New Scientist: When it comes to repairing damage done to the Earth's climate there's no shortage of ideas, ranging from schemes to put "sunshades" in orbit to burying the offending carbon dioxide underground. But ideas won't be enough, so there is an urgent need to rank those proposals to work out which should undergo rigorous testing, argues Philip Boyd of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in "The ideas for how to change our climate keep getting pumped out. They get lots of column inches," says Boyd. "My concern is that we will reach a tipping point, people will ask what are we doing about it, and none of the schemes will have been tested." Boyd proposes that an international body such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prioritise the schemes according to possible risks involved, how quickly they could be got of the ground, their cost, and how efficiently they would change the climate.
Climate scientist Martin Manning of the University of Victoria in Wellington agrees that a systematic ranking is needed, in part because there is little communication between research communities working on different approaches….Any assessment should be broadened to include other techniques besides geo-engineering, such as using plants for sequestration, says Manning, who worked for the IPCC during the last assessment.
Some schemes could quickly be dismissed, but testing even one of the feasible schemes will still be a herculean task. "We have only started to realise how complicated and interconnected Earth systems are, and scale up will be difficult," Boyd says….
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