Bipartisan Policy Center Urges Research Into Geoengineering

Today the Bipartisan Policy Center's Task Force on Climate Remediation Research issued a report that urges the United States to step up research into geoengineering techniques that might help slow or stop the progress of global climate change. In interviews with the New York Times, "some of the panel members said they hoped that the mere discussion of such drastic steps would jolt the public and policy makers into meaningful action in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which they called the highest priority." Climate change expert Orrin H. Pilkey believes "the potential for adverse side effects" in any geoengineering project is "high and unpredictable." His new book, Global Climate Change: A Primer, written with his son Keith C. Pilkey, features a chapter on geoengineering that lays out some of the potential technologies, such as seeding the oceans to provide cloud cover, carbon sequestration machines, and the pumping of aerosols into the stratosphere. Pilkey ultimately comes down against geoengineering, writing: "that climate change is so dire a challenge as to propel some in the scientific community to seriously consider geoengineering should scare us all the more. The anthropogenic climate change criss that we face requires a political rather than a geoengineering solution."