Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.) and main MAGA mountebank earlier this month urgently demanded that “we should finish the harmful and lethal follow of climate modification and geoengineering.” She added, “This isn’t regular. I need clear air, clear skies, clear rain water, clear floor water, and solar shine similar to God created it!! No particular person, firm, entity, or authorities ought to ever be allowed to switch our climate by any means attainable!!”
Subsequently, the congresswoman has now launched a invoice in Congress making it a felony for anybody to aim “climate modification” wherever in the US. The textual content of her “Clear Skies Act” prohibits “any injection, launch, emission, or dispersal of a chemical, a chemical compound, or a substance, or conveyance of an equipment, into the environment for the specific goal of…producing a man-made change within the composition, conduct, or dynamics of the environment; or…affecting the temperature, climate, local weather, or depth of daylight.” Examples of prohibited actions embody “geoengineering” “cloud seeding” “photo voltaic radiation modification and administration” and “a launch of an aerosol into the environment to affect temperature, precipitation, or the depth of daylight.”
Greene has an extended historical past of selling debunked theories about chemtrails and cloud-seeded floods (to not point out innuendos about Jewish house lasers inflicting forest fires), and her proposed prohibition on atmospheric geoengineering can now be added to her listing of specious provocations.
As a matter of truth, there may be at present an ongoing “injection, launch, or dispersal” of a a chemical compound or a substance that’s already geoengineering the “temperature, precipitation, or the depth of daylight.” These are globe-warming greenhouse gases which can be accumulating within the environment as the results of elevated carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, methane and varied artificial gases. As a consequence, final yr was the hottest within the instrumental file. Talking of climate modification, man-made local weather change contributes to the rise within the frequency and period of heatwaves and excessive precipitation globally and within the United States.
Now some researchers need to experiment with reverse-geoengineering the environment with the intention of slowing man-made local weather change by decreasing the globe’s common temperatures. One of many extra promising proposals is stratospheric aerosol injection. This entails releasing tons of tiny particles excessive within the stratosphere the place they might mirror a small proportion of incoming daylight again into house as a option to cut back world common temperatures. We all know that this doubtless would work to cut back world common temperatures as a result of a pure experiment. In 1991, the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo within the Philippines injected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, cooling the planet by 0.5 levels Celsius over the next yr. One middle-of-the-road estimate is {that a} SAI program would value about $18 billion yearly per diploma Celsius of warming prevented.
One other geoengineering proposal aimed toward counteracting a number of the penalties of artificial local weather change is marine cloud brightening (MCB). On this case, a fleet of ships would ply the oceans spraying salt water into the environment, which might support creation of very reflective low-level clouds. Curiously, the 2020 prohibition on cargo ships burning excessive sulfur gas oil decreased the variety of shiny cloud tracks shaped by ships, and analysis suggests that this has contributed to a current acceleration in world warming. Price estimates to implement MCB applications to chill the planet vary from $5 to $40 billion per yr.
Traditionally, political opposition to local weather geoengineering has primarily come from the progressive left. So it’s considerably amusing that Greene now seems to be endorsing and selling the views of a few of her progressive colleagues.
Opposite to Greene’s fears, allowing analysis on a backup emergency plan to chill ought to be an pressing precedence. We’re bequeathing to our descendants a world through which the local weather is altering in what could also be very deleterious methods. Certainly banning analysis that may provide individuals later on this century with details about the dangers and advantages varied geoengineering instruments can be mistaken. As two geoengineering analysis proponents requested, “Is it justified for us to deprive future generations of instruments that will reduce the ache we’ve inflicted? They might or could not use these instruments, however absolutely these selections are theirs to make.”
