Sulphate-based geoengineering would certainly slow down its recovery, but would not send it into reverse.
The geoengineering concept has also attracted significant interest from venture capitalists and investors like Bill Gates.
Modern climate scientists, by contrast, usually see geoengineering research as niche, if not fringe, stuff.
Unlike some other scientists engaged in geoengineering, Eisenberger is not bothered by the notion of tinkering with nature.
Such grand-scale geoengineering, as it is known, would not merely be a technical challenge to implement in reality.
What is troublesome is not just that the idea, like other geoengineering schemes, is untested on any appreciable scale.
With geoengineering the dangers are more likely to be caused by large-scale deployment than by any individual scientific experiment.
Like the biotechnology of the 1970s, geoengineering cannot be treated just as science-as-usual.
Fast-forward to the present, and we're seeing the opposite phenomenon - research that could give geoengineering answers, but isn't labelled as such.
Geoengineering the climate is an option that is now gaining scientific, policy, and public attention but it involves considerable uncertainty and risk.
The most environmentally sound approach to geoengineering is the least palatable politically.
For years, even to entertain the possibility of human intervention on such a scale geoengineering, as the practice is known has been denounced as hubris.
Though Dr Russell's experiment had been designed mainly to look at how clouds form naturally, it paves the way for future work on geoengineering.
So when some argued in Oxford that research should be constrained if it's tailored towards geoengineering but permitted if it's not, I wondered: how?
He's acknowledged worldwide as an authority on the geoengineering of railways.
That might have political ramifications even though both countries come closer to their original climates with the other's optimal level of geoengineering than with no geoengineering at all.
Recently, the scientific entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvold, whose company Intellectual Ventures has invested in several geoengineering ideas, said that we could cool the earth by stirring the seas.
The potential side effects of geoengineering are presently not well understood and will likely include unintended ecological consequences, which in turn can pose important political, social, and ethical challenges.
What you might regard as an optimistic note is the degree of thought and debate that's going into the issue of how to regulate geoengineering research before it happens.
Geoengineering is the intentional alteration of the climate system on a large scale and includes a broad range of proposed interventions at various degrees of testing and with uncertain consequences.
Then there are others who have proposed radical geoengineering schemes, such as injecting tons of sunlight-reflecting particulates into the stratosphere as a way to address the threat of climate change.
However, not everyone is convinced by the geoengineering ideas.
Many people see geoengineering as a false solution to an existential crisis akin to encouraging a heart-attack patient to avoid exercise and continue to gobble fatty food while simply doubling his dose of Lipitor.
This policy brief is based on the UNESCO workshop on geoengineering organized by its Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, the Basic and Engineering Sciences Division and the Ecological and Earth Sciences Division (Paris, November 2010).
As new regulations clean up shipping fuels in order to improve air quality in coastal regions, that brightening effect will be reduced, adding to the world's warming in a sort of inadvertent reverse geoengineering.
Caldeira began researching geoengineering almost by accident.
Considering that, a few years ago, it was rare to get the computer time needed to do even a single geoengineering simulation with a state-of-the-art climate model, this investment of time and effort marks a big step forward.
And in fact those same sulfate particles are a primary ingredient in acid rain, so loading the atmosphere with them is probably not a good idea either (although geoengineering proponents have suggested doing exactly that to help cool the climate).
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