Should Obama Try to Reset the Planet's Thermostat?

On Monday, the Waxman-Markey climate bill moved to the Senate floor after narrowly passing the House. It's a step, yes—but as everyone knows, cooling the planet will require a lot more than closing an emissions deal. That's why earlier this month the august National Academy of Sciences (NAS) brought together in Washington, DC, leading scientists, economists, policy experts, philosophers, and a menagerie of other experts for a two-day workshop to discuss a crazy-sounding idea: Should the US consider geoengineering the planet's atmosphere to combat global warming? Once a fringe theory, in recent years the idea that humans can change the Earth's climate through direct intervention has begun to gain credibility in climate change discussions. The ways by which scientists propose to directly engineer the Earth's environment to slow the Earth's warming are myriad. Ideas range from injecting aerosols into the atmosphere via fighter jets to reduce solar radiation, to fertilizing the oceans with iron to grow algae blooms that absorb more carbon dioxide, to sending millions of small mirrors or "sun shades" into the Earth's orbit to scatter the sun's light away from the planet and back out into space. And these are but a few of the suggestions now surfacing in scientific circles...MotherJones