Global Warming — Thinking Outside the Box
Can Dr. Evil Save the World? — (Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone) Forget about a future filled with wind farms and hydrogen cars. The Pentagon’s top weaponeer says he has a radical solution that would stop global warming now — no matter how much oil we burn.
”Dr. Evil”, in this case, is Lowell Wood (Linkage: 1, 2, 3, & 4), the physicist, teacher, and weapons designer. He worked on President Reagan’s Star Wars missile idea. His idea is to burn sulfur, and seed the atmosphere with the byproducts, creating a layer of pollution very similar to what a volcano causes, only without all the black ashy clouds. According to his science, this would drop the planet temperatures immediately, and last for several months, needing to be redone about once a year, for a cost of about 100 million dollars.
I’m in no position to judge if the science on this is worth a damn, although it seems to look good on paper. My go-to guys for climate science, Real Climate, don’t seem to have anything about the article or idea, so we’re on our own, folks. However, as far as I know (or can Google up), the bit about how volcanic eruptions cool the surrounding temperatures due to the ash cloud and so forth, is right. Whether you’d be able to duplicate that and achieve anything worth talking about is beyond me.
Part of me would like to say — if this idea holds water — hey, sign me up! We’ve been screwing with our environment in various ways for centuries now. Why piss around? Let’s get serious. Another part of me sees this as the diet pill method of solving global warming. The “easy way out”. It doesn’t actually solve the problems we’re causing, it just buys us more time to deal with them. It doesn’t teach us to deal with the consequences of our actions. It’s a deus ex machina — the god in the machine that lifts us away from our problems without our actually learning anything. Of course, at this late stage of the game, it may be that we’re going to have to utilize the deus ex machina. We might not have time to do things the “right” way.
