Ken -- Excellent post. The British Friends of the Earth statement includes the sensible line: “For the solar radiation techniques solar shades remains the stuff of children’s sci-fi films.”
Geoengineering is giving itself a bad name by appearing overly enthusiastic about "Edward Teller" type ideas [Remember Teller -- the 'father of the H-bomb', and proposer of many schemes to use nuclear devices for such purposes as extracting natural gas from tight formations, building a new 'Panama Canal' and building a deep water port in the far northwestern part of Alaska. The last of these lead to Inuit (Native Alaskan) self-protective reactions with consequences that last to this day. The long-term side-effects ended up being larger than the proposed main effect]. The Sierra Club surely counts itself among organizations supporting well-understood activities that sequester carbon (e.g. forests) or change the albedo constructively (e.g. white roofs), and supporting sensible research (e.g. on CCS). This focus is implicit in the name or our main program: Climate Recovery Partnership (http:// www.sierraclub.org/crp/) Research on concepts that will lead to increased ocean acidification might be acceptable if married to technologies to offset those effects. While "Everything is connected to everything else" is almost tautologically true, connections are often small enough that they can be ignored. With many geoengineering proposals -- not so. If the geoengineering community hopes to bring on board environmental groups, it will need good answers to the kinds of questions implied by the above. There's some good thinking in the as yet small geoengineering literature on raising this kind of question. There's as yet a dearth of compelling responses. Paul Craig Sierra Club -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
