Geoengineering considered (again)

The Economist has a good article on some new-ish ideas for geo-engineering the climate.

Of course, at this stage, whether any of them would really work well enough, and with acceptable side effects, is anyone’s guess.  I suppose, however, that I cautiously adopt the article’s view, and agree that some experimentation may as well be tried now:

Polluting the stratosphere. Liming the oceans. Locking Greenland’s glaciers to its icy mountains. It is easy to see why sceptics balk at geoengineering. And if viewed as a substitute for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, a cover for business-as-usual into the indefinite future, then it might indeed prove a Faustian bargain. But that is probably the wrong way of looking at it. Better to use it as a means of smoothing the path to a low-carbon world. Most of the researchers working in the area of stratospheric hazing, for example, think that its best use might be reducing the peak temperatures the Earth would otherwise face at a time in the future when greenhouse-gas emissions have started falling but atmospheric levels are still going up.