The National Academies Contemplate Geoengineering

American Geophysical Union, September 2013

The ideas seem lifted from a James Bond super villain’s dastardly plot: carpeting the Earth with whitened clouds, constructing giant solar reflectors in space, using chemicals to change the makeup of the atmosphere. But with scientific models predicting potentially devastating changes in the world’s climate, seemingly impractical and improbable geoengineering solutions become more and more alluring.