What Could Go Wrong

I remember reading, decades ago, an SF book or two about how, basically, lunatic environmentalists demanded some crazy geoengineering solution to global warming which ended up plunging the Earth into a new ice age. Lots of SF writers were pretty right wing and if the hippies wanted it then it must be wrong.

So it's a bit funny that as we move into the acceptance stage of global warming, geoengineering is increasingly the Sensible Big Brain Boy solution.

As crazy as it might sound, geoengineering the oceans by adding iron — in effect, fertilizing them — may offer the best, most effective and most affordable way not just to slow the march of global warming but to reverse its course by directly drawing carbon out of the atmosphere. The U.S. government needs to start testing it now, before the climate system spins off into an even more disastrous state.