| No one says in medicine, "You know, go in and take an all-or-nothing decision on someone's life," but they do say, "Let's try some stuff." If an experiment can be reversible, if it's plausible in the first place, if there's reason to think that it might work, we actually owe it to the future health of humanity to try at least some types of tests to see what could work. So, small tests to see whether, for example, seeding of something in the ocean might create, in a nonthreatening way, carbon sinks. Or maybe, rather than filling the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide, a smaller experiment that was not that big a deal to see whether, cost-effectively, you could reduce the temperature a little bit. Surely, that isn't completely crazy and is at least something we should be thinking about in case these other measures don't work? | |
| Well, there've already been such experiments to seed the ocean to see if that can increase the uptake of CO2. And the experiments were an unmitigated failure, as many predicted they would be. But that, again, is the kind of approach that's very different from putting tinfoil strips in the atmosphere orbiting the Earth. That was the way that solar geoengineering proposal started. Now they're focusing on chalk, so we have chalk dust all over everything. But more serious than that is the fact that it might not be reversible. | |
| But, Al, that's the rhetoric response. The amount of dust that you need to drop by a degree or two wouldn't result in chalk dust over everything. It would be unbelievably -- like, it would be less than the dust that people experience every day, anyway. I mean, I just. | |
| First of all, I don't know how you do a small experiment in the atmosphere. And secondly, if we were to take that approach, we would have to steadily increase the amount of whatever substance they decided. |