The Annual Energy Forum recently hosted by Montana State University outlined the challenges of keeping carbon out of the atmosphere while supplying the energy people demand at prices they’re willing to pay. I came away convinced that geoengineering, i.e., the deliberate modification of the Earth’s environment, will receive ever more attention as the steep and unavoidable costs of mitigating carbon emissions become more obvious. Here’s why. http://www.techcentralstation.com/

A wild idea to combat global warming suggests creating an artificial ring of small particles or spacecrafts around Earth to shade the tropics and moderate climate extremes.
There would be side effects, proponents admit. An effective sunlight-scattering particle ring would illuminate our night sky as much as the full Moon, for example.

And the price tag would knock the socks off even a big-budget agency like NASA: $6 trillion to $200 trillion for the particle approach. Deploying tiny spacecraft would come at a relative bargain: a mere $500 billion tops.

But the idea, detailed today in the online version of the journal Acta Astronautica, illustrates that climate change can be battled with new technologies, according to one scientist not involved in the new work. [...]

Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, tracks climate research and the resulting media coverage. He’s among the small but vocal group that goes against mainstream thought on the topic of global warming.

“I don’t think that the modest warming trend we are currently experiencing poses any significant or long-term threat,” Peiser told LiveScience. “Nevertheless, what the paper does show quite impressively is that our hyper-complex civilization is theoretically and technologically capable of dealing with any significant climate change we may potentially face in the future.”
Peiser also notes that the Kyoto Protocol, a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is estimated to cost the world economy some $150 billion a year. He also sees a broader rationale for supporting the seemingly bizarre manner of managing Earth’s temperature budget.

“I believe that this mindset, despite its apparent eccentricity, is actually rather reassuring,” Peiser said. “It provides concerned people with ample evidence of the extraordinary human ingenuity that, as so often in the past, has helped to overcome many predicaments that were regarded as impenetrable in previous times.”
He also sees an ultimate big-picture reasoning to look favorably on the notion of controlling Earth’s climate.

“Whatever the cost and regardless of whether there is any major risk due to global warming,” Peiser said, “it would appear to me that such a space-based infrastructure will evolve sooner or later, thus forming additional stepping stones of our emerging migration towards outer space.”
http://www.livescience.com/technology/050627_warming_solution.html