If you're here at RedState reading news, commentary, all dealing with the issues of the day, you're probably well above the mean when it comes to seeking out solid information, relevant facts, and reasoned, reasonable discussion. That's our stock-in-trade, after all.
Part of the reasonable discussion, of course, comes with separating fact from fiction, and threat from nothing-burger. The climate change issue is replete with nothing-burgers from the climate scolds, as I've documented here in these virtual pages, again and again. But there's another layer about which we should be cautious: When that nothing-burger has an adjacent issue that could be a real problem.
Case in point: Contrails, geo-engineering, and really, really stupid ideas from the climate change worriers. Dr. David Bell is a Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, and he has some things to say about the matter. First, on contrails, he talks a lot of sense:
There is a school of thought that streaks across the sky, or most of them, only began to appear recently and are the result of nefarious intent – geoengineering. The theory is that a whole hidden industry exists to make chemicals, transport them to airports, install them on commercial (i.e., passenger) aircraft or place them in fuel, and then release them at certain times or in certain regions. This, performed at scale, would require thousands of willing people, who all remain silent on the issue. This is possible, but people talk, including pilots, fuelers, manufacturing workers, truck drivers, and airport security guards, so it is a little hard to imagine at scale. Part of an air force may follow some stupid government agenda, and perhaps do. But that is a tiny minority of flights.
That's as I've been saying for years: Contrails aren't a worry. They are an inescapable side-effect of high-altitude air travel, and as you can see in the image above, WW2-era B-17s put out contrails to spare. But geo-engineering using aircraft is a real thing, and it's used in places like the Middle East and elsewhere to, among other things, prompt rain.
Dubai: Recent downpours across Al Ain, Ras Al Khaimah, and other eastern regions of the UAE are not just a stroke of luck; they are the result of a sophisticated weather modification technique known as cloud seeding. The National Centre of Meteorology (NCM) has been actively carrying out this program to boost rainfall in the country. Cloud seeding is a process that involves modifying a cloud's structure to increase its ability to produce rain or snow, and the UAE has become a leader in this technology.
That, too, isn't an enormous worry. Oh, the more humans go mucking about in things we don't understand very well, the more problems we're likely to encounter, but in this case, the problem should only last until the next major weather system moves through. No, Dr. Bell is worried about something entirely different: The use of aerial geoengineering to counter climate change.
Britain is set to approve funding of up to £50million for outdoor experiments to dim sunlight as part of efforts to combat runaway climate change.
The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) will announce the funded projects within weeks, making Britain one of the world's biggest funders of geoengineering research.
Professor Mark Symes, Aria's programme director, confirmed there would be "small controlled outdoor experiments on particular approaches".
The controversial technology aims to reflect sunlight back into space, potentially providing a temporary brake on rising global temperatures while emissions reduction efforts continue.
It's hard to properly convey how massively wasteful and stupid this notion is. But Dr. Bell has already done so:
Geoengineering can also be unbelievably stupid. The British government is planning to fund high-altitude geoengineering to block sunlight. This is a pet project of some very rich people who consider themselves geniuses, and it is a real thing – I have directly heard their discussions on similar projects from people who can pay for them. It is based on the interesting conviction that while all previous episodes of global warming were due to some natural phenomena, the current one is solely due to the work of man, and that somehow dimming sunlight by setting up a reflective layer in the upper atmosphere is therefore a good thing (i.e. not interfering with nature, but saving it…).
Unbelievably stupid, if anything, seems like an understatement.
Read More: Relax. They're Contrails, Not Chemtrails.
CO2 and Climate: This Is How Science Works
This isn't creating a local rainfall. It's not prompting the development of high-altitude cirrus clouds, as aircraft contrails can do. This is geoengineering on a considerable scale, with long-term effects, and the simple fact is that we - and by we, I mean all of humanity - simply don't understand the global climate well enough to be mucking around with it like this.
These nitwits and nincompoops are proposing to alter, through artificial means, the amount of sunlight that hits the Earth. Never mind the consequences for the climate scolds' favored solar panels. The sun, that massive fusion reactor in space, that thing that can burn us if we stay out too long in its rays even though it's (on average) 93 million miles away, is the source of all the energy for all life on this planet, save for a few chemotrophs deep in the crust or around ocean volcanic vents.
Plants produce the oxygen we breathe. Plants ranging from ocean phytoplankton to the vast taiga of the circumpolar north, from the equatorial rain forests to the vast grasslands of the American plains, produce almost every molecule of air we breathe, and they need sunlight to carry out the process that does this - photosynthesis. Without plants, which are producers, animals, which are consumers, cannot live. If sunlight were blocked, we would all die. At least we wouldn't have to worry about suffocating; most of us would starve to death first.
Of course, these activists pushing this aren't proposing to block all sunlight, just a portion of it. But how much? How much can we get away with? How do they know? Is it worth spending money to find out, when the overall problem is that we simply don't understand all of the systems, all of the inputs involved?
The only sane answer is "no."
So, perhaps we should concentrate on the industrial and political stupidity that is endangering us all through stuff that is proven and readily demonstrable. Labeling nature or air travel as evidence of evil will gain likes on social media, but also help the cause of those who would own and control our atmosphere and food supply.
There is a real problem out there that we should deal with, if only we can focus.
And that, folks, is the key. Focus on real problems, not imaginary ones. Focus on real solutions, not stupid ideas that could have catastrophic consequences.
