Enlarge / Stratospheric aerosols can make for great sunsets, regardless of how they get there. (credit: Rachel Dulson)
Humanity has managed to stabilize its carbon emissions, but they have yet to start trending downwards. It looks increasingly probable that we're going to emit enough to commit to at least 1.5° C of warming—and we need to act quickly to avert going past 2° C. This failure to get our emissions in order may force us to consider alternatives such as pulling carbon dioxide out of the air or geoengineering to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight.
Of the two, geoengineering comes with the longest list of unknowns, with a recent report from the National Academies of Science saying, "Scientific understanding of many aspects of solar geoengineering technologies remains limited, including how they could affect weather extremes, agriculture, natural ecosystems, or human health."
So, some Silicon Valley types naturally decided to go ahead and launch a startup company that would offer geoengineering for a fee. The company claims to offer warming offsets despite the considerable unknowns regarding geoengineering. And it's even worse than that sounds; based on an article in MIT Technology Review, the company has already started launching balloons to the stratosphere, despite not being capable of determining whether they're actually deploying their payload.
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