Geoengineering Schemes are Designed to Bedazzle Investors With Visions of Sugarplums - BAU

Can Chemtrails save the polar bears?

Another study out today is spiraling toward the black hole of geoengineering. This one by David Keith, a Calgarian and professor of applied physics at Harvard University suggests we could refreeze Arctic using the same Solar Radiation Management technology that was until recently condemned as the mutterings of the 'tinfoil hat' gang. In fact the experimental technologies known in science as Solar Radiation Management [SRM], Stratospheric Aerosols, Geo-Engineering or Climate Engineering have long been known in popular culture as chemtrails.

Scientists have been experimenting with injecting reflective particles of different kinds into the high atmosphere for decades. Their goal is to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface and compensate for the greenhouse effect. High greenhouse gas levels would continue to trap heat, but with less energy coming in to begin with, in theory at least [more on that in a minute] temperatures on the surface would go down. Call it SRM, call it whatever makes you less anxious, but by any name geoengineering is gaining a grip on the collective consciousness because it sounds like a viable route to keeping extractive capitalism meeting consumer's demands for needless crap thereby keeping all their mutual fund and pension plan portfolios growing, in short-BAU.

Yesterday the AEMG's hyperbolic headline about the catastrophic $60 trillion 'Arctic Methane Burp', widely condemned by peer reviewed science, was pushing the fear button with its warning about the vast costs of a huge Arctic methane pulse. Of course their solution was geoengineering. AMEG is a geoengineering lobby. Geoengineering solutions are predicated on the assumption that we can solve the problem of global warming by masking the effects of extractive capitalism rather than by eliminating it, which is bullshit - only conservation, only stopping the insanity of consumer capitalism can ever solve global warming.

Global warming is just one symptom not the disease itself. The disease of materialism causes many symptoms that may be convenient to see as unrelated to each other but are all caused by consumer capitalism and the ridiculous self-serving belief in a free lunch. All those other inconvenient issues like fresh water contamination and depletion, like species extinction rates, like soil degradation from chemical ag. killing the biomass, like...are all caused by the same extractive capitalism, by corporations destroying the globe to achieve maximum profit for their shareholders through fulfilling the demands of consumers.

Anyway, the point is that opponents will immediately discredit hyperbolic headlines allowing people not well informed on the subject to turn away from the real problems that Arctic ice melting and methane feedbacks cause.

Regarding the AMEG fear mongering, Dr Vincent Gauci, a researcher at the Open University and director of the MethaneNet research network and professor David Archer from the University of Chicago, who researches ocean sediments and methane agree that even if the ocean warms, most of the methane released by thawing permafrost could stay in the seabed or dissolve in seawater. Saying, "Even in the unlikely event that we were to stop all emissions in the near future, the permafrost feedback response to our historic emissions, even in the absence of future human emissions, is likely to be self-sustaining and will cancel out future natural carbon sinks in the oceans and biosphere over the next two centuries."

Methane feedbacks are deadly serious and, despite AMEG's geoengineering wet-dreams, won't be solved by geoengineering.  Geoengineering is another scheme meant to bedazzle potential investors, to generate windfall 'profits' for the corporations [until they go bankrupt from the liability lawsuits arising from the collateral damages caused by their hubris] and to keep the stock market and investment portfolios growing until the shit hits the fan.