The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things

Solar geoengineering is becoming a respectable idea

Critics argue that the example of sucking carbon dioxide directly from the air—another technology which does not yet exist at any useful scale, but which nevertheless underpins almost all long-term emission-reduction plans—shows that countries will seize on anything that allows them to avoid painful emissions cuts. People more open to the idea retort that geoengineering could be used to buy more time for those emissions reductions to happen, and keep temperatures lower in the meantime, an idea they refer to as “peak shaving”.

The Economist reports on a seemingly pretty wacky thing called "solar engineering" which involves pumping the stratosphere full of reflective particles to cut down on the amount of sunlight, hence heat, that reaches the surface of Earth.

Cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson wrote a novel called Termination Shock that involves such a scheme. I can't say how it ends because I never finished it. Sounded a little sketchy, though.

The Walrus appears in a Lewis Carroll poem, The Walrus and the Carpenter, which includes this stanza:

The time has come,' the Walrus said,

      To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

      Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

      And whether pigs have wings.'

[H/T Shawn]