Let's go on a fossil fuel binge. Scientists will cure it!  

Salon has an alarming article on geoengineering by Elizabeth Svoboda arguing that "Global warming demands more than do-gooder actions. It demands "geoengineering" -- like blocking the sun's rays with stratospheric dirt". It looks like an advanced case of fire worship to me - and from Gregory Benford at that (if you have a doomer streak you may enjoy some of his bleaker science fiction like Great Sky River) - even the flying party guys didn't consider this sort of madness.

Maybe he's just being realistic about us not being capable of turning away from coal as an energy source - but compensating for one dangerous practice with another (possibly even riskier) one just isn't a good idea in my mind. For those who haven't been following the geoengineering idea, Jamais Cascio has been doing the best job of following it - Terraforming the Earth, Now In the Spotlight, Open Source Terraforming and Terraforming War.

Gregory Benford thinks Al Gore's a good guy and all, but he also thinks the star of "An Inconvenient Truth" is a little delusional. Driving a hybrid car, switching your bulbs to compact fluorescents and springing for recycled paper products are all well-meaning strategies in the fight against global warming. But as UC-Irvine physicist Benford sees it, there's a catch. Those do-gooder actions are not going to be effective enough to turn the temperature tide, and even incremental political changes like reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mining alternative fuel sources are not forward-thinking enough. "I never believed we were going to be able to thwart global warming through carbon restriction," Benford says. "Carbon restriction requires nations to subvert short- and midterm goals for a long-term goal they've read about online, and that's just not going to work."

As an alternative, Benford has cooked up a plan that amounts to a manmade Mount Pinatubo eruption. He has proposed shooting trillions of tiny particles of earth into the stratosphere, where they will remain suspended to help blot out incoming solar rays. Dirt is cheap, chemically unreactive and easily crushable, he argues, making it a simple matter to test this strategy on a small scale over the Arctic before total global deployment. This plan might seem a little too sci-fi to take seriously -- fittingly, Benford moonlights as a Nebula-winning novelist -- but he's far from the only scientist to lobby for a so-called geoengineering fix.

Researchers all over the world have begun advocating large-scale climate control strategies that sound like something "The Simpsons'" Mr. Burns might endorse, including erecting sun-blocking mirrors in deep space, spraying tiny droplets of sulfur or ocean water into the atmosphere to deflect sunbeams, and seeding the oceans with iron to spur the growth of CO2-sucking phytoplankton. When a panel of scientists addressed the ethical implications of geoengineering at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in February in Boston, it was a clear sign of how far this seemingly out-there field has advanced toward legitimacy.

While no proposed geoengineering fixes have yet been tested on a global scale, all of them have the irresistible lure of immediacy. Once deposited, CO2 can linger in the atmosphere for more than 100 years, meaning it will take decades or centuries for emissions-reduction policies to cool the planet significantly. Geoengineering, on the other hand, could potentially send global temperatures back to preindustrial levels within only a few years, bringing the Arctic melt to a screeching halt and keeping extreme weather patterns and rising sea levels associated with warming in check. "Every simulation that's been done shows that geoengineering doesn't bring the climate back perfectly," says Ken Caldeira, an ecologist at Stanford University, "but you could put sulfur in the stratosphere right away and it would be colder next year."

Hubristic to the nth degree? Riskier than a tightrope ballet? Absolutely. Even geoengineering's proponents concede that. "The history of intervening in complex systems to correct them is not good," says Caldeira, who has cautiously endorsed future geoengineering research. "You always think you know how the system's going to respond, but we should assume that if we start doing this, there are going to be some ugly surprises."