In the cover story for a special Wall Street Journal report, IEET Senior Fellow Jamais Cascio admits he has become a reluctant advocate of “cooling the planet.” Our current IEET poll asks whether you agree on the merits of geoengineering.
We were planning to change the poll this week, but now that the issue is hitting the mainstream fan, so to speak, we’ll leave it up a bit longer. If you haven’t weighed in yet, make your vote count!
IEET Blog
The issue of geoengineering is “hitting the mainstream fan” now, but just wait until non-irrigated crops start routinely failing due to record high temperatures in a couple of decades. The alternative to geoengineering is a massive cull of humanity.
There is a simple and cheap way to immediately cool down the Earth: just add a little (more) sun dimming aerosol to the upper atmosphere. Using an engineered aerosol could be ten times cheaper than using SO2, not destroy the ozone layer, and avoid further acidifying the environment. We are all ready living in a “fool’s climate” where our short-lived sun dimming pollution is accidentally cooling us down around 1C, so what if we add a little more to restore the polar ice and glaciers?
Remember, the US government has replaced WMD with destabilization of foreign regimes as the biggest threat to our national security. In the coming decades, you will see massive destabilization due to famine, drought, and social unrest. Frankly, the current climate models are grossly underestimating the rate of climate change, as is evidenced by their underestimation of current warming, ocean level rise, and the breakup of polar sea ice.