Bad climate for solutions
Study nixed lest it offer a real fix
THIS week, Harvard University has shut down a Bill Gates-funded geoengineering experiment. The controversial Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx, run by professors David Keith and Frank Keutsch, aimed to study the potential future implementation of geoengineering by crop dusting sulphuric acid into our stratosphere. Nice.
Even if you put aside the almost instant validity such an experiment would give to conspiracy theories like chemtrails and HAARP, it still sounds a bit too much, playing with our thin air like that — in an unprecedented, and potentially catastrophic, manner, too.
But let’s not kid ourselves. The plug wasn’t pulled over fears of playing fast and loose with the venusformation of Earth’s atmosphere.
Nor was it due to Harvard’s faculty’s occasional (yet frequent) dalliance with plagiarism or concerns over the lack of diversity within the ivory tower.
Poor ‘excuse’
No, according to the MIT Technology Review, it was something else entirely: “Even studying the possibility of solar geoengineering eases the societal pressure to cut greenhouse gas emissions,” they clarified.
The Harvard Crimson picked up the scent too, noting that “a vocal minority of scientists have voiced concern that [the experiment’s] technology may provide an excuse to reduce pressure to cut emissions.”
And that’s the irony. Fixing “climate change” without destroying capitalism and everything the West stands for, does nothing for the revolution.
What a waste of a good crisis! It turns out, the climate change business thrives on more climate change alarmism. Whodathunk?
The Harvard Crimson cited a “vocal minority of experts,” among them Chris Field from Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment. Field insists that cutting emissions swiftly is the only way to save the world and, even if geoengineering “worked spectacularly,” it still wouldn’t address “all the impacts” of climate change.
What impacts? Well, fortunately, a letter from the Saami Council, representing indigenous tribes from across the Nordics and Russia, to the SCoPEx Advisory Committee spells it out: “The irreversible sociopolitical effects that could compromise the world’s necessary efforts to achieve zerocarbon societies.”
So here’s what we have in our hands, a new rendition of the classic Mexican standoff: technocratic geoengineering, economic planning and social revolution, all aiming guns at each other.
The fear? If the hoi polloi believe a tech fix is close, they might second-guess the need for human sacrifices to overthrow capitalism and appease the gods of the weather.
‘Political theater’
Raymond Pierrehumbert, a physics guru at the University of Oxford, sums up the thinking, casting geoengineering as a “painkiller,” or perhaps an iron lung, risking to distract the Tide poddrinking generation from fighting the good fight. Lucky for us, he’s a physicist, not a physician.
Then there’s the ETC Group, an extreme climate fundamentalist cult, screaming apocalypse if we even think about geoengineering.
“These experiments amount to scenes in a high-stakes political theater,” said pastor Jim Jones, I mean Jim Thomas, ETC’s mouthpiece. Thomas is concerned the experiment is a grand scheme to trick the populace into rolling out the red carpet for big money. He has a point.
Even Greta Thunberg throws her two cents in, with her usual doomsday charm. “Nature is doing everything it can; it’s screaming at us to back off, to stop — and we are doing the exact opposite,” she said about this specific experiment. A study in non sequitur.
David Keith of SCoPEx, in defense of his work, compares geoengineering sceptics to the naysayers who once argued against airbags, claiming they would encourage reckless driving.
But from where I’m standing, the critics resemble those parents of so-called “trans kids” afflicted with Munchausen syndrome by proxy, who, in their fixation with “climate-affirming care,” recklessly throw all caution to the wind.