Careful. It's dangerous to dismiss ideas based on intuitive feelings rather than evidence-based analysis. Consider nuclear power. If we had scrapped developing

Careful. It's dangerous to dismiss ideas based on intuitive feelings rather than evidence-based analysis. Consider nuclear power. If we had scrapped developing it because it sounded dangerous with the argument: "What. Could. Possibly. Go. Wrong?", then France today wouldn't generate 75% of it's electricity from nuclear power. Many countries around the world would be forced to use more coal and fossil fuels, adding a lot more pollution to our environment. And we'd be deprived of the source of energy that causes the fewest deaths per amount of energy produced. But more broadly, this type of reasoning just isn't scientific. We can only judge geoengineering by carefully understanding what it would do. Yes, this would have to include a tough analysis on possible risks. But dismissing it out of hand and depriving it of funding because it feels wrong in your gut is not rational. It's easy for us to approve studies that, say, fight disease. Everyone knows it's important to get information on, say, what the health impact of a new chemical is. But those are the easy cases. Doing science well is about getting it right in the hard cases. I believe geoengineering is one of those hard cases, because it feels wrong to us that we'd be able to control our environment. It doesn't seem like "our place" to tinker with nature. But let's see. Volcanos erupt making abrupt, profound changes in our environment. As mentioned in the article, when Mount Pinatubo erupted, it shot enough stuff in to the atmosphere to cool the earth by nearly a degree Fahrenheit. Given that the world didn't end because of this, perhaps there's a place for controlled intervention by humans which more efficiently and precisely alters the world. We don't know yet if anything we think of would work. We need to do more research. But do you really think we should quit because it doesn't sound nice? The fate of the world rests in our hands. Are we going to throw away one of the few potential solutions to our problems because it doesn't appeal to our human intuitions? It's time to grow up. Let's do science properly before we fuck ourselves over.