Welcome to Hack The Planet
It’s the new blog by Eli Kintisch, author of Hack The Planet. First order of business: Sharing my recent story in Slate on geoengineering tests.
The once-rogue concept of planet-hacking has come a long way in just three years: from key private meetings among scientists, to sophisticated computer modeling papers (PDF), to serious investigations of the idea by the British Royal Society and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
This week the discussion moves into a new phase: a debate over how actual field tests for geoengineering should be implemented, regulated and, in fact, whether their results would even help us to understand the most severe risks of deployment at all.
In three opinion pieces published in the premiere science journals—one in Nature yesterday, and two in Science today—scientists from across the world offered differing takes on the future of internationally coordinated testing. But their back-and-forth over which experiments might be best and what sort of political treaties would be necessary raises a distressing possibility: It’s not just that geoengineering tests will be difficult.
It’s that the problems they invite would be so diverse—and their results so inconclusive—that we’re likely to skip the testing altogether. If countries are going to hack the stratosphere, they may just do it full-bore in the face of disaster.
Tags: #geoengineering, articles, testing
