In the panic to save the planet we now have the hairbrained idea of artificially altering the atmosphere to create a shield
Can cloud ships and space sun shades fix the planet? - CNN.com (http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/11/05/eco.geoengineering/index.html)
Scientists want to mimic volcanoes and fire sulphur particles into the atmosphere to create a giant reflector

Our world system is sliding into insanity. There will come the time described here

Luke 21:26
26 Men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.
(KJV)

For some reason, certain people think that it is up to mankind to control his natural environment.

To start with, it is impossible for us to have any meaningful effect on it.

Secondly, we have managed to survive through the natural cycles for thousands of years.

But men will become more and more frantic as the end of this age comes to a close and the prophecied chaos begins.

Forewarned is indeed forearmed.

Everything that can be shaken will be shaken, but we are yet to see man's faith in himself be shaken. On that day will they turn to God?

everything that can be shaken will be shaken, but we are yet to see man's faith in himself be shaken. On that day will they turn to God?

Excellent quote and question.

Undoubtedly, some will. I think most will not.

It will be interesting to see what others post.

I predict that there will be no shift in the perceptions of the regular members of this board.

Bret Stephens: Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics - WSJ.com (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704335904574495643459234318.html)

Is that really more harebrained than cap and tax?


G&P

Bret Stephens: Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics - WSJ.com (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704335904574495643459234318.html)

Is that really more harebrained than cap and tax?


G&P

Interesting article and I remember those days with a leaden sky.

Yes it is more harebrained because we have no idea of the impacts, we only have a best guess. I would expect a huge increase in acid rain. As far as cap and trade is concerned I am not in favour of any scheme which licenses pollution. These schemes have already been shown not to work. What could be more hairbrained than saying to industry you can pollute for a fee. Since they can pass their costs on obviously it is a free pass to avoid doing anything. No, we have to get industry out of the pockets of the politicians and get a clear fines system going based on realistic targets, no trade of permits allowed. It isn't as hard to clean up our act as is thought once we get focused on the fact that change is necessary

The same wacko scientists who cry about spewing things into the atmosphere propose this ?

In the panic to save the planet we now have the hairbrained idea of artifically altering the atmosphere to create a shieldHello clete:

Hairbrained, huh? Now, I don't know if THIS particular idea will work, but the science IS sound. These ARE smart guys.

You DO know that we'll be able to control our weather, travel to the ends of the universe, and live for 4,000 years, don't you? Well, in order to get there from here, we're going to have to try new stuff.

Thank God we got people willing to do that. Speaking of God, does your collective opposition to this have ANY thing to do with your religion? I have a feeling it does.

Besides that, you DO know that the guy who CHANGED the world in a most profound way, started Microsoft, don't you?

excon

Excon, we can't even predict our weather more than 3 days in advance... and we screw that up more than half the time.

The weather models used to predict global warming 5 and 10 years out have been proven wrong over and over again. We can't accurately even determine what CAUSES weather patterns.

We can barely control the temperatures of our homes with any accuracy.

And you expect that we're going to be able to CONTROL weather for the entire planet?

And you consider this "sound science".

No wonder you're buying into the global warming BS.

Elliot

Excon, we can't even predict our weather more than 3 days in advance... and we screw that up more than half the time.

No wonder you're buying into the global warming BS.Hello again, Elliot:

This post isn't about whether you BELIEVE in global warming. It's about the hairbrained, or not, idea. Are you having trouble keeping up?

excon

Hello clete:

Hairbrained, huh? Now, I don't know if THIS particular idea will work, but the science IS sound. These ARE smart guys.

You DO know that we'll be able to control our weather, travel to the ends of the universe, and live for 4,000 years, don't you? Well, in order to get there from here, we're gonna have to try new stuff.

Thank God we got people willing to do that. Speaking of God, does your collective opposition to this have ANY thing to do with your religion? I have a feeling it does.

Besides that, you DO know that the guy who CHANGED the world in a most profound way, started Microsoft, don't you?

excon

I haven't decided whether you are being sarcastic or not? As to your last statement you have that wrong, it wasn't Bill Gates, it was Jesus Christ, he wasn't a thief.

