great geo-engineering article

In April I gave a horrified report of James Lovelock’s terrifying lecture in Dublin on climate change.

So, I should also post another perspective– the idea that the use of geoengineering to reverse climate change might actually be too cheap and easy.

See Graeme Wood’s wonderfully presented piece in the Atlantic Monthly.

I’d heard of a couple of these ideas before, but this piece is filled with surprises. Wood is an occasional reader of this blog, by the way. He spent a year in Cairo and I got to know him a bit then. He’s a Harvard philosophy graduate from Canada, and at over a decade younger than I am, he’s still about 40 countries ahead of me on the travel front.

“Give me half a tanker of iron,” Martin said, “and I’ll give you the next Ice Age.” If Martin’s ideas are sound, Climos could in effect become the world’s gardener by seeding Antarctic waters with iron and creating vast, rapidly growing offshore forests to replace the ones that no longer exist on land.