Geo-engineering the climate: Just when you thought winter was over

The Associated Press reports on the latest lunacy:

The president's new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air. [emphasis added]

John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

"It's got to be looked at," he said. "We don't have the luxury of taking any approach off the table."

Holdren outlined several "tipping points" involving global warming that could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of "really intolerable consequences," he said. ...

Read the rest here. The article mentions one possibility:

But Holdren noted that shooting particles into the air — making an artificial volcano as one Nobel laureate has suggested — could have grave side effects and would not completely solve all the problems from soaring greenhouse gas emissions. So such actions could not be taken lightly, he said. [emphasis added]

We know so little about climate, its causes and effects, yet these climate "scientists" are so arrogant that they are willing to gamble human existence on crap like this. Weren't climate scientists predicting "Global Cooling" back in the 1970's? Anyone trust these scientists to get it right?

Here's another article from last September on "geo-engineering" the climate:

Artificial clouds to reflect away sunlight, creating colossal blooms of oceanic algae and the global use of synthetic carbon-neutral transport fuels are just three of the climate transforming technologies in need of urgent investigation, according to leading scientists. The eminent group argue that, with governments failing to grasp the urgent need for measures to combat dangerous climate change, radical – and possibly dangerous – solutions must now be seriously considered. [emphasis added]

The idea of engineering on a planetary scale in a bid to control climate has been around for more than 50 years but, to date, has remained on the fringes. The potential for dramatic and beneficial change has hitherto been outweighed by the risk of unexpected side-effects in the complex climate system, with global consequences. Now, in a special edition of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, climate scientists and engineers have brought together the latest research and issued a call for a far-reaching assessment of a raft of geo-engineering techniques.

"We are now, or soon will be, confronting issues of whether, when and how to engineer a climate that is more to our liking," argues Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist based at the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California. If a decision is made to move ahead with climate engineering, he says, then it will be essential to understand the point at which the risks and costs of geo-engineering outweigh the impacts of global warming. [emphasis added]

Not everyone is so unequivocally positive, however, including Stephen Schneider of Stanford University. In an overall assessment of the geo-engineering challenge, he notes that critics ask whether it is socially feasible to expect the many centuries of international political stability and co-operation that would be needed to operate global scale schemes. He adds that the potential also exists for conflicts between nations if geo-engineering projects go wrong. ...

Here's one of the proposed ideas:

One approach is to insert "scatterers" into the stratosphere. Caldeira cites an idea to deploy jumbo jets into the upper atmosphere and deposit clouds of tiny particles there, such as sulphur dioxide. Dispersing around 1m tonnes of sulphur dioxide per year across 10m square kilometres of the atmosphere would be enough to reflect away sufficient amounts of sunlight.

Remember sulfur dioxide? Wasn't that one of the key components of acid rain? Well, now, climate scientists want to spew a million tons of it into the air, every year. Who knew that all those industries like, say, coal-fired power plants back in the 1970's and 1980's spewing sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere weren't really polluting, but were really fighting Global Warming!

We may have a lot of dead lakes, rivers, oceans, and forests, and your cars will rust away sitting in the parking lot, but hey, at least we'll be cool doing it. Maybe. I'm sure these eminent scientists have figured out every possible consequence. Right?

Read the rest of the article to get a sense of the other ideas some of these lunatics, er, climate scientists are proposing.