Ex I don't mind us trying out new stuff, I object when we try to play God because every time we do the result turns out bad because of unconsidered consequences. A system designed to cool the planet could intensify winters and destroy the crop cycle. I happen to know that in parts of Canada the planting has to be so precise they only have a window of a few days in order to get the crop to maturity. But we rarely try out new stuff what we mostly do is incrementally add to what exists. When was the last time you saw a radically new engine design. The Space Shuttle will be replaced by a rocket program, we have stopped developing supersonic commercial aircraft. Sometimes I think we left all the brains in the last generation

Hello again, Elliot:

This post isn't about whether you BELIEVE in global warming. It's about the hairbrained, or not, idea. Are you having trouble keeping up?

excon

Clearly you are having trouble.

If we cannot predict weather (and global warming pseudo-scientists have been trying to do so for decades) then what makes you think we can CONTROL it?

That was the point of my post. Clearly you couldn't follow.

Elliot

Hello again, Elliot:

It's about the hairbrained, or not, idea.

excon

Thanks for injecting that dose of reality, ex. Yes we can counteract the effect of spewing CO2 into the atmosphere by spewing SO2 and this is different how? Well, one apparently traps heat and one reflects heat. SO2 is a component of petroleum so how come the SO2 isn't already counteracting the CO2. I think we can definitely give this one a tick in the harbrained box:confused:

You DO know that we'll be able to control our weather, travel to the ends of the universe, and live for 4,000 years, don't you? Well, in order to get there from here, we're gonna have to try new stuff.
If we cannot predict weather (and global warming pseudo-scientists have been trying to do so for decades) then what makes you think we can CONTROL it?

That was the point of my post. Clearly you couldn't follow.Hello again, Elliot:

You DO know that a lot of our typing has to do with YOU not being able to read, don't you? If you would just take a moment to read stuff you don't understand a second time, and maybe even a third.. It would save ME so much time having to repeat myself... But, alas and alack, that's why I'm here.

I don't know what wasn't CLEAR in my post... I was talking about possibilities in the FUTURE. You missed it. You can't make the leap from where we are today, to where we could be.

That's probably because I was ACCURATE in my post. I don't stutter. Some of you religionists have such DISDAIN for science, that you cannot even imagine things being different from where they are today.

Or, it could be that the Evangelical Christians think the end times will come LONG before we can invent really cool stuff, so why even bother??

Clete asks, has reason left us?? Where would we be, if Columbus asked the same question of himself? Is it reasonable to set off on an ocean not knowing where the adventure would lead? It was especially unreasonable because the religionists of HIS day were telling him that if he went, he'd fall off the Earth.

Sounds kind of like you guys.

excon

Oho... so if anyone disagrees with you... BASED ON ACTUAL SCIENCE OF TODAY rather than your assumptions of what the future MIGHT bring... they are religious fanatics.

Got it.

I'm a religious loon because I don't think we'll ever be able to control weather if we can't even predict it with any accuracy.

Yep... there's a reasoned argument for you...

Congratulations, excon. You have just exposed yourself as an anti-religious bigot.

Next time you bring up my fictional "racism", I'm going to remind you of your anti-religion bigotry.

Elliot

These observations about Copenhagen ;the US Senate upcoming debate about passing economy killing cap and trade legislation ,and the Al Gore scam... possible the biggest potential swindle since Bernie Madoff and the biggest scam since Y2K... is in the Newark Star Ledger today by libertarian commentator Paul Mulshine .




President Obama's headed to Copenhagen next month to talk climate change. Al Gore's headed toward profits that could make him the world's first "carbon billionaire." But where's global temperature headed?

Nowhere, it seems. The most reliable readings of the Earth's temperature show that it peaked back in 1998. This was not widely reported in America, where the state of science reporting is dismal. But over in England, where they take that sort of thing more seriously, the British Broadcasting Corp. created quite a stir with an article headlined "What Happened to Global Warming?" In it, BBC climate correspondent Paul Hudson gave a summary of the problems facing the alarmists: "For the last 11 years, we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise."

