U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 of the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite”. A slew of private patents has already been taken out over methods to engineer the world’s climate. The call to ‘do the research’ entrenches a situation in which geoengineering is often carried out by the wrong people, for the wrong reasons and with no oversight, and in the process is creating a lobby group that is likely to press for deployment because it is in its financial or professional interests to do so. This article raises more troubling questions than it answers.The idea of applying geoengineering research to mitigate climate change has not been thought through, argues Clive Hamilton. by Clive Hamilton,
Nature,10 April 2013
Fresh concerns about using geoengineering projects to cool the planet emerged late last month, when scientists at the UK Met Office said that possible unintended consequences demanded global oversight of such schemes. With the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change soon to report on it, geoengineering will not go away and neither will the controversy it provokes.
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