I’ve always loved this idea but I’m scared of what unforeseen monkey’s paw issues might arise.

Valid concern, but it seems like the glide path—continued carbon dioxide buildup and climate change—might eventually be worse than the unknown unknowns. (I suppose how one makes that decision is the challenge, hence the need for further study, per the article.)

This is one of the few carbon capture approaches that appears to be able to approach global scale, so I'm rooting for it. Even enhanced weathering suffers from needing to move billions of tons of rock, but scattering trace minerals seems pretty high leverage. The sheer mass of material that must be removed from the atmosphere is otherwise very intimidating.

I think everybody who has thought much about it has similar concerns. I'd propose we start soon, start small, ramp up slowly, and be thorough about the data collection.

As uncomfortable as it is to experiment on the only planet you have, even worse would be to wait too long and then, in a panic, try to do everything that might possibly work all at once and to as extreme a degree as possible.

I find the attitude of "it's more important to not be blamed if something goes wrong than it is to solve the problem" to be incredibly annoying. It's like the epitome of bureaucracy.

Totally get that. It's got that classic "elegant in theory, terrifying in practice" energy