Excuse me. Do you mind if I turn your blue skies white? Why spend all that money on wind farms and insulation? Keep on driving, brothers and sisters, because Big Science is going to fix global warming.
While they talk up a new Manhattan project to block out the Sun, it's another year of multi-billion dollar profits for the coal and oil companies. Stall, stall, stall, while the money rolls in!
Welcome to Radio Ecoshock. I'm Alex Smith. In this program, we'll dig into geoengineering - the industrialization of the climate. You'll hear top climate scientist Alan Robock. He's got a laundry list of reasons why trying to control the climate may not be such a good idea. Diana Bronson of the ETCgroup joins us, to counter the Academies and think tanks pushing geoengineering.
GEOENGINEERING LINK FEST (for this program)
Alan Robock's reply to Bjorn Lomborg, Eric Brickell and Lee Lane's "science" of geoengineering (at realclimate.org).
Royal Society press release and report "Stop emitting CO2 or geoengineering could be our only hope." 28 Aug 2009
Bjorn Lomborg's geoengineering article in the UK Telegraph
Bjorn Lomborg's errors site: A comprehensive list of errors and flaws in Bjorn Lomborg´s book: The Skeptical Environmentalist, compiled by biologist Kaare Fog
Bjorn Lomborg's own site
From Joe Romm's Climate Progress blog: British coal flack doubts global warming, but says let's use geoengineering so we don't have to stop burning carbon...
Scientist Ken Caldeira's response to the Lomborg Report (via climateprogress.org)
ETCgroup's main site
ETCgroup press release "The Royal Society’s Report on Geoengineering the Climate: Geoengineering or Geopiracy?"
Risks of geoengineering to precipitation changes - Susan Solomon via climateprogress.org
Music: "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth" by Neko Case and "See You in The Sun" by Shane Philip (Canadian content).
In this week's program won't hear Bjorn Lomborg - the self-styled "skeptical environmentalist" now pushing projects to reduce the Sun's rays reaching Earth. I invited Mr. Lomborg to do an interview, but he was too busy. I believe he is busy. Lomborg has op-eds and interviews going in all the major media. Newsweek and Time magazine love him. Newspapers print his words uncritically.
In early September, Lomborg was at the White House to meet Joe Aldy, special assistant to the president for energy and the environment.
Bjorn Lomborg knows the major governments of the world, the IPCC, and all those other carbon cutters - are on the wrong track. Lomborg doesn't dispute that rapid global warming is upon us. But cutting greenhouse gas emissions is much too expensive he says. Citing a report written for his organization, called the "Copenhagen Consensus" - Bjorn Lomborg has a half dozen good reasons why we should just keep on burning gas, oil, and coal.
Say what?
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1 comment:
Alex, interesting show this one was. The one question that I would posit to the geoengineers about increasing the albedo affect of the clouds, etc., is how, if the visual shift in the sky changes from blue to a whiter shade of blue, will it affect plants and animals. I ask as the plants and animals may have evolved in step with the "colour" of the sky...
It is a very scary thought to think about using our home as the lab and not having the ability to see just how daft that is. We're just as arrogant a species as we have thought, even when presented with such dire issues as global survival of all life on earth.