The real climate change controversy: Whether to engineer the planet in order to fix it
In 1965, leading scientists of the day produced a report for President Lyndon B. Johnson on the rampant pollution of the environment. It included a section that summed up their understanding of climate change.
"Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment," wrote longtime University of California, San Diego oceanographer Roger Revelle. "The climatic changes that may be produced," he warned, "could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings."
What Revelle suggested next kicked off a debate that continues to this day: Can humans avert the worst effects of climate change with a vast geoengineering experiment?
Revelle thought so. One solution, he proposed, would be to reflect more of the sun's energy away from the Earth "by spreading very small reflecting particles" over large swaths of the ocean.
Over the intervening decades, the idea of geoengineering
