America’s defence department is looking for rogue geoengineers

country experiencing the bad effects of —crop failures, perhaps, or serious flooding—were to begin, unilaterally and perhaps quietly, to try to modify the climate? Such a project, reckons , a research arm of America’s defence department, is possible. But it could trigger chaos, and not just of the meteorological sort. The agency, the overall objectives of which include preventing “strategic surprise”, has therefore recently begun to pay for research into how such an event might happen, and how to react to it.Part of this work is pure science—upgrading the relevant computer models to forecast changing weather patterns that could result from such an irregular project. The other part is to use a branch of maths called game theory to identify those countries, or even non-state entities, which might, if push came to shove, be most likely to give climate engineering a go.