Beam Me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 10/27/2009 7:52:50 PM PDT by Lorianne
IF we need to cool the Earth in a hurry, what is the best way to do it?
Reducing carbon emissions is not a great way of cooling the Earth in a hurry for two key reasons: (1) even if we cut carbon emissions today, the Earth will continue warming for decades; and (2) reducing carbon emissions is expensive, with a price tag of at least $1 trillion per year. (There is a third problem with reducing carbon emissions, which is that it requires worldwide behavioral change, which will be hard to achieve. But even beyond that, carbon mitigation is not a great solution to the question posed above. There might be other significant benefits tor reducing carbon emissions — addressing ocean acidification, for instance.)
A much better approach, we conclude, is geoengineering. The scientific evidence suggests that either the stratoshield or increased oceanic clouds would have a large and immediate impact on cooling the Earth, unlike carbon-emission reductions. The cost of these solutions is trivial compared to the cost of lowering carbon emissions — literally thousands of times cheaper! Perhaps best of all, if something goes wrong and we decide we don’t like the results of the stratoshield or the oceanic clouds, we can stop the programs immediately and any effects will quickly disappear. These two geo-engineering solutions are completely reversible. Given the huge costs of global cataclysm and how cheap the solutions are, it would be crazy not to move forward with geoengineering research in order to have these solutions ready to go in case we decide we need to cool the Earth.
Why then, are our our conclusions so radically different from those of our critics? The answer:
We are answering a different question than our critics.
(Excerpt) Read more at freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com ...
No harm, no foul.
These two guys have already drawn very sharp critiques from the high priests of the Global Warming religion.
This modern day version of Lysenkoism is just too ridiculous!
Exactly. Which is why their ‘fix’ is ingenious. It calls the GWists’ bluff.
It’s always been there. If we really wanted the earth to be cooler (for whatever reason) we could always release a cloud of particulates into the air which would have a downward impact on the temperature. Global warmists have always admitted as much, even talking at length about such measures.
Of course, all such discussions severely underestimate the scale off effort needed to have any noticeable effect on a system as huge as the planet’s atmosphere - but hey, I’m not the one exaggerating man’s ability to control such things. As a pretended solution to pretended global warming the envirowackos would never accept it simply because it places man above nature, and they won’t ever accept that.
Here’s another way to “save” the earth...stop printing the NY Times. You quit killing trees, stops the use of making those carbon imprinting inks and it eliminates all the carbon it takes to get people there for work. Then they won’t have any money, won’t be able to buy meat and thus further saving the world for worms, bugs and other animals.
I see your point, but maybe there’s an easier bluff call.
Ask the question: Ok, if we spend these trillions will it work? Will it stop “global warming”? How much?
No
No
Teeny tiny insignificant bit.
Ok, tell me again why you want to take trillions of dollars out of my pocket?
Open up all your freezer doors at the same time! /s
Alternately, we could just burn down some big cities like Washington D.C., New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles...you get the idea. Finally the bastions of Liberalism could actually contribute something positive to the GW hoax problem.
Why cool the earth at all, ever? Hasn’t it been cooling?
From the wikipedia site: Isaak Izrailevich Prezent, a main Lysenko theorist, presented Lysenko in Soviet mass-media as a genius...
Isn't this what our media do with every liberal thinker?
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