What could possibly go wrong?
Inventor in Baja is testing a plan to cool the Earth by mimicking a volcanic eruption
When Luke Iseman was thinking of launching a solar geoengineering startup, he talked to experts in the field. The strongest advice they gave him was not to use the word “geoengineering.”
The term refers to manipulating the Earth’s climate for human benefit, but in recent years it’s been used as shorthand for “solar geoengineering,” a theoretical process of releasing chemicals into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth and mitigate the effects of global warming. It’s controversial because it hasn’t been studied comprehensively, and we don’t know whether the unintended side effects will be better or worse than the impacts of climate change.
Iseman’s startup Make Sunsets, which has raised at least half a million dollars in venture capital, mostly skates around the hot-button word on its website.
“We make reflective, high-altitude, biodegradable clouds that cool the planet. Mimicking natural processes, our ‘shiny clouds’ are going to prevent catastrophic global warming,” reads the site’s About page. On the FAQ page, Make Sunsets calls what it is doing “albedo enhancement,” a scientific term for reflecting sunlight.
There are so many things that could go wrong, starting with a feedback that, causes way too much cooling, dropping the earth back into a Little Ice Age or even a glacial period. It could potentially inhibit enough sunlight making it too the ground level, causing problems with agriculture, reducing needed warmth for the ground.
On the downside, injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere could damage the ozone layer, cause respiratory illness and create acid rain. It would also cost as little as $10 billion per year to run a program that cools the Earth by 1 degree Celsius, UCLA environmental law professor Edward Parson told CNBC in 2022. That’s remarkably cheap compared to other mitigation techniques.
Does the climate cult care? Do they think that the climate crisis (scam) is more dangerous and are willing to take the chance?
“This all sounds crazy. A for-profit company trying to make money by cooling the planet. Crazy, yes, but perhaps a sign of the times?” Pasztor told CNBC. “The climate crisis is getting worse by the day. The world is getting — and will continue to get — warmer. Governments are not taking their responsibilities seriously enough. And we live in a capitalist society where actors make money in many different ways, like it or not. So how surprising is this?”
Pop singer and climate change alarmist Billie Eilish claims that her fear of global warming makes her feel ill — but admits she won’t stop selling merchandise or traveling the world via jet airplanes.
Residents of a Chicago neighborhood protested preparations to establish a migrant shelter inside a closed-down elementary school, allegedly without the locals’ permission.
In the not-so-distant past, scientists predicted that global temperatures would surge dramatically throughout this century, assuming that humans would rely heavily on fossil fuels for decades. But they are revising their forecasts as they track both signs of progress and unexpected hazards.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the Biden administration over a newly implemented rule that he says places a burden on American taxpayers as a result of illegal immigration.
In a rare White House address on the nation’s southern border crisis, President Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled new policy that will accept 30,000 migrants a month from four nations but also will crack down on those who fail to use the plan’s legal pathways.
