Paint the clouds white

Geo-engineering: it’s a last straw. It is the younger and sexier brother of GHG reduction. While reduction of greenhouse gas emissions rides his bicycle to the fair trade shop and goes for a hearty Sunday walk with his mother, and reads a good book in the evening, geo-engineering drives his Maserati to jet set parties and hangs out with the cool crowd. And who should we side with? Mitigation, because he simply is the one that does the sensible thing? And he may not be excessively successful at it, but he’s not doing anybody harm in trying.

Or should we side with geo-engineering, because maybe he’s an arrogant twit, but he makes his voice heard, and might convince the boys with the big money to team up with him? And his business is risky, but hey, risk might make things interesting.

I read on the BBC website that yet another initiative for geo-engineering has been proposed: Arctic cloud-whitening. People are rightly worried about diminishing Arctic sea ice, and everybody agrees the thing to do to stop that process is to seriously cut back on the exhaust of greenhouse gases. But everybody also knows that there is no political will to do that. So now some British chap has come up with cloud-whitening-chimneys on the Faeroes or the Bering Strait. The idea is that they spew out lots and lots of very fine droplets which will provide nuclei for cloud formation, and as these droplets are so small, the average drop size in the resulting clouds will be very small, which makes them very white and reflective. And that reflectiveness would send lots of sunlight back into space.

From the BBC news website

Do I think that's a good idea? Not really. I can easily imagine they can indeed get the droplet size right, and if something falters they can just switch them off. But as soon as such a thing is in place the last morsel of political will to reduce emissions will go straight out of the window, quite irrespective of whether these chimneys actually work. And the people that own and run these things have a disconcerting amount of power. Should sea ice lie in private, or even national, hands? I still prefer the less falshy older brother: mitigation...