UK geoengineering project put on hold

Guardian : A test of a UK geoengineering project has been postponed pending further discussion of its implications. The Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) project, which was conceived in March 2010, would inject particles into Earth’s atmosphere to try to cool the planet and mitigate climate change. In mid-September 2011, SPICE announced the UK’s first field trial. However, the trial was postponed later that month by the project’s scientific advisers, who say further public discussion is needed. Among the objections to the plan is the charge that such a project would “deflect political and scientific action away from reducing greenhouse-gas emissions,” write Phil Macnaghten, chair of the advisory panel, and Richard Owen, architect of the project’s governance process, who describe in Nature the first attempt to govern a climate-engineering research project.