Geoengineering won't touch sea level rise

This just in on the geoengineering front in the battle to grapple with climate change: At least as far as controlling sea level rise, it won't work. A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warns that we're in for at least 30 cm of sea level rise by 2100 "despite all but the most aggressive geoengineering under all except the most stringent greenhouse gas emissions scenarios."

Aggressive geoengineering, in this case, means injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere at a rate comparable to a Mount Pinatubo eruption every 18 months (!) or building an ever expanding fleet of giant space mirrors.

The "business as usual" scenario has sea-levels rising by 1 meter by 2100 -- enough to flood out 150 million people and swallow roughly 10 percent of the "global gross world product."

The graphic of the Greenland Ice Sheet melt is courtesy of Konrad Steffen and Russell Huff, CIRES, University of Colorado at Boulder. They have done some chilling work (pardon the pun) on the melting of this enormous ice sheet.