Since profits for oil companies trump every decent and honorable effort to lower CO2 emissions and increase renewable energy development, how about spraying sulfates into the earth’s atmosphere for the next 100 years?
If that doesn’t sound reasonable to you, then take it up with the Trump administration. They think it’s just dandy, according to a report in The Guardian.
Harvard engineers who launched the world’s biggest solar geoengineering research program may get a dangerous boost from Donald Trump, environmental organizations are warning.
Under the Trump administration, enthusiasm appears to be growing for the controversial technology of solar geo-engineering, which aims to spray sulphate particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s radiation back to space and decrease the temperature of Earth.
Never mind those pesky solar panels, people! No need to climb up on rooftops and risk injury from falls when you can let the government, and our friends in industry, do the “solar” work for you. Wind power? Pshaw! Wind turbines just ruin your view. Instead, you can have a little bit of haze way up in the sky — you won’t even notice it! — and voilà! Drilling in the Arctic can continue, no problem, and we’ll cool ourselves down at the same time! Human ingenuity — that’s the ticket!
Geoengineers argue that such methods would be an inexpensive way to reduce global warming, but scientists have warned it could have catastrophic consequences for the Earth’s weather systems.
Scientific modelling has shown that stratospheric spraying could drastically curtail rainfall throughout Asia, Africa and South America, causing severe droughts and threatening food supply for billions of people.
Hey, we’re not climate scientists, and we’re in North America, so what’s the diff? Bring on the sprayers, boys! It costs just a few billion bucks a year.
The Harvard experiment may fly in the face of a moratorium on geoengineering adopted in 2010 by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which was reaffirmed in December in Mexico. The United States is one of the few countries to not ratify the UN convention, creating a potential loophole for experiments.
Like I said, what the rest of the world is doing is none of our business. And doesn’t the UN owe us money or something? We don’t have to listen to them, anyway. Onward and upward!
Tuesday, Mar 28, 2017 · 4:36:09 PM +00:00
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J Graham
This is going to happen soon, if they decide to do it. Please contact your members of Congress!
David Schnare, an architect of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition, has lobbied the US government and testified to Senate in favour of federal support for geoengineering.
He has called for a multi-phase plan to fund research and conduct real-world testing within 18 months, deploy massive stratospheric spraying three years after, and continue spraying for a century, a duration geoengineers believe would be necessary to dial back the planet’s temperature.