By Paul Homewood
h/t Dennis Ambler
There have been mixed reactions to the latest splurge of taxpayer money into engineering climate cooling:
What they are talking about is solar radiation modification (SRM), also known as solar geoengineering, aka dimming the sun.
Representing the Raving Loony Party is Prof Stuart Haszeldine, Professor of Carbon Capture and Storage, School of School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh said:
“Humans are losing the battle against climate change. Engineering cooling is necessary because in spite of measurements and meetings and international treaties during the past 70 years, the annual emissions of greenhouse gases have continued to increase. The world is heading towards heating greater than any time in our civilisation.
Dr Naomi Vaughan of the Tyndall Centre is alarmed at the prospect though:
“SRM methods do not address the causes of climate change – SRM methods seek to cool the climate by reflecting more sunlight back to space to offset the warming we are causing by increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere that come from the burning of coal, oil and gas and deforestation.
“Deployment is a major issue for SRM ideas, because the way that SRM balances out the warming we’ve caused is not a perfect offset. Deploying SRM would create a new risk to global society – the risk of stopping the SRM whilst greenhouse gas concentrations were still high, as it would cause very rapid warming. To stop SRM once it had been deployed safely, would require global society to reach net zero emissions and pay to remove large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.
“It’s for these reasons that many scientists are cautious about SRM research because of how it could be used or misused in the future.”
Mike Hulme, formerly of the notorious UEA, is also worried:
“£57m is a huge amount of tax-payers money to be spent on this assortment of speculative technologies intended to manipulate the Earth’s climate. I say this because these technologies will always remain speculative, and unproven in the real world, until they are deployed at scale. Just because they “work” in a model, or at a micro-scale in the lab or the sky, does not mean they will cool climate safely, without unwanted side-effects, in the real world.
There is therefore no way that this research can demonstrate that the technologies are safe, successful or reversible. The UK Government is leading the world down what academic analysts call ‘the slippery slope’ towards eventual dangerous large-scale deployment of solar geoengineering technologies. This is public money that would be far better invested in enhancing technologies to reduce dependence on fossil fuels or to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.”