Just to make this all portentous, you're basically saying that we can only win against nature when we've won against ourselves? There's a religion in there some

Just to make this all portentous, you're basically saying that we can only win against nature when we've won against ourselves? There's a religion in there somewhere :) One might argue that there's defeat inherent in the idea of conflict with nature. We are a part of it, after all. Perhaps cooperation and understanding are the real path? We don't bomb the tsunami into oblivion, but learn to watch for it and get out of the way when it comes. There are many examples of this philosophy of 'going with the grain': buildings which use ground-source heat pumps, unforced convection and solar panels for HVAC & hot water; kite-driven cargo ships, and so on. The tree that yields survives the storm. I'm sorry to say that I don't find geoengineering inspiring at all. I find it terrifying. We do not understand the mechanisms at work in global climate at all, yet we're presuming to try and pull the levers to create an outcome years hence. Have these people never heard about chaos, about sensitivity to initial starting conditions? It's exceptionally dangerous. Most of us look down on 'cargo cult' programmers, people who copy and paste stuff from the web into an editor with no idea how it works, bashing away until it compiles. That's what geoengineering is. To extend the metaphor, we don't have the first clue about the world's API, even what language it's written in, whether it's functional, object oriented or what have you[1]. We're trying to change the value of a few public ivars in the hope that something will happen. The consequences though! It's not just a compile error: we have some greedy, pig-headed salesman dumping kilotonnes of heavy metal into a rich ocean ecosystem so he can sell some phantom bits of paper to industrial polluters. I'm coming across like some Sierra Club hardliner here. It's not right, because I'm not, I'm a proper capitalist and I love a supercharged V8 more than I like cigars and steak. I really do hate arrogance though, and I'm a big fan of the precautionary principle. [1](Everyone knows it's actually in Lisp.)