A group of scientists and legal experts are calling for a strong, international body to monitor geoengineering and prevent individual nations from attempting potentially dangerous experiments on their own.

Last week the topic of geoengineering made headlines when the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released reports calling for further research into non-traditional ways of cooling the Earth.

Geoengineering includes methods like carbon-capture and sequestration, which traps carbon particles and buries them underground or in other holding-areas so that they are not released into that atmosphere. Other methods include releasing sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the Earth and fertilizing oceans with iron to encourage the growth of plankton which would remove additional carbon.

Although the NAS cautioned that geoengineering was no substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, said that the technology was not currently viable and could pose additional risks and recommended only further study of the ideas, there was a rapid backlash.

Some scientists and many environmentalists were angered by the very idea of, what the Washington Post called “playing God with the planet.”

“…it’s an idea that almost certainly will never be practical and could be more dangerous than the problem it’s trying to solve,” said the Post’s Jason Samenow.

However, after decades of talking about climate change and carbon emissions continuing to rise year after year, many people are taking the idea very seriously. An increasing number of people see geoengineering or climate engineering as a potential strategy to put a short-term hold on global warming while ways are found to reduce carbon emissions to a sustainable level.

“These technologies appear to provide a pathway by which we could substantially reduce climate risks over the next half-century. That means reducing the risks of sea-level rise, reducing the risks of stress for the crops of people in the poorest and hottest parts of the world, This would be complementary to emissions reductions. Nothing changes the fact that in the long run, the only way to manage carbon risk is to stop emitting carbon-dioxide. But, similarly, nothing we know about cutting carbon-dioxide emissions says that’s going to help us deal with the risk of CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere,” said Harvard’s David Keith, author of the book, “A Case for Climate Engineering“, according to Vox.

Now, according to Phys.org, a group of US scientists and legal experts want a strong, international authority to regulate any attempt at man-made interventions to combat global warming.

“If some nations decide this year to embark on a crude untested experimental attempt to do it, we cannot prevent it,” Edward Parsons said in San Jose, California at the American Society for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) annual meeting.

Geoengineering is not currently regulated by any international body or treaty, so there is nothing to prevent any nation from acting independently.

”The governance mechanism [for the organization] should be open, be transparent and should involve the civil society on deciding where is the dividing line for these experiences. If the US starts to talk about this, we can have other nations joining in,” said Marcia McNutt, editor in chief of the journal Science and the former president of the American Geophysical Union.

There has been no signal of support yet, from any national or international political organization, that plans are being created for such an organization.