When one thinks of the Wall Street Journal, “environmental advocacy” doesn’t leap to mind, but, it seems, the paper has come around on the issue of climate change. In its ‘Environment’ section earlier this week, the WSJ offered this headline: “It’s Time To Cool The Planet.”
As one critic of the Journal noted in January, the paper often uses quotation marks around certain terms to, in effect, suggest that term is misleading. “A 2007 editorial on climate change complained that “political and media activists attempt to stigmatize anyone who doesn’t pay homage to their ’scientific consensus.’” As a matter of grammar, if not as a matter of fact, this is perfectly clear: The Journal believes no scientific consensus on climate change exists.”
Still, there it was in print on Monday, June 15th. In the article, Jamais Cascio proclaims, “if we’re going to avoid climate disaster, we’re going to have start getting a lot more direct. We’re going to have to think about cooling the planet.” Cascio explains that “many of us who have been watching this subject closely gone from being skeptics to advocates. Very reluctant advocates, to be sure, but advocates nonetheless.”
Policy makers have failed to meet the challenge. As a result, if we want to avoid an unprecedented global catastrophe, we may have no other choice but to reduce the impact of global warning, alongside focusing on the factors that are causing it in the first place. That is, while we continue to work aggressively to reduce the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere, we also need to consider lowering the temperature of the Earth itself.
He then advocates so-called ‘geoengineering‘ as a “more deliberate manipulation of the environment;”,
On a global scale, industrial activity for the past 150 years or so has changed the Earth’s atmosphere, threatening to raise average world temperatures to catastrophic levels, even if we were able to stop releasing carbon into the atmosphere immediately…
Geoengineering mainly takes two forms: temperature management, which moderates heat by blocking or reflecting a small portion of the sunlight hitting the Earth; and carbon management, which gradually removes large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere (as opposed to simply reducing the amount of additional carbon we’re releasing into the atmosphere). Temperature management is the more likely course of action, as it has the advantage of potentially quick results, while carbon-management techniques that would have a global impact might take decades or centuries to show results…
We can’t let ourselves slip back into business-as-usual complacency, because we’d simply be setting ourselves up for a far greater disaster down the road. Our overall goal must remain the reduction and then elimination of greenhouse-gas emissions as swiftly as humanly possible. This will require feats of political will and courage around the world. What geoengineering offers us is the time to make it happen.
As we suggested earlier this week, it’s possible that we’ve reached some sort of tipping point, that maybe we’ve moved towards a place where even Rupert Murdoch-owned companies acknowledge the need to love tomorrow TODAY!
[full WSJ article]