geo-engineering: those crazy physicists

From Mark Bergin in World...

The idea is simple, really: Fill the skies with tiny reflective particles and global temperatures will fall. Sunlight will divert. Shrinking ice shelves will reverse course. Sea levels will drop. And climate-change alarmists will have lots of spare time.

Sound like a crank idea? Most scientists used to think so, too. Not anymore: "You could fly aircraft in the stratosphere and you could have a fire hose that would be squirting out sulfur. And the sulfur dioxide would form particles, the same kind of particles formed in a volcanic eruption," explains New York University physics professor Marty Hoffert. With a Ph.D. in astronautics and numerous publications in respected journals, Hoffert seems the antithesis of a crank as he adds, "Another way to do it is to create boats that spray the ocean water up into the atmosphere and create cloud concentration nuclei. And by changing the reflectivity of the clouds over the ocean, they would be able to reflect more sunlight."

A sulfur-spraying fire hose in the heavens or massive floating ocean fountains smack of science fiction, but these are serious ideas in an emerging field dubbed geoengineering. Things get only stranger from there: shooting mirrors into space; seeding the sea with iron; planting forests of metal, carbon-sucking trees....