This week, California will host the

Asilomar International Conference onClimate Intervention Technologies

. The conference follows hearings last weekin the US House of Representatives and a report from the UK Committee onScience and Technology, as well as a recent report from the GovernmentAccounting Office, all following on the heels of earlier reports from the RoyalSociety. In short, there is a lot of high level interest in the topic.Given the failure of Copenhagen, the sellout of US Congress to special interestsand the stalemated international negotiations, the "last resort" of geoengineeringis gaining support. This is especially true as many are either in a state of panic orparalysis following recent announcements of methane seeping from the EastSiberian Arctic Shelf, on top of the ongoing reports of emissions rising, icemelting, and temperatures reaching all time highs.There are good reasons to be quite worried. But there may be good reasons to beeven MORE worried by the climate geoengineering proponents and what isgoing on at Asilomar this week.The conference holds as its intent to develop "voluntary guidelines" for furtherresearch on climate geoengineering technologies. Voluntary guidelines are mostoften designed to fend off "involuntary" regulation. The conference is organizedby Margaret Leinen, who happens to be the mother of Dan Whaley, founder andCEO of Climos, a company with patents currently pending for methods to profitby selling carbon offsets from ocean fertilization, one proposed geoengineeringtechnology. Other major players in geoengineering, some of whom will be atAsilomar, similarly have vested interests in ensuring cash flows for funding,experimentation and commercialization of their pet technologies.We can pretty well guess that whatever "voluntary guidelines" they come upwith for themselves will be designed with "don't take no for an answer" as theirunderlying mantra.A letter signed by dozens of civil society groups was submitted to theconference organizers, challenging the entire premise of the conference instating: "The priority at this time is not to sort out the conditions under whichthis experimentation might take place but, rather, whether or not the communityof nations and peoples believes that geoengineering is technically, legally,socially, environmentally and economically acceptable."Asilomar seeks to step right on past any process for determination of acceptability, assume it as a given, and carry on with business.This is deeply troubling on many fronts given the technofixes being put on thetable, the scale of their impacts, and the track record so far.The technologies for "climate intervention"(aka, geoengineering) fall into twobroad categories: Carbon sequestration and solar radiation management. Oceanfertilization falls into the former. The idea is to dump iron particles into oceanwaters to stimulate plankton blooms. The plankton absorb CO2, and when theydie, (hopefully) carry their carbon to the ocean floor to remain sequestered.There are many known risk factors, including one newly discovered and

described just last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.This study revealed that the kinds of plankton that are stimulated by ironfertilization include those that produce domoic acid, cause of shellfish poisoningin humans and lethal to marine animals. Oops.Ocean fertilization has already been tested numerous times. The controversial"Lohafex" test last year failed to illustrate any carbon sequestration afterdumping more than 6 tons of iron into the Southern Ocean. To make mattersworse, these tests were undertaken in spite of a moratorium agreed to by close to200 nations under the Convention on Biological Diversity, also defying theLondon Convention on Ocean Dumping. Such treaties and agreements are,apparently, just pieces of paper. Biochar is another carbon sequestrationtechnology proposed. Advocates claim that by growing hundreds of millions of hectares of tree plantations, burning the trees to make charcoal and then tillingthe charcoal into soils, we can sequester carbon under ground. The scale thatwould be entailed here is monumental, especially given that only 12-40% of thecarbon from the trees is retained in the charcoal. The impacts, on forests, soils,and from small particles (soot) becoming airborne, could very well outweighany supposed gain.Another broad category of climate intervention technologies involve "solarradiation management" (SRM), i.e. blocking or reflecting sunlight. Examplesinclude using jets or rockets to blast small reflective sulphate particles into thestratosphere, "cloud whitening" to increase reflectivity by injecting saltwatermist into clouds, vast plantations of plants engineered to have shiny, reflectiveleaves, or covering large areas of the desert with a white/reflective coating ordeplying huge arrays of mirrors into space.These technologies are virtually all extremely risky, expensive and/or downrightnuts. But, frighteningly, they are gaining mainstream acceptability! Among theadvocates are some, like Bjorn Lomberg the "Skeptical Envrionmentalist", whohave denied global warming is even real. Some claim that these approaches areprefereable to reducing emissions. Julian Morris, of the International PolicyNetwork, for example stated: "Diverting money into controlling carbonemissions and away from geoengineering is probably morally irresponsible."The potential for "weaponization" of climate geoengineering technologies addsfuel to the fires for those who find this issue troubling. Who will control andhave access to the power to control rainfall or deflect (or not) sunlight in adrought, flood, famine and water deprived future world?Perhaps it is time for a collective pause and some deep reflection? First of all,our faith in science and technology seems to be teetering precipitously. On theone hand, we appear shocked when scientists err, as if we somehow expect thescientific method and its practitioners to be godlike in their ability to predict thefuture of global systems and dynamics. On the other hand, many are prepared todeny the validity of literally thousand of studies all converging towards theconclusion that global warming is in fact a reality. Further, we fail to recognize