get your smog on
It's not like we were using all that outside anyway, right?
AP, via ENN:
NAIROBI — If the sun warms the Earth too dangerously, the time may come to draw the shade.
The "shade" would be a layer of pollution deliberately spewed into the atmosphere to help cool the planet. The proposal comes from prominent scientists, among them a Nobel laureate. The reaction here at the annual U.N. conference on climate change is a mix of caution, curiosity and some resignation to such "massive and drastic" operations, as the chief U.N. climatologist describes them.
The Nobel Prize-winning scientist who first made the proposal is himself "not enthusiastic about it."
"It was meant to startle the policymakers," said Paul J. Crutzen, of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. "If they don't take action much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this."
Serious people are taking Crutzen's idea seriously. This weekend at Moffett Field, California, NASA's Ames Research Center hosts a closed-door, high-level workshop on the global haze proposal and other "geoengineering" ideas for fending off climate change.
This isn't the first time this proposition has been bandied around by climatologists - Lovelock caught grief for suggesting the cooling-power-bennies of air pollution back in the 70s, though he followed that right up by making the point that covering the planet, or certain portions of it, with a blanket of smog would introduce a whole range of new problems, potentially global in scale.
There's this line from Mike Davis' Ecology of Fear, a line from the end of the intro where someone remarks that Los Angeles wasn't on the way to becoming Blade Runner, but that it already was Blade Runner. We may rapidly moving toward the day we will say the same thing in relation to global warming - not whether or not we're getting an industrial dystopia, but just how industrial, and how dystopian, things will be.
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