This article links to one reporting what Hansen said, to which I have more objections. Both suggest that it’s time for geoengineering, though neither uses that word. The idea is that we must engage in experiments with our only planet, and deal with the unforeseen (and foreseen) consequences because we can’t, or won’t reduce our emissions enough, fast enough–or at all, until the fossil fuel runs out.

If that’s the case, these experiments won’t much help even if they’re successful and it turns out that arrogant, hubris-filled scientists adjusting the parameters of the planet can actually improve on what Mother Nature has developed over billions of years of evolution.

Because most geoengineering schemes are in the Solar Radiation Management category, including the zillions of bubbles covering ice sheets notion propounded here. This means they buy temporarily lower temperatures to avoid melting by increasing the albedo of Earth or bouncing incoming solar energy into space. What they don’t do is lower greenhouse gas levels.

Usually they take a lot of energy, with its attendant emissions. Odds are, they can’t be kept up forever (one version has four jets taking off every hour to spray sulfur compounds in to the upper atmosphere). So when they stop, the average temperature quickly shoots up to what it would have been if none of this had ever been done, creating an even more impossible adaptation/migration challenge for species.

There actually are solutions, but we have to:

1–overcome the power of megacorporations and sociopathic “leaders”;

2–accept limits. We can’t keep growing either our numbers or our economies.

In fact we need to shrink both, if we want to maintain a habitable and harmonious world. If we don’t find a way to cooperatively impose these limits on ourselves, they will be imposed on us by the Three Horsemen–famine, pestilence and war, who will work cooperatively together to chop our numbers and our civilization.

Mary Wildfire, Central WV