http://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/100042/1/791917835.pdf
Conclusions Even though it is frequently said that the climate engineering strategy has yet to reach technical and institutional maturity and that it poses both many and extensive risks, and even though environmental policies remain committed to emission-cutting efforts, an astonishing international preliminary action on the issue has already been amassed. This brings to mind a play titled "The Visit" by the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt: In this story, an matronly woman returns to the small town where she grew up and makes the community an indecent proposal: She will give the town a huge sum of money in return for the killing of her former unfaithful lover. Outraged, the town rejects the offer. But it rather obviously goes about the job of preparing for this very eventuality and does things that make it even more likely. The end to the story is well known. Given the potential impact of climate engineering, it is not surprising that the preliminary question of whether this environmental option should actually be researched at all as a way of improving the public’s awareness of this strategy is highly controversial. In this new age of Anthropocene, in which the human race has had an impact on nearly every geo-economic process, the vision of a man-made climate appears to represent a temporary climax of humans’ presumed domination of nature. In light of the international inability to systematically cut emissions, environmental policies are painting themselves into a crowded corner. To the right, there is the Scylla of potentially irreversible latent effects of global warming. To the left, there is the Charybdis of potentially uncontrollable and highly combustible emergency steps to halt encroachment into the Earth system. In this unpleasant situation, the pressure regarding fall-back technologies in emergency situations may become so intense that consideration of them will appear to be unavoidable. The seal on the Pandora’s box of environmental policy may have already been broken. In mythology, the complete opening of this box did bring trouble. But after all, it also offered hope. -- 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 geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
