Have been wondering about this sentence since I read it, it seems there must be multiple typos in it for it to make sense...eg "London's docks were so odorous..." (makes a kind of sense, during the Great Stink chemicals were dumped in the sewers to reduce the smell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink ... not oil I think though?). Is that the incident you meant?
Our environment built itself out of eons of incremental changes using self replicating systems using the entirety of habitable surface area.
I think its extremely unlikely that there will be a single one time way of removing carbon from the air (I'd bet on it).
So we will be left with constant and continuous systems cleaning the air.
Instead of not mucking it up in the first place.
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You should also consider that the moment people start selling Geo engineering, they will also sell permission to keep doing what we are doing.
So the solution seems to be to spend more on cleaning the air, and allowing us to pollute it further at the same time.
In such a scenario I see things going MORE wrong, with unanticipated effects going on to create more damage.
Any solution must somehow be a net negative in the long and medium term - and must also not have complex unpredictable knock on effects.
To give you an idea of how often mankind tries this - before the internet there was a time where london's dogs were so Onerous they felt that it would be a good idea to pour oil over the water.
Hindsight is of course 20/20, my point being that healthy scepticism and a high bar for evidence are the watchwords.