Science panel: Consider air cooling tech as climate back-up

“It is not so much playing with fire as it is researching fire, so that we understand it well enough to deploy, if necessary,″ said Waleed Abdalati, a former NASA chief scientist who was on the 2015 panel. “Sometimes you have to examine very risky options when the stakes are as high as they are with climate change.”

This is the main point, we already know climate change will have extremely serious consequences in the near future, but still many people keep prioritizing economic profits over scientific facts. At some point this will no longer be possible and if it this point comes too late people will be demanding urgent drastic measures.

Even if at the end the only results of these research projects is to find out that the options examined are too risky to be put in order that itself would be a huge improvement, we would already have the knowledge to reject rushed out plans that would be counterproductive, and hopefully have still something left that is safe to do.

There are serious moral and geopolitical hazards in any geoengeneering effort. It would require consent from every country in the world; good luck with getting that!

Agree with virusrex we simply do not know if any of these proposed interventions will work and if so what consequences ensue, so research is called for but it is not for any one country to unilaterally action this.

Wait for a volcanic eruption or two to spread enough ash in the atmosphere to provide natural cooling. Imagine going through all this geoengineering to reduce the sunlight for a lengthy period of time, we slap each other on the backs in congratulations, and THEN the volcanic eruptions occur. Together they will create a new ice age and mass devastation around the planet.

If Xi Jinping keeps angering all and sundry at his current brisk clip we might have to be more concerned about a nuclear winter.

Very smart...not The same people who fought against the ozone hole , where a lot of non-returning heat can be let out into outer space, now complain that it is becoming too hot (with a more closed ozone layer that of course now reflects all the heat back to our surface). You know what? You have at first to decide what you really want, because every force has an anti-force and every decreasing of one risk increases one or more other risks. The best thing would probably be, as it is for example common sense in IT, not to touch at all a working system. Your wild and crazy tuning here and there and back and forth sets us all obviously at too high risks.

the ozone hole , where a lot of non-returning heat can be let out into outer space

....except that isn’t how it works. The ozone layer keeps out ultraviolet rays which add to global warming; Closing the ozone hole helps combat global warming.

Very smart...not The same people who fought against the ozone hole , where a lot of non-returning heat can be let out into outer space, now complain that it is becoming too hot (with a more closed ozone layer that of course now reflects all the heat back to our surface). You know what? You have at first to decide what you really want, because every force has an anti-force and every decreasing of one risk increases one or more other risks. The best thing would probably be, as it is for example common sense in IT, not to touch at all a working system. Your wild and crazy tuning here and there and back and forth sets us all obviously at too high risks.

Your comment isn't even remotely logical. Global warming and the ozone hole are the result of the same problem, man's pollution of the Earth. Without the stratospheric ozone layer filtering out the Sun's UV radiation life on Earth is not possible. There is growing evidence that CFCs are not the only source of ozone depletion in the atmosphere as methane and chlorine play a role in the creation of the winter holes in the stratospheric ozone layer at the poles. In any event the cooling effect you mention is negligible, on the order of 2% additional heat release from the atmosphere. Science, not speculation.