Are you ready for geo-engineering?

Part 1

There was a provocative headline, in the Science Times section of The New York Times on February 13, 2007, “A Cool $25 Million for a Climate Backup Plan,” above a story by John Tierney. British entrepreneur and Virgin Enterprises founder Richard Branson had just made the cash offer in his Virgin Earth Challenge (VEC) to “…anyone who figures out how to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere.”

But four years later another New York Times story, “Cash Prize for Environmental Help Goes Unawarded,” told a very different tale. Branson and his team had reviewed more than 2,600 challenge submissions and found none of them worthy. Climate change is a hard (but not impossible) problem.

In the intervening years, Branson and company discovered how squeamish people are about geoengineering, which many submissions advocated, and for good reasons. Done right geoengineering strategies can be part of a solution to climate change; done poorly they can cause major problems.

Geoengineering is an approach that attempts to change some large features of the environment to achieve a desirable result, such as reducing global temperature increases. Some proposals in the VEC included seeding the atmosphere with chemical aerosols to reflect solar radiation back into space; others called for fertilizing the oceans with dilute iron solutions that would stimulate plankton growth resulting in carbon capture. But Branson later notedin a blog, “Changing the chemistry of…