Recently the New York Times reviewed four books, three recently published and one about to be published, that deal with geoengineering–the purposeful application of engineering techniques to alter planet Earth. A major goal of geoengineering is to offset climate change resulting from global warming. All four books conclude that there are great dangers in experiments of the magnitude that geoengineering requires and that there is no way to do safe experiments on a smaller, isolated system and then scale up. The reviewer adds that amid all of the discussion of what geoengineering experiments might be carried out, there is little or no discussion of who would decide whether to use geoengineering techniques and, if so, which to use.

All the while we continue a major geoengineering experiment–that of adding carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases to Earth’s atmosphere at an ever increasing rate. The countries of the world have not seemed able to agree on how to handle this current geoengineering experiment, so what makes us think they could handle other geoengineering designed to abate this one?