There Goes the Sun?

We have every reason in the world to try to stop climate change. But when it comes to geoengineering––lacing the atmosphere with particles to block the sun’s warming effect––experts are split on whether the intervention would create more problems than it would solve. At this rate of global warming, though, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which humans won’t eventually try it out. Inadvertently, we’ve already piloted the method through air pollution. Is the geoengineering genie already out of the bottle? Should we even want to stop it? Are there ways to deploy these efforts that will insure against scenarios where we wish we’d never tried? Host Brian Beutler is joined by Elizabeth Kolbert, a New Yorker staff writer and author of Under a White Sky, and Dr. David Keith, a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago and an advocate for geoengineering research.