Op-Ed: Scientists Say Carbon Emissions Reductions A Dumb Idea

The cost to spray particles over the Arctic would be a couple hundred million dollars a year; and for the whole planet, it's a few billion a year. That's the thing that terrifies geoengineering's opponents -- that this is at least a thousand times cheaper than anything else...Everybody talks about [geoengineering] as though it's a matter of mass action, but I don't think it is -- I don't think it can be. The reason nothing's being done is that governments are ever slower to act...Only one or two organized bodies have been able to carry down their traditions for a thousand years...Future societies are going to have to place their trust in a technological enterprise as they never have before,” says physicist and best-selling science fiction novelist Gregory Benford. What he’s talking about is twofold. First off, he’s talking about the increasingly popular idea among a pretty good number of scientists, himself included, that the only cost-effective, humane, and realistic way to curb global warming is through some type or combination of types of “geo-engineering”: that is, literally altering the Earth and/or the Earth’s climate so that the disasters predicted by global warming activists don’t come to pass. Benford’s personal idea is to suspend trillions of itty-bitty sun-reflective particles in the Earth’s stratosphere (thereby tacitly admitting that the Sun is a significant factor in causing global warming, although Benford gives lip service to the idea that it’s increased spew-ups of carbon dioxide). This was an idea that had a precursor in astrophysicist John Von Neumann in the 1950s…um, except that he wanted to do something similar in order to warm the planet and increase the availability of arable land in the northern hemisphere by melting a lot of arctic ice. But secondly, and to this writer much more salient, just as Benford remarks, geo-engineering is vastly less expensive than government taxation and regulation, and it would not require mass sacrifice and the harming of billions of people in developing and Third World nations where, in some of the latter, areas are so poor and out of touch with what we in the civilized world take to be basic human necessities (and justifiably so) that the lighting up of a place’s first electric street lamp literally sets off dancing in the (dirt) streets. The geo-engineering advocates further make it clear that private industry would ultimately play a larger, more powerful role in aiding the scientists’ efforts than any government. And most importantly to them, their efforts would yield real, significant effects in only a few years—unlike those proposed by politicians and the IPCC. So: Transparency (through simplicity and private initiative), no interference with economic development (indeed, there would be economic stimulus), scientific advancement, and all at a fraction of the cost of the measures proposed by politicians and the likes of Al Gore and all his business cronies and media minions. Can it be any wonder Al Gore never thought of all this? It causes them to lose vast swaths of their power. "Global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models...There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated...In humid air, the effect of carbon dioxide on radiation transport is unimportant because the transport of thermal radiation is already blocked by the much larger greenhouse effect of water vapor. The effect of carbon dioxide is important where the air is dry, and air is usually dry only where it is cold. Hot desert air may feel dry but often contains a lot of water vapor. The warming effect of carbon dioxide is strongest where air is cold and dry, mainly in the arctic rather than in the tropics, mainly in mountainous regions rather than in lowlands, mainly in winter rather than in summer, and mainly at night rather than in daytime," says another eminent physicist and writer, Freeman Dyson. But what Dyson says gets even more interesting -- for everyone. Dyson says that we need to consider “the mystery of the wet Sahara. This is a mystery that has always fascinated me. At many places in the Sahara desert that are now dry and unpopulated, we find rock-paintings showing people with herds of animals...The glaciers that are now shrinking were much smaller six thousand years ago than they are today. Six thousand years ago seems to have been the warmest and wettest period of the interglacial era that began twelve thousand years ago when the last Ice Age ended. I would like to ask two questions. First, if the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is allowed to continue, shall we arrive at a climate similar to the climate of six thousand years ago when the Sahara was wet? Second, if we could choose between the climate of today with a dry Sahara and the climate of six thousand years ago with a wet Sahara, should we prefer the climate of today? [I answer] ‘yes’ to the first question and ‘no’ to the second.” None of this answers the questions concerning whether or not carbon dioxide really is playing any leading role in climate change or if we really can effect the climate, which is a vastly complex system, nearly as effectively as even some of our best scientists imagine. But to this writer, two things are obvious. One, we shouldn’t be so hasty in deciding that climate change that we are now experiencing, if it even does play out roughly as predicted over the next decades, will be for ill and not for good. Two, even if we do need to try to do something to staunch the growth of climate change, the “solutions” laid on the table by Al Gore and all his cronies and his wild-eyed faithful are closer to suicide.