There are lots of things to worry about these days from the elections to international conflicts to the rise of domestic fascism, to…well, lots of things.

But this morning an unexpected new item was added to the worry list.

“Solar geoengineering.”

This is from a piece last week on the Lawfare Blog (“ The Case for Researching Solar Geoengineering”).

In a nutshell, solar geoengineering is the intentional modification of Earth’s atmosphere to reflect more sunlight back into space, with the goal of cooling temperatures on a regional or planetary scale. The most discussed and best understood of these techniques is stratospheric aerosol injection—the idea, basically, of using aircraft to release a thin “veil” of aerosols high up in the atmosphere to reflect away a small amount of sunlight.

Everyone agrees that dramatically reducing GHG emissions is essential to addressing climate change, but some see solar geoengineering as a sort of “bridge” to a zero-emissions world or, to use a different metaphor, an insurance policy in case the world cannot decarbonize quickly enough to avoid catastrophic climate impacts. For those who see climate change as a likely planetary emergency, geoengineering may provide a regrettable but necessary way to buy time to improve and commercialize decarbonization technologies, invest in new infrastructure, and, perhaps, prevent runaway warming.

This article reviews the legitimate concerns that are raised in response to the prospect of solar geoengineering.

But then it points out: “But a hotter world could become a more desperate world, and countries may reach for solar geoengineering no matter how little it has been studied or how few governing institutions are in place.”

Yikes! What could possible go wrong here?!