Maybe It's Time to Talk About Geoengineering, and Maybe We'll Do Something About CO2

I’ve only blogged about geoengineering once or twice. My feeling has been that it is an inevitability. Most folks know of and are concerned about global warming, yet we still keep electing politicians who make no promise of reducing our carbon output. We even elect politicians who are hostile to the idea that climate change is even real.

Senator James Inhofe calling Climate Change a hoax on the Senate Floor

We elect individuals like this to Congress. Who is to blame? 

So nothing gets done. In the meantime the world warms. I see things going from bad to worse until desperation sinks in somewhere, possibly India or another powerful country with a lot of land giving way to a rising sea, and that government will start shooting sulfate aerosols into the air to cool things down. We will then have crossed the threshold from inadvertently rearranging the dynamics of the atmosphere to intentionally manipulating the atmosphere.

Most folks, me included, have a very natural reaction to these ideas, that they remind us of the workings of some mad scientist. We see Vincent Price or Bella Lugosi in a black and white B movie crazily using his evil genius to despoil an innocent world.

Atomic supermen? Or sulphate aerosols. You decide. 

Lex Luthor, Superman won't let him geoengineer the world.

So are you scared now? Are you sufficiently freaked out by the idea of scientists taking a monkey wrench to the atmosphere to cool down the world that we’re warming with our power plants and automobiles? It seems that this is the real irony of geoengineering. Climate change freaks out some folks, but not all that many. And there are folks who aren’t freaked by it at all or deny that it’s happening. But geoengineering freaks the bejesus out of everybody.

At least that seems to be the conclusion of a study by Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who looks into how people’s values influence how they process information and assess risk. I won’t go into the details of the study. You can find it here, published by the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and there is a Grist article about the study here. I’ll just sum up that the study found that if you have folks read about global warming and scientists advocating for stricter controls on carbon emissions, it only made folks more entrenched in the beliefs they had before, whether they thought of global warming as a threat or were skeptical or doubtful.

If folks read about global warming and scientists advocating for geoengineering, then skeptics were open to the reality of climate change. Also, those who believed in global warming were left more ambivalent after reading about geoengineering.

 

Pumping sea water into the atmosphere, one proposed geoengineeering idea 

Besides cluing us in, once again, to the reality that people are quirky and don’t behave predictably, what does this study tell us? I think we all feel that if we talk more about geoengineering, then it will normalize the idea, making all that much easier to consider and make us complacent about reducing our CO2 emissions. But maybe if we started to include the topic more in our discussions, it might be a way to loosen the skepticism of a good number of people. And it might get them to sign on to reducing our emissions and adequately dealing with global warming, instead of waiting for somebody to come along and start making atomic supermen to suck up carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

What do you think? Should we talk about geoengineering, even though we don’t want to do it?

Or we could throw these giant parasols into orbit Good idea, or scary?

Todd Akin: Is He Any More Stupid and Insensitive Than Other Politicians?

This is apparently big news. I’ve been hearing about it just about any time I turn on the radio. Defending his stance against abortion rights, Todd Akin, the Missouri representative who is competing with Claire McCaskill for her Senate seat, said during an interview with a Saint Louis television station this past weekend that pregnancies do not result from “legitimate rape.” Besides the absolute ignorance of basic biology he displays with this statement, he’s also showing a great deal of insensitivity with the terminology of calling any sort of rape legitimate.

            So there is an outcry and calls for him to drop out of the Senate race against McCaskill. I tend to agree with the folks who say he should drop out of the race. A person who would say such a thing, whether or not you think that access to abortions should be restricted or outlawed, is too stupid to hold any sort of public office, from the U.S. Congress down to your local school board.

            But, compared to other congressional representatives, is Akin all that stupid? Despite some of the best science ever performed in the history of the empirical method, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe denies that there is any evidence for global warming. As a matter of fact, he goes so far as to say that all the science on climate change is a fakery, a hoax, perpetrated on the world by mendacious scientists. This is a scenario that, if it were a movie, would contain thousands of Doctor Frankensteins in cahoots with a sort of covert Trilateral Commission working with a great PR department.

            Obviously crazy or really stupid, maybe even paranoid. Where are the calls for him to resign?

            Then there is Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky, a state in which mountaintop removal coal mining has destroyed hundreds of mountains, ruined ecosystems, and has been shown to cause kidney stones, tooth loss, diarrhea, learning disabilities, and some forms of cancer,[i] as well as numerous forms of birth defects.[ii] Rand said of the mining practice that, “I don’t think anyone’s going to be missing a hill or two here and there.”

            People are getting sick and dying, and as far as Rand is concerned it all amounts to “missing a hill or two here and there.” I don’t think much consideration is needed to find this statement stupid and insensitive. Once again, where are the calls for his resignation?

            I could go on and on. The list of things said that are stupid and insensitive is long: equating Islam with terrorism; blaming poor folks for their plight; classifying vandalism as terrorism; calling any kind of coal production “clean.” There is a lot of stupid getting in the way of real political progress.

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[i] Holzman, David C. “Mountaintop Removal Mining.” Environmental Health Perspectives Vol. 119, Issue 11 11/1/2011 electronic journal

[ii] Ahearn, Melissa M. et at. “The association between mountaintop mining and birth defects among live births in central Appalachia, 1996–2003.” Environmental Research Vol. 111 Issue 6. Aug 2011, p 838-846 electronic journal

Congressional Hearings on Climate Change: Did Anybody Hear About This?

There was a Congressional hearing this past week on climate change and the connection that climate change has to the extreme weather we’ve been having. Except for a 75-word piece in the Washington Post that announced the participation in the hearing by Senator Benjamin Cardin from Maryland, the hearing received no U.S. press. I read about the hearing in the Guardian, a paper from Britain.

Perhaps this country’s press was correct to pass on reporting on this hearing. After all, maybe there was nothing newsworthy in the hearings. That there was nothing new in earnest scientists telling Congress once again that, yes, global warming is really happening, and yes, that some of the freakish weather that has brought drought to half of the United States and wildfires throughout Colorado can be connected to that warming.

            And maybe they know that there is no news that Senator James Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate’s environment and public works committee, continues to claim that the science of climate change is a hoax. And they also know that there is no news in reporting that two of Inhofe’s biggest campaign contributors are Koch Industries—which has made its fortunes from oil, gas, and other extractive industries, as well as the Koch brothers being the financiers behind the T Party—and Murray Industries, the largest privately owned coal company in the United States.

            We know that big oil and King Coal are to blame for the inaction of our government to take steps to reduce carbon emissions and that shills like Inhofe are the most egregious enablers of this dangerous charade. The press, particularly the major papers and television networks, are also partly to blame for leaving important hearings and other news on climate change unreported.