Year 4, Month 1, Day 11: Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on one of our technological back-up plans:

One afternoon last fall, Armand Neukermans, a tall engineer with a sweep of silver bangs, flipped on a noisy pump in the back corner of a Sunnyvale lab. Within moments, a fine mist emerged from a tiny nozzle, a haze of salt water under high pressure and heat.

It didn’t look like much. But this seemingly simple vapor carries a lot of hope – and inspires a lot of fear. If Neukermans’ team of researchers can fine-tune the mechanism to spray just the right size and quantity of salt particles into the sky, scientists might be able to make coastal clouds more reflective.

The hope is that by doing so, humankind could send more heat and light back into space, wielding clouds as shields against climate change.

The fear, at least the one cited most often, is that altering the atmosphere this way could also unleash dangerous side effects.

“Ten years ago, people would have said this is totally wacky,” Neukermans said. “But it could give us some time if global warming really becomes catastrophic.”

When, not if. Sent January 6:

While the prospect of geoengineering technologies for mitigating climate change’s effects is terrifying, the crisis allows for no non-terrifying outcomes. We’re midway through a mass extinction of a magnitude unprecedented in human history; our greenhouse emissions have achieved a critical mass sufficient to forestall an ice age 50,000 years from now (even if we completely stopped burning fossil fuels today); melting methane in the Arctic has transformed the “Venus effect” from a never-in-a-million-years nightmare to a statistically significant probability.

There’s no single cause of the climate disaster, and no single solution. But the business-as-usual approach which has brought us to this point must be rejected; we humans must transform ourselves, our communities, and our nations — putting the survival of our species above our short-term gratification. Armand Neukermans’ work on increasing cloud reflectivity could never as dangerously uncontrolled an experiment on Earth’s atmosphere as the multi-century endeavor known as industrial civilization.

Warren Senders

Published.

Month 10, Day 17: If Only You Could Geo-Engineer Stupidity Out Of The Atmosphere

Dana Milbank at the Washington Post writes an obituary for cap-and-trade, and instead recommends that Democrats try and interest their Republican colleagues in geo-engineering as a coping strategy for the coming climate apocalypse.

The Post has been instrumental in creating and fostering a level of scientific ignorance in our political class that is directly responsible for much of our current predicament (see: Will, George). And, as usual, the comments on Milbank’s article are a demonstration of the prevalence of dumb.

Cap-and-trade, originally a Republican idea, may indeed be dead in the water due to inflexible opposition in the Senate. And, as Milbank suggests, a huge geo-engineering program may be more attractive. The image of huge cannons firing sulfur into the atmosphere will appeal to politicians of both parties who are enthusiastic about big guns. But the central question is simply this: how can we as a nation accomplish any necessary actions on climate when conservatives wholeheartedly embrace a vehemently anti-science position? Of the current crop of Republican candidates, those accepting the scientific factuality of global climate change can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. What gave rise to this intransigence? Alas, our print and broadcast media, ever reluctant to undertake difficult explanations (when facile misrepresentations are easier and cheaper) must bear much of the blame for the nation’s appalling ignorance of the gravest threat humanity has ever faced.

Warren Senders