Going to Extremes to Fight Global Warming

Many scientists are uneasy with the notion of monkeying with a climate system so complicated they are still working to understand it. In 1992, when a U.S. National Academy of Sciences panel looked at the policy implications of global warming, there was a serious debate over whether geoengineering should be included, said Stephen Schneider, a climate expert at Stanford University. Some members of the panel feared it could be used as an excuse to continue pollution. In the end, they decided to lay out some of the options in a carefully worded chapter.