Should the government control our climate?

Geoengineering is totally mis-defined in this documentary, and in the entire public discourse, as symbolically painting the earth white and taking sulfuric acid baths, besides hopelessly expensive ideas with devastating side effects!

Dr. Brian Soden’s HPAC talk two days ago, “Geoengineering: A bad idea whose time has come?”, (soon to be posted on the Healthy Planet Action Coalition site, HPAC, watch this space!) sheds new scientific light on the possibilities of effective and safe climate modification by increasing out-going radiation emitted to space at the top of the atmosphere.

There are many possibilities to reverse global climate change, but we still don’t know enough about methods, costs, and side effects for an effective strategy without careful experiments, as well as more models in the hope that they get better when informed by real data!

Dr. Alan Robock, in the video, is confident models answer all climate questions, so experiments to see what actually happens are not needed! I admire his work, but this is a theoretician’s delusion by those who think they know it all, and that small experiments are useless for their own understanding of how reality works.

GeoEngineering is ANY human activity that modifies the earth system, whether solid, liquid, or gaseous phases, or Earth’s living systems. We have engaged in uncontrolled GeoEngineering for thousands of years, by extinctions, burning fossil fuels, cutting down forests, tilling the soil, digging ditches, dredging canals, draining swamps, terracing fields, dredge spoil dumping on eroded beaches, spreading toxic chemicals across the land, water and air, dumping poisons in our air and waters, and building breakwaters, seawalls, jetties, and groynes, apart from our suicidal use of fossil fuels.

CREDIT: Elhacham, E., Ben-Uri, L., Grozovski, J. et al. Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass. Nature 588, 442–444 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5

Earth now has more concrete and asphalt than living biomass of all the trees and plankton and bacteria! What is left of nature cannot clean what has been destroyed without positive help: Regenerative Geo-engineering instead of Degenerative Geo-engineering. That’s why we need Corrective GeoEngineering to undo the catastrophic results of the Destructive GeoEngineering before it is too late!

Credit: Photo: WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY/BARCROFT

Manhattan in 1600 (left) cannot clean the CO2 and sewage of Manhattan in 2000 (right) without a lot of help!

We are seeing again the sort of anti-scientific alarmism of certain theoretical physicists who feared that the first nuclear bomb test at Alamogordo would set off an uncontrollable chain reaction that would blow up the Earth! Oppenheimer had to do feverish last minute calculations to dissuade doubters. Just before the explosion, my grandfather met with Oppenheimer, who was extremely nervous! But he was much calmer right afterwards!

Below: Oppenheimer, relieved that the experiment worked, at Alamogordo Ground Zero once it was cool enough to walk on, photo by my grandfather.

Credit: F.W. Goro / LIFE

Another bad idea whose time had come, whose consequences we have never escaped! We must do better with climate change! We won’t be able to save coral reefs from extinction without IMMEDIATE Regenerative GeoEngineering.