The Virginia Quarterly Review, arguably the best literary journal in the country, has the nerve this quarter to take on an urgent issue, and dispatches Pat Joseph to look at geo-engineering the climate.
He avoids stating his conclusion, but does a masterful job of laying out the facts. See here:
efforts, but the growing economic crisis, combined with falling oil and
coal prices, does not bode well for the negotiations at this year’s
climate summit in Copenhagen. Furthermore, diplomacy is only part of
the story. Fundamentally, global warming is an energy problem, and
solving it will require nothing less than a complete and radical
transformation of the world’s energy infrastructure, something most
energy experts believe will take decades, if it happens at all.
As [Nobel Prize winner and geo-engineering advocate] Paul Crutzen stressed in his essay, “The very best would be if
emissions of the greenhouse gases could be reduced so much that the
stratospheric sulfur release experiment would not need to take place.
Currently, this looks like a pious wish.”
But what's really disturbing, according to Joseph and Stanford physicist Ken Caldeira, is the possibility that we will do nothing at all. As Caldeira says:
I think the most likely thing is we don’t do anything. We don’t reduce emissions, and we don’t do geoengineering.
So we guarantee extinction for a million or more other species on the planet, while doing nothing for our good, either. Caldeira and Joseph can only laugh at the absurdity of the situation, in which our species, with all its vast mental powers, is as hopelessly frozen as Buridan's Ass, the mythical dim-bulb donkey placed halfway between two bins of food, and starves to death, unable to choose either.
Wish I could tell them that they're all wrong, that humans are much better than that…but for now, here's a thoughtful photo of the Maldives, threatened by sea level rise, courtesy of m o d e.
Kit Stolz 
Hi Kit,
thanks for taking note of the article and for the kind remarks. I’ll take “masterful job” any day. As for my conclusion, I suppose I did play the cards a little close to my chest. All I can say is, I’m a proponent of studying the issue and taking it seriously. At the same time, I’m a proponent of aggressive emissions reductions. I’m just doubtful that we’ll get there fast enough.
So, now, I’m curious about your title. “Are we just not cynical enough?” About what? And what’s your answer?
All best, PJ
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