OK, this is going to be a short, sorry-ass post, and y’all deserve better…but it’s all I have in me for today, so I hope you will come along for the very brief ride.

The fact is, I’m a geek. Something in me responds when smart people propose bold solutions to big, hairy-ass problems. Yeah; I go. We need to think big. Really big.

Global warming is one of the biggest problems we face—if not the biggest. So I can get into space umbrellas. But man, this kind of shit scares me. In a nutshell, Nobel Laureate and Cold War scientist Paul Crutzen is proposing that we dump hundreds of tons of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, to screen the earth from the worst effects of the warming while we get our carbon dioxide emissions under control.

Apparently he has a lot of credibility in the science community, and a couple other folks’ calculations seemed to confirm his, that the amount of sulfur emissions needed to keep the earth from overheating during the next twenty years would be a small fraction of what we are already emitting. The trick is to get it up into the upper atmosphere…but that is not an insurmountable problem. Jets could do it; rockets with SO2 payloads could do it.

And I think, yeah, slowing down the impending heat tsunami is all well and good. A lot of lives could be saved. But even if we get that temporary fix of sulfur dioxide, it means an increase in acid rain. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide will still be turning our oceans to acid. And the longer we wait to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the bigger a problem we will have on our hands down the line.

We dumped a bunch of crap in our air that is about to kill us, and a bunch of other species, off. Whatever will we do? Hey! I know! Let’s dump even more crap into the air!

And who knows? It may even work—maybe even without wiping out all the fish species, or killing off all the trees, or dissolving all our buildings and cultural treasures.

But even if it does, it’s not a real solution. It’s just a bandaid. A stopgap. Once the heat is off, will we really have any political will to change the way we live?