GeoHacking -What are the Dangers of Reconfiguring the Planet's Ecology

Presidential Science Adviser John Holdren
recently outlined options for geohacking, forcibly reconfiguring parts
of the planet’s ecology.  Since this is a country where you can’t set
up a windfarm without someone opposing it, this set off a storm of
protest.  But the most vocal cry was “We shouldn’t study it because we
don’t know how it would work”, indicating that the those opponents
don’t understand what some of their own words mean.

It’s important to note that Holdren was advising the study of
scientific options, kind of like you’d expect a science adviser to do. 
The plan (that of pumping the atmosphere full aerosols) certainly has a
couple of potentially-planet-pulverising problems, but that’s exactly
his point - it needs study.  He’s a scientist, you see, where admitting
you don’t know something is a vital step towards finding a solution. 
Unfortunately he’s talking to politicians and the media.

One the
one hand you’ve got the ultra-Luddite response, that of any scientific
change of anything being bad.  The sort of people who’d be running
everywhere and tutting loudly when one of those fancy “wheelamajigged”
things came along if they’d been born earlier.  Given their opposition
not just to doing something, but even learning about how it might work,
we can only assume they learned speech by accident or before they came
up with their “Don’t learn what I don’t already know” viewpoint.

On
the other hand, uncontrolled geohacking could be the closest thing to
real life Bond villainy we’ll ever really see.  Even if the government
has no interest in altering Earth’s environment, they need to
understand exactly what they don’t like about it - and where the
dangers are - to prevent others from doing the same.  Corporations
won’t think twice about altering the environment if it benefits them in
even the shortest term, and technology will soon bring ecotinkering
from the national to the corporate budget level.

Geohacking needs
to be studied as a scientific problem: we don’t know how it works, and
we want to, so let’ learn.  That’s how science works.  We’ve been
altering Earth since we first worked out that things burned -
ecogineering isn’t some blasphemous defilement of Gaia’s green glory,
it’s humanity saying “Let’s see if we can actually fix things on
purpose instead of breaking them all the time.”

Geohacking needs federal support