I have been a hunter all my life but cannot understand the policy(politics) of having military armament in civilian hands

Please don't forget that bolt-action rifles, break-action shotguns, even bows and arrows are ALL military-style weapons.  Here in the USA, we do NOT use military armament in hunting - well, except when our law enforcement personnel are hunting dangerous criminals.

AR-10 and AR-15 rifles are NOT military weapons, though they are cosmetically similar.

What a supercilious answer ! 

Hi Bud!

Been a while.

I'll try to get into DC today.

Not supercilious at all.  Merely factual.

Hi Jen!

Take care -

My question marks are a smiley gone wrong

Oh well, that happens occasionally.

Geoengineering: The quick, and potentially catastrophic, fix for climate change

Proposals for geoengineering projects sound like something out of science fiction.

Pumping aerosols into the upper atmosphere to make clouds more reflective, for example. Or fertilizing oceans with iron to promote the growth of plankton and algae so they consume more carbon dioxide.

Then there are proposals to plant vast swathes of trees in desert areas, or brighten clouds above marine areas to prevent ocean warming.

They sound like drastic interventions because that's what geoengineering is: the active and intentional modification of the climate.

As the Paris agreement target of limiting global temperature rise to two degrees or less seems increasingly improbable, there has been renewed interest in solutions that once seemed morally challenging, or difficult to contemplate.

To proponents, like Cambridge University's Hugh Hunt, geoengineering could mitigate the worst aspects of climate change, and provide time to look for more permanent solutions.

"It's a little bit like someone with lung cancer - we're not going to give you a transplant if you're going to carry on smoking," he said.

"Geoengineering will buy us some time, until we get this sorted out."

Dare not speak its name

Dr Hunt is currently investigating the construction of huge updraft towers in the desert, and using the air flows to generate electricity while stripping the airstream of greenhouse gasses.

He previously worked on a project named SPICE — Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering — which looked at sending a tethered balloon 20km above to earth to seed aerosols into the stratosphere.

In theory, the particles would change the optical properties of sunlight, reflecting more solar radiation into space and reducing global temperatures.

The idea was to emulate natural volcanic events, like the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which caused global cooling of one degree for about a year.

Intellectual property concerns were among the reasons SPICE and its balloon fell back to earth, figuratively speaking.

"It was closed down because it was deemed to be controversial," he said.

Dr Hunt is concerned about the lack of research into geoengineering solutions, which he says could leave the international community seriously unprepared if any country decided to act unilaterally.

"If they could be made to work, they could be quite cheap - the development time can be short, and the cost low," he said.