THE CRIES of climate doom are becoming more strident and more desperate as every instance of bad weather is taken as positive evidence that our planet is falling into a climatic black hole. Decisions are needed now! Next week is too late!
The alarms always begin with ‘research shows’, ‘a new analysis reveals’, or ‘scientists are warning that’ to prove that it’s well-founded stuff so you must take notice. Somehow these experts have contrived to show that, for instance, the climate is warming faster than at any other time. In answer to which, you might ask them what was the average temperature of the world in June 856 AD? Or April 2025 BC?
We are experiencing record heat, they claim, which can only get worse. Again you might wonder about that world ‘record’ when we have temperature data going back only a couple of hundred years. We are apparently on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. Even the UN chief has warned of unimaginable catastrophe and a crisis of unimaginable scale.
It’s time to think differently, they say, we are moving into a critical and unpredictable phase of the climate crisis. Climate change is worsening at a dangerous pace.
But don’t worry, other experts are aware of the problem and claim they have the answer: geo-engineering, by which they mean a repair kit for our crumbling climate.
One much favoured idea amongst this we-must-do-something-different tribe is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), which means spreading particles 10-30 miles up in the stratosphere to reduce the intensity of the sun’s radiation.
This different approach to climate change has supporters who are equally forthright about their schemes. Geo-engineering is probably our only hope to buy us time, says one. Much more detailed information about this worrying subject can be found in Jonathon Riley’s series of articles in TCW last year.
In February a scientific paper published in Nature argued that while SAI could mitigate the harmful effect of global warming, it might have undesirable side effects. A few weeks later another claimed that large-scale climate intervention was inevitable.
The Guardian argued at first that ‘the gamble on solar engineering is like using aspirin for cancer’. Two days later it ran a different view: ‘The only potential tool we have to reduce temperatures on a short timescale is solar geo-engineering.’ Devastating impacts could happen, it seems, if we have even 2 deg C of warming.
There are other climate-mending ideas, all involving conducting experiments on the earth’s atmosphere. The wide-ranging plans have been causing concern for years. This is the BBC’s science editor in November 2014: ‘[Geo-engineering] schemes to tackle climate change could prove disastrous for billions of people, but might be required for the good of the planet, scientists say.’
The field of battle is now clear. There are two parties, each convinced our climate is changing dangerously and that theirs is the only way to save the earth. One side (the Negotiators) think they can do it by means of all countries agreeing to stop using carbon-based fuels. The Engineers say this will not happen and something more drastic is necessary.
The Negotiators’ argument is weak. Another climate conference is due in November, almost certainly with more pleas for massive reductions in emissions. But no country is likely to crash its economy unless everybody joins in, which is what the Conference idea has been based on. Dear old GB has boasted about leading the race to Net Zero, but very few have bothered to enter.
Last December the previous US administration had a sudden thought that ‘hostile foreign states or mega-rich entrepreneurs could be hatching plans to conduct solar geo-engineering’. They are designing a warning system ‘to detect supervillain-style plots to manipulate the weather’. The Engineers’ clever ideas are just another weapon of war.
Now why would Biden and his team have been worried? Geo-engineering projects have been around for years, but by December it was becoming obvious there would soon be several mega-rich folk in the White House who might want to save the world.
Nothing that has happened since President Trump took office can have soothed their fears. April 8: ‘Received wisdom on the president was wrong: he means precisely what he says, including on Greenland and a third term.’ April 9: ‘The economic emergency is just one of a galaxy of emergencies … The emergency of the moment is the economy.’ April 12: ‘The president changes his mind by the minute.’
In early April the ‘the emergency of the moment’ was the American economy. Think what the next one might be.
