National Gengraphic is reporting on a report from the UK’s Royal Society, which looks at five ways to combat global warming. The twist? It’s five ways to cool the earth that basically involve changing it more, to “cool” it artificially, and to counteract the warming trend.
To me, that’s like saying your coffee is too sweet, better add some salt to it.
For the record, the proposals include three versions of shading the earth — microscopic droplets of sulphur dioxide, seawater mist or space mirrors. The final two are huge-scale engineering projects that envision artificial trees, sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, or dissolving mountains. Yes, seriously.
When I was a kid, these proposals were called “terraforming” and they were universally employed in sci-fi stories where far-future astronauts were trying to make an alien planet more Earth-like. How sad that we’ve come to the point where we’re faced with doing the same thing — to Earth itself.
Grant Hamilton
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