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About halfway down in https://cen.acs.org/
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Many object to shielding the planet from the sun’s rays by injecting particles into the atmosphere, but a small band of researchers think the approach is worth studying before it’s too late
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"In 2010, the Convention of Biological Diversity, an institute of the United Nations with more than 190 parties—excluding the U.S.—issued what amounts to a moratorium on any large-scale climate intervention activities, including solar geoengineering or carbon capture, until there is enough scientific evidence to justify such strategies."
It's like they are riding along in a car, seatbelts unbuckled, while heading for an imminent and foreseeable collision. Sheer madness.
-- Steve
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To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old
problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination
and marks real advance in science. -- Albert Einstein
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Thank you, Steve.
I agree that the group you are referring to is an example of group insanity and hysteria so severe that it threatens our very existence.
It reminds me of an informal discussion I had with some IT executives last week, where we summed it up: "To understand how it really works in Congress, there are two things which drive it all: economics, and psychiatry." For many years, large and powerful lobby groups have been drooling over all the cash they expected to extract from the taxpayer from things like the Waxman climate bill of 2009. (I still remember a hearing where an advocate stood up, looked rapturous, saying something like "You really need to envision the great new ecology which could emerge from the flow of this $500 billion per year in allowances which this bill will pour into the environment."
This was before Trump changed the language... I envisioned a great swamp full of crocodiles and malaria carrying mosquitoes... )
So those folks view geoengineering as a threat to their expected bonanza. Group response to a threat. Waxman did not pass in the US, but something similar passed in the EU, and lots of crocodiles were fed for awhile, so of course they respond to threats, and of course their feeding is what matters to them, not the survival either of the species or of the planet.
Many more honest environmentalists say "All known geoengineering is risky, so we should wait until the last ditch." (The statement you found is more like "let's wait until we are provably dead before we stir ourselves.") Problem with that:
(1) IF it is risky, and if there is SOME possibility we might need it, the rational response is to explore a wide variety of possible geoengineering solutions, get a better understanding of its impacts, and find the best we can, with aggressive technology development. NOT JUST DO NOTHING!!! One of the things we would do, if rationally trying to survive, is do full justice to space-based options, among others (as Abdul Kalam emphasized) by developing truly low-cost truly real launch capabilities, and studying ways we could exploit them, IN PARALLEL.
(2) Sadly, there is evidence that the last ditch is already here. It is dumb that we debate whether global warming might shut down the main thermohaline currents ("lungs of the planet") which bring oxygen to the ocean; they have already shut down:
In my view, the environmentalists who do not face up to that are a demonstration of groupthink insanity just as serious as... whatever your favorite example of group hysteria may be.
Best regards,
Paul
P.S. Of course, there were better, simpler, and more rational climate bills proposed in 2009. Why did Reid insist on Waxman-like bill? Well, that's more like the swamp which Trump has talked about, which is certainly not just Democrats.
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A defender of the UN position wrote back :
Thanks, Steve!
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A defender of the UN position wrote back :
You seem to have overlooked the words "large scale" in the phrase "large-scale climate intervention."
They certainly did NOT advocate doing anything at all.
It reminds me of how Mike Rogers recently DID NOT cancel NSA's efforts in information assurance, needed urgently to
harden our power grid. "We are just sending the functions elsewhere on a distributed basis."
Political speak for strenuous efforts to get rid of competition.
Thanks, Steve!
I am ever so glad that someone else really cares about that boring old issue of whether we live or die in the end.
I had a chance last night to probe a little further. You and I were BASICALLY right, but ...
What really happened was classic reactive group thinking. Some folks in the UN system became aware of just how serious the H2S threat is, and probed the possibility of international action (with an open door to US participation, but not requiring it or waiting for it). And then... the announcement was just a fancy way of saying NO. Many hired hands at the UN have their own interests guiding their behavior, just like lobbyists who make money as representatives of some company or group in Washington.
Why not just live and let live? Well, what if they are hard committed to a policy which DOESN'T let us live?
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