Planet Cool Down

David G. Victor got a spirited reaction to hisarticle about geoengineering in Foreign Affairs a few months ago. “I fielded a lot of hate mail,” he said.

Mr. Victor, the director of Stanford University’s Energy and Sustainable Development Program, is a leading voice in the effort to get governments and policymakers to start thinking seriously about the possibility of technological tinkering with the atmosphere, as a weapon of last resort in the battle against global warming.

In the March/April edition of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Victor was the lead author of an article that candidly acknowledged the challenge. “Fiddling with the climate to fix the climate strikes most people as a shockingly bad idea,” he wrote. Read more…