A quick-fix solution to global warming, through engineering a cooler climate, is appealing - but dangerous. Here's why."
Fault lines already are developing on a wasp's nest of technical, economic, and political questions.
A climate engineering analysis published this month by a University of Texas engineering professor and an American Enterprise Institute researcher concludes that all of the 21st century's projected global warming ... that's right, all of it ... could be offset by spending a mere $9 billion on ships that spray seawater mist into the atmosphere in order to thicken clouds that would redirect sunlight back to space.
Bjorn Lomborg, the skeptical environmentalist, says the idea sounds like the cat's pajamas and never mind the worry warts who in his view have "overstated" the risks of climate engineering.
Not buying it is Roger Pielke, Jr., a University of Colorado environmental studies professor and a bit of an iconoclast who regularly annoys liberal greens and fellow climate researchers.
Pielke argues that the sea mist spraying proposal "is not well grounded in a realistic set of assumptions about how the global earth system actually works." Not enough is known about climate engineering to come up with cost-benefit analyses at this time that would be worth the paper they're printed on.
There is a thicket of vexing issues that cannot be waved away. "The consequences of reflecting sunlight would almost certainly not be the same for all nations and peoples, thus raising legal, ethical, diplomatic, and national security concerns," the American Meteorological Society said in a cautious geo-engineering policy statement published July 12.
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