Yesterday morning I was reading my latest edition of Newsweek while eating breakfast, and I came across an article that startled me. It was about the latest efforts to stop global warming, and it involves a plan to create 100's of unmanned boats that will troll the ocean and spew salt and water up into the sky in order to increase the cloud cover of the planet. This cloud cover would reflect more of the sun's energy and cool the planet. The last sentence of the article said--almost as a throwaway--that some scientists were worried that there could be unintended consequences.Of course there are going to be unintended consequences to something like this! Man-made global warming, if it's real, is a result of us monkeying around with the environment. We dug up all of those long buried fossil fuels and set them on fire. We weren't TRYING to increase the temperature of the earth. We were trying to charge the batteries on my cell phone. That's all. But in the process of doing that we've caused all kinds of climate change.
And if we build these ships and deploy them, they may decrease the temperature of the earth. But what else are they going to do? Increase the amount of rainfall and cause massive flooding? DECREASE the amount of rainfall in areas where the clouds aren't being created and cause massive droughts? Do something else that no one can even imagine? It's scary as hell to me.
It's battling a man-made creation with another man-made creation, and it just seems like a bad idea to me. It's as if a homeowner were leaving crumbs everywhere and found ants in his kitchen. Rather than picking up the crumbs he sprays poison all over his kitchen. Now he's got ants AND poison.
Anyway, I couldn't find the article I read on the Newsweek website, but I didn't want you to think I was making this up, so here's a link to an article on a different site that discusses this.
2 comments:
Interesting post.
As you say, we (humanity) are already involved in a massive geoengineering project (unplanned as it may be) of pumping billions of tons of fossil carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2. Ideas of using other geoengineering projects have been kicking around for years. The UK's (Britain, not the 'Cats) Royal Society on Tuesday, just released a major report on the possible use of geoengineering projects to mitigate climate change; http://tinyurl.com/m9pu32. Here's an article from Nature that summarizes the report; http://tinyurl.com/npfxfd.
Basically, the report concludes that the best way to control climate change is still to reduce CO2 emissions. Because of the potential, unintended consequences of massive geoengineering projects, the report also argues that there needs to be international oversight and control of even small geoengineering experiments. However, the report also concludes that studies and experiments should be done (under strict guidelines) so that we could be ready if there is a massive climate emergency.
Scary but interesting stuff.
I don't think we understand the problem and we will bankrupt the USA trying to mitigate a problem that has very little to do with man and a lot to do with other uncontrollable things like volcanos and of all things people, so taking the "Gore" approach we seal all volcanos and kill the people oh damn forgot the trees ...
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