US scientists launch world's biggest solar geoengineering st

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Mapping some supposedly risky and risque territory. Should be interesting to see what they determine. My guess - the industrial base and transportation of the world has to get off of fossil fuels, they're a limited quantity and we know the damage they're doing. If a little bit of seeding does help it could at least take the edge off and buy us maybe 50 or 100 years to make that transition and take the CO2 levels down the rest of the way on our own transition.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ring-study

To be clear, it sounds like even if this sort of thing worked out as anticipated it could cause serious drought in different areas of the world. From the sound of things it would have to be done in a very conservative manner and would also need all kinds of supplements - de-desertification, planting a lot of trees, and most importantly bringing our carbon footprint to 10% of what it is now or less.

The US is doing this right now as a study; fine. I have the feeling we'll need it like a liposuction because we will still be drinking ice cream after we got our stomach taped.

But who has thecauthority to geoengineer?
What's the cut-off point for the US to take that risk for all of mankind, what's the line for Europe, or China?
And what's the line for some island nation that can't wait? - is geoengineering a legitimate tool for survival for an island, or only fir the US?

I have no clue, and I don't think there will be a good answer for that aside from perhaps some scientific authority of some global clout biting the bullet and dedicating their energy to both moving funding toward geoengineering research and standing behind the efforts to inject very judiciously low quantities of the right substances in the upper atmosphere.

The trouble with any approach - whatever they do, if they do it fast enough to make a difference they probably run a serious risk of doing way more harm than good. This is part of why I really don't think it'll ever be anything close to a fix on its own, ie. overdoing it would be irreversible and we might not know that we overdid it until decades afterward.

Thids kind of thing has been talked about for quite a while.
Example:
Benefits, risks, and costs of stratospheric geoengineering
Alan Robock,1Allison Marquardt,1Ben Kravitz,1and Georgiy Stenchikov1,2
Received 21 May 2009; revised 17 August 2009; accepted 20 August 2009; published 2 October 2009.
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/2009GL039209.pdf

A Cheap and Easy Plan to Stop Global Warming
Intentionally engineering Earth’s atmosphere to offset rising temperatures could be far more doable than you imagine, says David Keith. But is it a good idea?
by David Rotman February 8, 2013
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/511016/a-cheap-and-easy-plan-to-stop-global-warming/

Deliberating stratospheric aerosols for climate geoengineering and the SPICE project
Nick Pidgeon1, Karen Parkhill1, Adam Corner1, Naomi Vaughan2,
Nature Climate Change
3,
451–457
(2013)
doi:10.1038/nclimate1807

Received
30 April 2012
Accepted
18 December 2012
Published online
14 April 2013
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n5/full/nclimate1807.html?foxtrotcallback=true

The Ethics of Geoengineering
First of a Two-Part Series
By David Appell
Thursday, December 13, 2012
https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2012/12/the-ethics-of-geoengineering/

Mitigating the risk of geoengineering
Aerosols could cool the planet without ozone damage
December 12, 2016
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/12/mitigating-the-risk-of-geoengineering/