Scientific American Endorses Geoengineering

                       Welcome to the wonderful world of Planetary Geoengineering, SciAm!

The venerable and highly respected Scientific American (SciAm) magazine has been reporting on science issues and publishing popular scientific articles for 168 years.  It is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States.

In it's most recent issue, Scientific American endorsed the use of Planetary Geoengineering.

Now it wasn't a strong endorsement.  In fact it was more the along the lines of a geoengineering-is-terrible, but-the-alternatives-are-worse kind of endorsement.   But it was still an endorsement.  Here's some excerpts from what David Biello said in a SciAm report from the UN climate conference in Lima, Peru:

A global deal to combat climate change lurches toward reality in Lima, Peru, this week—and yet any politically feasible agreement will be insufficient to restrain continued warming of global average temperatures, perhaps uncomfortably high.....atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have crossed the threshold of 400 parts per million—and will reach 450 ppm in less than two decades at present growth rates.

If civilization continues, the unplanned, undirected geoengineering of the climate via burning fossil fuels—whether coal in a power plant or oil sludge in a massive container ship steaming across the Pacific—then perhaps nations will need to plan for a directed attempt at geoengineering or the "deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment" as the U.K.'s Royal Society defines it.

Geoengineering could play a role in coping with some of the impacts of climate change, perhaps used to cool off the rapidly warming Arctic and save summertime sea ice. Or "these strategies might be used throughout the period required to replace fossil fuel burning with globally distributed clean energy and even be continued while CO2 concentrations remain too high," as atmospheric scientists put it in an overview of the Philosophical Transactions issue

SciAm made it clear that it sees risks in some geoengineering ideas, and doesn't believe that any geoengineering concept can permanently solve the problem of global warming without a concomitant transformation of the world's energy systems. 

But an endorsement of geoengineering, even a qualified one, is very welcome coming from a premier scientific magazine like Scientific American.