FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
7 May 2009
CONTACT: Tim Bueler
media@timbueler.com
(530) 401-3285
GLOBAL WARMING HYSTERIA: OBAMA CONSIDERS ‘GEO-ENGINEERING’ CLIMATE
© 2009 RedAlert.WND.com
By Dr. Jerome R. Corsi
White House evaluates new scheme to pollute air to block sun’s rays
The Obama administration is seriously considering polluting the air to save the planet from the perceived threat of global warming.
John Holden, President Obama’s new science adviser, told the Associated Press that global warming is so dire that the Obama administration is discussing actively radical technologies to engineer the climate by shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.
Using a near hysterical analogy, Holden told the Associated Press that global warming was equivalent to being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”
Holden discussed doomsday scenarios that would trigger the Obama administration into action, such as the complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic.
Referring to geoengineering the climate, Holden told the Associated Press, “It’s got to be looked at. We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.”
The Council on Foreign Relations appears to be a major supporter of the idea.
In the March/April 2009 issue of the Council on Foreign Relations magazine Foreign Affairs, a group of five authors including David Victor, a law professor, wrote a piece entitled “The Geoengineering Option: A Last Resort Against Global Warming?”
Victor, Stanford professor and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations is also holding a CFR-sponsored workshop entitled “Geoengineering: Workshop on Unilateral Planetary Scale Geoengineering,” in Washington, D.C., on May 5, according to the CFR website.
Victor and his co-authors describe their geoengineering strategies as “deploying systems on a planetary scale, such as launching reflective particles into the atmosphere or positioning sunshades to cool the earth.”
The key premise of geoengineering to combat global warming is that by increasing the reflectivity of the atmosphere, more of the sun’s rays would be reflected back to space.
“Increasing the reflectivity of the planet (known as the albedo) by one percentage point could have an effect on the climate system large enough to offset the gross increase in warming that is likely over the next century as a result of a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Victor and his co-authors wrote.
The scheme brings back memories of the efforts by the U.S. military dating back to the Johnson administration to explore detonating nuclear weapons to make the climate somehow more favorable.
The U.S. military was so serious about the effort that in 1976 the United Nations adopted a convention that prohibited the use of military weapons as a climate-change technology.
An idea Victor and his co-authors seem to favor would involve injecting sulfur into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight, copying what is seen as the methodology by which the plumes of erupting volcanoes fill the upper atmosphere with sulfur and other fine particles.
Victor and his co-authors propose launching sulfur particles and other reflective materials into the upper stratosphere by using high-flying aircraft, naval guns or giant balloons.
The Council on Foreign Affairs article acknowledges adverse climate changes, such as inducing droughts, could be caused in turn by geoengineering efforts to fill the stratosphere with sulfur.
Yet, Victors and his associates conclude that, “The highly uncertain but possible disastrous side effects of geoengineering interventions are difficult to compare to the dangers of unchecked global climate change.”
Not all scientists are equally enthusiastic about geoengineering as a methodology to reverse global warming.
Research published this month in Great Britain suggested that shooting air pollution in the form of microscopic particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays back to outer space, a phenomenon known as “global dimming,” ironically could end up being harmful to plants, with the result being that the Earth would absorb less carbon dioxide.
Plants right now soak up about 25 percent of the carbon dioxide human beings emit into the atmosphere.
With reduced sunlight, plant growth may be slowed.
Even worse, when plants die, the carbon stored in the plants is released back into the atmosphere.
The entire discussion is premised on an assumed scientific consensus that human activity is responsible for global warming.
Yet, as WND has repeatedly reported, thousands of scientists remain skeptical that the nightmare scenarios of rising waters and dramatic climate events such as increased hurricane activity have any basis in fact, outside computer models generated by geo-scientists that tend to produce frightening predictions that typically fail to be realized.
Still, the Obama administration persists, both to pass a new cap-and-trade carbon tax through Congress this year, as well as to explore the geoengineering of the upper atmosphere with pollution as a technology calculated to induce global cooling.
About your guest:
Jerome R. Corsi is a staff reporter for WND. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in political science in 1972 and has written many books and articles, including his best-sellers “The Obama Nation” and “The Late Great USA.” Other books include “Showdown with Nuclear Iran,” “Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil,” which he co-authored with WND columnist Craig. R. Smith, and “Atomic Iran.”
