Is It Time for High-Tech Solutions?

Isn't it weird how calamity can come slowly without us really noticing?

So it was with the Bush administration's rollback of constitutional protections, and so it is with climate change.

One of the major signposts along the way to that calamity, as I've imagined it, is when credible people start talking about geo-engineering "solutions" as a realistic alternative.

We may have reached that point -- and not because Superfreakonomics says so. A conference scheduled for March will explore technical options, like pumping particulate pollution into the atmosphere to block sunlight. Participants point to new urgency in the wake of the failed Copenhagen talks to make significant cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions.

The conference's scientific program is being organized by the Climate Institute, which skews somewhat conservative but sits well within the range of serious approaches to the issue.

Mike MacCracken, a global warming expert at the institute, said: "Most of the talk about these geo-engineering techniques say they should be saved until we get to an emergency situation. Well, the people of the Arctic might say they are in an emergency situation now."

The conference's host is somewhat less credible: It's a group called the Climate Response Fund that promotes research into geo-engineering solutions. The group's head formerly worked at her son's geo-engineering firm, Climos, which advocates seeding the oceans with iron to create giant blooms of plankton that would absorb CO2.

Indeed, profit motive seems inherently to erode the credibility of these high-tech solutions. It also seems likely that if the approaches proved disastrous, the start-up firms behind them wouldn't pay the cost of remediation; we would.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons