"After decades of global warming, the summer sea ice in the Arctic has vanished entirely, opening up new trade routes and vast oil and gas reserves in the Far North. China and the Pacific Rim nations, meanwhile, are enduring ever-worsening repercussions of climate change: volatile storms, food riots, and rising sea levels that displace millions of people. Suddenly.......some countries say, ‘Screw it. We have to cool this down.’ How? A bloc of Asian nations underwrites an aggressive geoengineering effort that uses specially designed aircraft to disperse thousands of tonnes of sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere."
This is a hypothetical scenario by Jason Blackstock, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario. It is contained in the title link article by John Lorinc in The Walrus. This article presents a fascinating overview of geoengineering (aka Plan B), and makes a compelling case for at very least for discussing it in international forums:
"At this stage, [David] Keith says, a formal policy debate is certainly more important than coming up with rules. He feels there needs to be 'a lot of talk, because for so many people this is so new. [We] need a venue to allow a lot of people to express a lot of opinions, including those that say geoengineering is stupid and should be banned.'
Perhaps, Keith notes, the prospect of governments or private entities deploying these fantastically potent technologies will stir people to focus more energy on finding ways to make Plan A work."
This is a hypothetical scenario by Jason Blackstock, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario. It is contained in the title link article by John Lorinc in The Walrus. This article presents a fascinating overview of geoengineering (aka Plan B), and makes a compelling case for at very least for discussing it in international forums:
"At this stage, [David] Keith says, a formal policy debate is certainly more important than coming up with rules. He feels there needs to be 'a lot of talk, because for so many people this is so new. [We] need a venue to allow a lot of people to express a lot of opinions, including those that say geoengineering is stupid and should be banned.'
Perhaps, Keith notes, the prospect of governments or private entities deploying these fantastically potent technologies will stir people to focus more energy on finding ways to make Plan A work."
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