Tuesday, 17 February 2009

Can geo-engineering rebuild the planet?

(click headline for original article)
Can geo-engineering rebuild the planet?

As global warming worsens, the idea of vast projects to alter the Earth's environment is moving from fantasy to necessity.
By Sanjida O'Connell

Comment on the above article:

In a parallel world banks are just about to create bad banks – or should we say bad banks are creating worse banks? - to set aside the dirt they played with but are now fed up with; it seems that some so-called scientists are trying to follow a similar route by playing around with what the planet balanced all by itself while traveling millions and billions of years through space enabling life to develop.

Little do we know about the climate per se, we are fishing in muddy waters when it comes to understand the correlations of materials and processes on a global scale, invent climate models that forget to take into account that white ice reflects sunlight better than dark waters and the same ice when thawing might get covered with water which then accelerates the thawing process; we forget the ozone hole’s influence on Antarctica only to find out that it is subject to the same warming patterns like the vastness of the rest of the planet, we regard wood as carbon neutral and nuclear power as a necessity – and then we want to geo-engineer this planet?

Frightening; Orwell’s ideas about 1984 would seem like heaven compared to a scenario where it was declared a necessity to play around with the planet’s climate; while in the end we might just need to dump the old bad and worse banks, install new ones with new money and hopefully better regulations and controls in place we will not be able to give up this planet and try another one just because our engineers missed a point or two, five or ten years earlier.

In the ideal world it was God who was creative for seven days; one can discuss the story and the outcome, especially since mankind obviously is not so far talented enough to manage this ideal planet; we need to be doing our homework, not trying at playing God.

Carpe diem

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