Geo-engineering goes mainstream

The Guardian reports today that calls for geo-engineered reversals of predicted climate change have now made it into the highly predigious and, normally, formidably sane pages of the Proceedings of the Royal Society journal.Alok Jha explains more about them, Doug Parr, head scientist for Greenpeace, wrings his hands over them, and Jim Lovelock does the sensible thing: says we need to get used to the idea of a hotter, more violent world. Not that anyone will listen to him. After all, the earth’s climate out of man’s conscious control? What a crackpot!

But then, being cynical, now there’s more or less a global consensus that climate changes are afoot  – well, outside the White House – where are all the scientists whose funding raison d’etre was explaining this going to come from? ‘This atmospheric dynamics crap is like so 2005′, the head of the Welcome Trust can be imagined yawning, ‘but gigantic artificial algae blooms? That’s awesome! Give them a million, no, ten million!’.