I suspect that the majority of supporters of geoengineering research share most, or all, of Hamilton's concerns, but interest in geoengineering (and SRM in particular) is a marker of despair at the current situation despite sharing those concerns. It's the first landing place for environmentalists who have absorbed the failure in current policies devoted entirely to emissions reduction. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to try; perhaps it is attractive precisely because it seems so much like a bargain with the devil, ie 'who else could get us out of this?'. Let's avoid stacking the deck and set aside extreme worst-case scenarios in which *anyone *would be willing to try *anything. *How do you define 'bad enough to try it'? Critics are free to insist that they are still a long way from that point, but it would be useful to know their definitions of 'bad enough'.
The flip side of that coin is to define a plausible alternative. Radically redesigning the world's economic and political behavior does not qualify. One could dress that up in fancy language about a eusocial species with behaviors that might be co-opted but cannot be contradicted, or one could just point to the history of Marxism and ask how that worked out for them. However you describe it, the institutions that made the global warming problem will be the ones that solve it, if it is solved at all, because there are no others. So if we must not even study geoengineering, what should we actually *do*? Absent a convincing answer, to paraphrase Trotsky, 'You may not be interested in geoengineering, but geoengineering is interested in you*'.* On Wednesday, April 10, 2013 3:52:08 PM UTC-6, andrewjlockley wrote: > > > http://www.nature.com/news/no-we-should-not-just-at-least-do-the-research-1.12777 > > NATURE | COLUMN: WORLD VIEW > > No, we should not just ‘at least do the research’ > > The idea of applying geoengineering research to mitigate climate change > has not been thought through, argues Clive Hamilton. > 10 April 2013 > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
