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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (3209)	11/29/2008 3:39:55 PM
From: Sam	Respond to of 86352

Geoengineering. Even very smart people can do stupid things. No one knows today whether geoengineering could ever make sense. Most workers would agree that further research is now inevitable—but their attitudes toward such study vary. To some, such as Wigley, a sunshade could be a rational strategy to buy time for the long labor of converting to a carbon-neutral energy supply. Others fear it would remove the incentive to do that hard work. “It’s extremely unfortunate that this genie has come out of the bottle just at a time when the world seems finally awakening to the seriousness of climate change,” Pierrehumbert told an audience recently at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “There is a huge risk that if people begin to see this prematurely as a fallback position, this technology will cut off at the knees actions that are just starting to be taken that make serious reductions in emissions.” In the end the debate comes down to differing views about human nature—and the power of science to restrain it. “Scientifically it would be utterly stupid just to do geoengineering” without reducing emissions, Wigley says. “If we were to do that, we’d get to the crunch where people realize there aren’t any more fish in the sea. We’re not that stupid. We can be guided by good science.” Pierrehumbert, like many others, takes a darker view. A bullet point on one of his PowerPoint slides reads simply: “We are quite capable of doing stupid things.” Entire paper from Scientific American at sciam.com