Geoengineering and Burt Rutan - The Economist

Letter to the Editor of The Economist sent on 6 of June 2012.

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Dear Sir,

SpaceShipOne (designed by Mr Rutan)
at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington D.C.
Photo from wikipedia.

In your last Brain Scan article ("A maverick in flight", Technology Quarterly, June 2012) on the accomplishments of Burt Rutan, a pioneering and unconventional aerospace engineer, I find entertaining how Mr Rutan uses acrobatics to announce that global warming will lead environmentalists into an engineering breakthrough. He refers to unprecedented global warming and the tipping point for atmospheric carbon dioxide as "it’s just nonsense".

But this might not be a pejorative term for him. The statement is followed by the clarification:
 "You run into them [breakthroughs] when you’ve found something that doesn’t make sense and you find a way to make it work".

Maybe he is announcing the arrival of geoengineering. I would approve.

Best Regards,

-
Dr Guillermo Rein
Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering
Imperial College London
http://www.eng.ed.ac.uk/~grein