“People have a sort of hubris and think they can control different parts of nature and its proven that they are wrong ... Ecological controls don’t work out exactly as planned.”

– James R. Flemming, author of The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control

“Suppose ... that the best solution (to global warming) involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere (to block the sun’s rays and cool the planet), all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.”

So wrote The Wall Street Journal’s pundit Bret Stephens in a column dismissing anyone who questioned the wisdom of “geoengineering” Earth’s atmosphere as adherents of “the religion of global warming.”

Said faithful, Stephens asserted, are too invested in the idea that confronting global warming will require major adjustments to the global economy to allow that a simple, inexpensive solution might have been developed – by a company, headed by a former Microsoft executive, that holds patents in the geoengineering field, in the example he cited. (Bill Gates recently has begun to finance scientists who want to conduct geoengineering experiments.)

Furthermore, Stephens concludes, these global warming worshipers have a pernicious hidden agenda: If global warming is “solved,” they can no longer rake in trillions in research funding, carbon taxes and alternative-energy grants. Therefore, they will stymie any solutions such as geoengineering that would allow us to continue burning fossil fuels.

Well, as one of those faithful I must abjure: I could pass from Earth in peace if an easy, affordable solution to global warming were developed – if, for example, the various stratospheric geoengineering schemes that have been proposed were viable, reliable or even sane.

But alas, they are not.

It is generally agreed that spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it would interact with existing chemicals to create a “screen” of reflective particles, would cool the planet. When the volcano Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it injected large quantities of particulates into the stratosphere. In the months afterward, global temperatures decreased by almost 1 degree Fahrenheit.

A recent study by the U.S. aerospace company Aurora Flight Sciences says that releasing 1 million to 5 million tons of sulfur dioxide per year could reduce temperatures by 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit. (However, a newer study calls for 60 million tons per year if carbon dioxide levels are allowed to rise above 450 parts per million.)

There are technical challenges. The proposals for lifting the 5 million tons of sulfur dioxide include shooting it with 16-inch naval guns – which would require about 70 million shots per year at a cost of $70 billion – to ejecting it from a fleet of Boeing 747s working around the clock.

Then there are Stephens’ blimps which the AFS study indicates could be flown at $10 billion per year – for the 20 years many scientists think it would take to have a lasting effect on Earth. (There goes his “cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.”) But there’s a glitch: The technology for such high-altitude blimps is not yet developed.

However, the technical difficulties and expenses are just the beginning of the scheme’s problems. A recent study published in The Journal of Environmental Research Letters – described by science writer Damian Carrington as “the first to convincingly model what happens to rainfall if sulfates were deployed on a huge scale” – shows that the unintended consequences could be as bad as global warming itself.

The study explains that as well as cooling Earth, the particulate shield would interfere with cloud formation, likely reducing global rainfall as much as global warming would increase it. The effect would be especially pronounced in the tropics, where rainfall could be cut by 20 percent – affecting the health of the Amazon rain forest, the world’s largest carbon sink, and inflicting famine upon billions of people in Asia, Africa and Latin America while inflaming international tensions.

Some (of the many) additional problems include the depletion of stratospheric ozone, our principal protection from the sun’s ultra-violet rays; enhanced sulfuric acid precipitation; and reduced sunlight for plants and solar panels.

Who has the right to geoengineer us? Although climate models agree on the big picture – giving us a can’t-be-ignored warning about global warming – the climate system is far too complex for anyone to claim, on the basis of modeling or small-scale experimentation, that atmospheric geoengineering will “protect” us.

We need to stop burning fossil fuels at our ecological house.

Philip S. Wenz, who grew up in Durango and Boulder, now lives in Corvallis, Ore., where he teaches and writes about environmental issues. Reach him via email through his website, www.your-ecological-house.com.