By James Kwak
Mark Buchanan — who is actually a physicist, after all — makes a compelling argument against relying on geo-engineering to deal with our climate change problem. For one thing, some of the proposed technologies simply won’t work, because they do nothing about the fact that the poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet. For another, the geo-engineering fairy is being used to lobby against other approaches — conservation and renewable energy sources — that would deal with climate change at its source.
Another reason to be skeptical of geo-engineering is the effect it has on the risk profile of humanity’s future. Technology has produced some amazing things in the past century. But, with zero exceptions that I can think of, they weren’t things that our species needed to survive, or to prevent widespread natural and societal devastation. If we’re talking about technologies that can make our lives better in all sorts of ways, like the Internet or DNA sequencing or quantum computing, then risk is good: we want to place lots of bets that have a high chance of failure but high potential returns.
The Baseline Scenario 