Liberal Values Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought

Here’s a surprising solution proposed for global warming:

Air pollution may be just the thing to fight global warming, some scientists say.

Prominent scientists, among them a Nobel laureate, said a layer of pollution deliberately spewed into the atmosphere could act as a “shade” from the sun’s rays and help cool the planet.

This reminds me of those anti-scientist disaster movies in which the scientist comes up with a grand plan which backfires and destorys the earth.  The scientist who proposed this the idea is “not enthusiastic about it.”

“It was meant to startle the policymakers,” said Paul J. Crutzen, of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. “If they don’t take action much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this.”

Serious people are taking Crutzen’s idea seriously. This weekend at Moffett Field, California, NASA’s Ames Research Center hosts a closed-door, high-level workshop on the global haze proposal and other “geoengineering” ideas for fending off climate change.

A variety of opinions were given on this idea:

“Yes, by all means, do all the research,” Indian climatologist Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the 2,000-scientist U.N. network on climate change, said.

But “if human beings take it upon themselves to carry out something as massive and drastic as this, we need to be absolutely sure there are no side effects,” Pachauri said.

Philip Clapp, a veteran campaigner for emissions controls to curb warming, also sounded a nervous note, saying, “We are already engaged in an uncontrolled experiment by injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”