edward Teller — was leading a secretive team of young geniuses called the O Group. They weren't merely working with the nukes that Caldeira and his fellow peaceniks reviled; they were dreaming up new and expanded uses for them. One plan called for channeling the energy of a hydrogen bomb into laser blasts that could theoretically destroy enemy ballistic missiles from outer space. It sounded crazy, but Wood and Teller's ideas inspired President Reagan's famous March 23, 1983, "Star Wars" speech introducing the Strategic Defense Initiative, the bane of arms-control advocates everywhere. What's surprising, then, is that today, 25 years later, Caldeira, the left-wing environmentalist, calls Wood, the Cold Warrior and Star Wars proselytizer, "one of my best friends." Recently, they have collaborated on strategies for a process known as geoengineering: the large-scale, deliberate modification of the planet to counteract the consequences of ever-increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gas. The global climate crisis has made for strange bedfellows, and Caldeira's passage from devout environmentalist to would-be geoengineer has led him into a partnership that his younger self would have scorned. Geoengineering schemes sound like they're pulled straight from pulp sci-fi novels: Fertilize the oceans with iron in order to sequester carbon dioxide; launch fleets of ships to whip up sea spray and enhance the solar reflectivity of marine stratocumulus clouds; use trillions of tiny spacecraft to form a sunshade a million miles from Earth in perfect solar orbit. They all may seem impractical, but among a small but growing set of climate scientists, one idea that Wood and Teller started pushing in the late 1990s (before Teller's death in 2003) is gaining acceptance: Inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect a portion of the sun's rays back into space, thus cooling the planet. Ken Caldeira is a self-described blabbermouth with disheveled curly hair and a habit of modestly turning his voice up at the end of sentences so even his most definitive utterances sound like questions. On a recent morning in his Carnegie Institution office on the Stanford campus, he's dressed casually in a sweater and jeans, eagerly examining results from a new climate model run that was designed to explore possible consequences of geoengineering. As Caldeira tinkers with the software, he jokes that his talent with computers basically ensured that he would spend more time in an office than out leading research expeditions. A career in science, he says, "was all a ploy for me to get into the rain forests. But it never really worked." Caldeira's transit from antinuke activist to climate scientist grew out of his fondness for ecotourism. During the '80s, he joined occasional research expeditions into the Mexican rain forest; he pitched in by writing software to help researchers map out species distributions. Caldeira loved the trips, but he soon realized that to get himself beneath the canopy more regularly, he'd need a PhD. So he took night classes at New York University under Martin Hoffert, a physicist best known today for his skepticism about how quickly cleaner energy sources can actually replace dirty fossil fuels. In 1990, a year short of his doctorate, Caldeira went to Leningrad to study with Russian climate scientist Mikhail Budyko, one of the first champions of geoengineering. In the 1970s, Budyko had suggested an early version of the basic Teller-Wood idea — decrease the global temperature by shooting sunlight-scattering particles into the stratosphere. While he was in Leningrad, Caldeira's philosophical outlook still predisposed him to distrust such interventions, but years later that would change. In 1993, the former peace activist accepted a research post at that haven of bombmakers, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Caldeira was running high-powered computer models to study the climate, but when he was offered a security clearance that would have allowed fuller access to the lab's resources, he tried to stay true to his old principles by declining. As a result, he didn't see much of Wood. "There's an outer fence at Livermore, and then there's an inner fence," Caldeira says. "Lowell worked inside the fence." The two got to know each other in 1998, just after the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, at a conference in Aspen, Colorado. The topic was strategies for stabilizing the climate system, and Wood had been invited to speak about his work with Teller on geoengineering.

Source

c0r summary: Geoengineering allows us to take certain actions to reverse or slow global warming, among a host of other things.

What are your thoughts? What do you know about it?

I am admittedly quite ignorant of this, as I had never heard the word, although the concept itself is not new to me.

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