OPINION:
British climate kooks intend to blot out the sun. The government’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency will soon be spraying material in the skies above the perpetually overcast island to amplify the gloom and lower the average temperature.
It’s not the plot of a science fiction B movie; it’s a $66 million boondoggle showcased in the agency pamphlet “Exploring Options for Actively Cooling the Earth.” Nobody at 10 Downing St. recoiled at the nonsensical tone of urgency underlying the stratagem to “buy time to decarbonize” by interfering with the sun.
“To date, there have been very few actual (or even attempted) outdoor experiments into approaches whose ultimate goal would be to reduce global or regional temperatures on a short-to-medium term basis,” it says, as if caution is a bad thing.
If The Daily Telegraph is right, the agency will soon receive formal approval to proceed. Before this, ARIA advertised its intention to hire a “diversity data consultant” to ensure that none of the computer data gathered discriminates against the nonbinary. That sounds less like science and more like politics.
Nothing stirs Labor parliamentarians more than feel-good rhetoric about addressing the “impacts of climate tipping points” without a hint of racism. ARIA’s swift action in this area is sure to inspire higher budgets and the confidence needed to secure perpetual funding. Future scientists will have a hard time coming up with a scheme outlandish enough to draw attention away from this one.
But not necessarily. In a study published five years ago, a group of climate scholars from University College London argued that Christopher Columbus was the first person to trigger global climate change.
The peer-reviewed journal article says the explorer kicked off an ice age by killing the Indigenous people of Mexico and Central America. “The uptake of carbon on the abandoned anthropogenic lands after European contact may have been large enough to impact the atmospheric CO2 record,” the researchers concluded.
Chilling the planet, in that context, is presented as a bad thing. It was also unwelcome in 1895 when a New York Times headline proclaimed, “Prospects of Another Glacial Period. Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again.”
About 25 years later, the “Gray Lady” shifted to concern about the Earth’s warming. Another quarter-century passed, and the consensus flipped back to global cooling. Anxiety peaked in 1978 as actor Leonard Nimoy issued a dire warning on his NBC show, “In Search Of.”
“Climate experts believe the next ice age is on its way,” he intoned. Except Mr. Spock wasn’t prescient enough to realize The New York Times was about to reset the narrative once again. In 1981, the paper announced: “Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is primarily a result of mankind’s burning of fuels, is thought to act like the glass of a greenhouse.”
The “experts” have blown hot and cold for more than a century and a half. That’s why it’s madness to let a random team of bureaucrats decide what’s best for the entire globe. Today, they want to lower the global thermostat. If it were the 1970s or 1900s, they would insist on intensifying the sun’s rays.
Rather than humbly acknowledging they might not understand this complex topic as well as they suppose, they are blindly acting on groupthink. President Trump ought to encourage Prime Minister Keir Starmer to reconsider the wisdom of allowing fanatics like these to mess with Mother Nature.
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