Readers know I'm a global warming pessimist, almost completely convinced that we'll never muster the political will nor global unity to meaningfully curb carbon emissions in time to head off the ravages of climate change, if for no other reason than global warming will harm the developing world first and most, and it's hard to get individuals to sacrifice when they can't feel and don't really expect consequences.
But I am a techno-optimist, so I've long assumed wacky planetary engineering fixes will end up being deployed. Algae blooms, orbiting mirrors, sulfate particles blasted into the air over the arctic -- whatever. Of course, bioengineering isn't exactly the safest route forward, so it would be nice if we gave emissions reduction the old college try first. But in the meantime, this is one of the better articles I've seen on bioengineering, the tradeoffs involved, and whether such strategies can be deployed without a meaningful conservation strategy (short answer: probably not).