Hudson went on to cite numerous scientists skeptical of the theory of anthropogenic global warming. But perhaps the most damning observation came from a scientist who supports the theory. Mojib Latif is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group that set the panic off with its 1996 report on global warming. According to Hudson, Latif concedes "that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years."

Hmmm. Ten to 20 years is what I would call "the near future." Didn't a certain former vice president of the United States win a Nobel Prize by pushing a movie that told us that the melting of the polar ice would cause sea levels to rise by up to 20 feet "in the near future?"

Perhaps Al Gore was talking about a different future, one in which he gets rich off the panic he helped create. If the Senate passes that cap-and-trade bill that's now before it, Gore stands to make a fortune through his stake in the investment firm he set up with former Goldman-Sachs exec David Blood to deal in carbon credits. So there's a lot at stake in that Senate decision for the firm known to Wall Street wags as "Blood and Gore." There's even more at stake for consumers whose bills would go up by billions.

As for those senators, they'll look pretty foolish if they pass a bill to curb global warming just as we enter a cooling trend. AndDonald Easterbrookwarns that is a distinct possibility. Easterbrook is a professor at Western Washington University who was quoted in that BBC article. When I called him at his home outside Seattle, Easterbrook informed me that we have just experienced the third coldest October in the past 115 years. There's probably more cold to come, he said, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the climate will have little effect on it one way or the other. The reason? Contrary to popular belief, there just isn't that much of it in the atmosphere.

"For every 100,000 molecules of air, only 38 are carbon dioxide," Easterbrook said. The global-warming crowd likes to say that CO2 levels have risen 35 percent in the industrial era. "But 35 percent of nothing is still nothing," says Easterbrook, and the increase in CO2 has virtually no effect.

The alarmists harp on that infinitesimal increase, he says, while they ignore the most prevalent greenhouse gas of them all — water vapor. Clouds reflect sunlight back into the sky. And that is at the center of a developing dispute among scientists. Easterbrook is on the side of a Danish scientist namedHenrik Svensmark. In the 1990s, Svensmark developed a theory that links cloud formation to sunspots. When the number of sunspots is low, more cosmic rays get through to the atmosphere. And these rays, Svensmark theorizes, are the primary cause of cloud formation. The clouds reflect more sunlight back into space. Earth gets colder.

This fits in nicely with Easterbrook's specialty, which is how ocean currents affect climate. "It turns out there is a correlation between ocean cycles and sunspots," he told me. And the historical record shows many climate shifts that correspond to sunspot activity.

"There were 6,000 feet of ice here that all melted very suddenly 15,000 years ago," Easterbrook said of his neck of the woods in the Pacific Northwest. "There have been big ups and downs throughout history. How do you explain them?"

Well, if you want to control people's lives and/or make a lot of money, you explain them the way a lot of politicians do. As for the scientists, they're divided. Most agree that, all things being equal, it would be better for man not to alter the atmosphere at all. But that's an entirely separate question from just what effect that alteration will have on the climate.

And the answer to that question is: Nobody's quite certain.

Except, of course, Al Gore

These observations about Copenhagen ;the US Senate upcoming debate about passing economy killing cap and trade legislation ,and the Al Gore scam......possible the biggest potential swindle since Bernie Madoff and the biggest scam since Y2K ...... is in the Newark Star Ledger today by libertarian commentator Paul Mulshine .

There is strong evidence Global Warming has little to do with CO2 levels. That there might have been a correlation in recent history is coincidence. We have people worrying about extinction of the Polar Bear but the Polar Bear has been with us in ice ages and out of them, if Global Warming kills off the Polar Bear it should have done it 400,000 years ago. The same can be said about all the other hysteria and peusdo science associated with this. Yesterday I was pleased to see that the Parliamentary Liberal Party here began to rebel against their leadership on this issue, they too are far from convinced that we must destroy our industries to offset what isn't conclusively proven