It's not reassuring to see one of Al Gore's worst ideas to modify the climate taken up by the American Enterprise Institute.
And, alas the National Academy of Sciences.
The evidence for increased CO2 increasing the global temperature is solid enough. Complicating the picture is the other solid fact: we live under a highly variable star. Twenty thousand years ago a sheet of ice a mile thick covered North America north of the Ohio river.
There may be one thing keeping it from happening again: the greenhouse effect.
During the last thousand years there was an episode of massive global cooling: the Little Ice Age.
It ended at the onset of the industrial age. About the time CO2 emissions increased.
I don't know. But dimming the sun to control global warming is totally irrational, given the complexity of the problem and the clear lack of understanding anyone has about the issue.
And for the AEI to support geoengineering initiatives? That's a bad, bad sign.
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Indeed, the thought of the United States Government attempting to 'geoengineer' the Earth's climate is absolutely terrifying. Artificially causing a volcanic winter? Christ, what could possibly go wrong?
Of course temperature is not even the biggest issue. The AEI guy mentions in passing "slow" ocean acidification. Well, it is not so slow. In fact the Cenozoic may end in 2050:
Studies indicate that the shells and skeletons possessed by everything from reef-building corals to mollusks and plankton begin to dissolve within forty-eight hours of exposure to the acidity expected in the ocean by 2050. Coral reefs will almost certainly disappear and, even more worrisome, so will plankton. Phytoplankton absorb greenhouse gases, manufacture oxygen, and are the primary producers of the marine food web.
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Exactly right, Logan. The issue is the increasing carbon dioxide.
That could be halted by shifting to biofuels generated solely by solar energy.
Similarly, every summer there's a dip in the carbon dioxide, indicating carbon-neutral energy and biological carbon fixation would lower carbon dioxide slowly without precipitating sudden meterological disasters.
Of course, slow, safe, and steady gives no quick profits or financial windfalls to the private contractor crowd, and a switch to solar generated biofuels leaves the fossil fuel boys sucking wind.
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