Rhinocrisy

There is no shortage of clever ideas for solving climate change once and for all. I’m not talking about amateur-hour stuff like electric cars or planting lots of eucalyptus trees. I mean serious proposals with at least a little scientific backing that might screw everything up for everyone but would solve some aspect of climate change. They might prevent some of the tipping scary feedback loops from accelerating out of control. And the good news is they are guaranteed against any unforeseen effects. After all, everyone knows that reengineering the world’s climate is a simple, linear process that has no possibility of failure.

Here’s one that was presented at a scientific conference in December with the I-wish-I-were-joking title, “Are Salps A Silver Bullet Against Global Warming And Ocean Acidification?” No, the term “silver bullet” isn’t being used sarcastically. It’s a concept by this fellow to pump nutrients out of the deep ocean to increase the population of salps, strange jelly-like creatures, which then shit out lots of carbon-rich excreta which drop to the bottom of the sea, sea-questering it for “ever.” The nice inventors appear to be positioning themselves to make money with this kind of scheme when carbon credits go above $26 a ton, as companies will pay them big bucks to sequester carbon so they can keep pumping out more CO2 into the atmosphere.

Another idea is to spray sulfur compounds into the upper atmosphere to reflect light and “counterbalance most of the warming associated with the greenhouse gas forcing. Surface temperatures return to within a few tenths of a degree(K) of present day levels. Sea ice and precipitation distributions are also much closer to their present day values. The polar region surface temperatures remain 1-3 degrees warm in the winter hemisphere than present day values.” They note that they didn’t study “the important ethical, legal, and moral issues that are associated with deliberate geo-engineering efforts.”