The Virginia Quarterly Review, arguably the best literary journal in the country, has the nerve this quarter to take on an urgent issue, and dispatches Pat Joseph to look at geo-engineering the climate.
He avoids stating his conclusion, but does a masterful job of laying out the facts. See here:
As [Nobel Prize winner and geo-engineering advocate] Paul Crutzen stressed in his essay, “The very best would be if emissions of the greenhouse gases could be reduced so much that the stratospheric sulfur release experiment would not need to take place. Currently, this looks like a pious wish.”
But what's really disturbing, according to Joseph and Stanford physicist Ken Caldeira, is the possibility that we will do nothing at all. As Caldeira says:
I think the most likely thing is we don’t do anything. We don’t reduce emissions, and we don’t do geoengineering.
So we guarantee extinction for a million or more other species on the planet, while doing nothing for our good, either. Caldeira and Joseph can only laugh at the absurdity of the situation, in which our species, with all its vast mental powers, is as hopelessly frozen as Buridan's Ass, the mythical dim-bulb donkey placed halfway between two bins of food, and starves to death, unable to choose either.
Wish I could tell them that they're all wrong, that humans are much better than that...but for now, here's a thoughtful photo of the Maldives, threatened by sea level rise, courtesy of m o d e.
