Spencer Weart - December 5, 2009

If human activities could change climate, why not change it on purpose, to suit us better? From 1945 into the 1970s, much effort went into studies of weather modification. American entrepreneurs tried cloud-seeding to enhance local rainfall, Russian scientists offered fabulous schemes of planetary engineering, and military agencies secretly explored “climatological warfare.”

The hopes and fears promoted basic research on climate change by raising large sums of government money and a few provocative ideas. In the mid 1970s the visionary projects were abandoned. Research turned instead to controversial “geoengineering” schemes for interventions that might restrain global warming if it started to become unbearable.

“Intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters . . . will unfold on a scale difficult to imagine at present. . . . this will merge each nation’s affairs with those of every other, more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war would have done.” — J. von Neumann

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John Holdren dreams up some scathingly brilliant, super-gigantic-expialidocious projects to head off global warming.

James Lewis - April 13, 2009

How often have we seen the picture of Galileo Galilei facing the Office of the Inquisition in 1632? Galileo is held up as a scientific martyr today, because he fiercely defended the Copernican solar system against the Inquisition, which finally ordered him to stop publishing those ideas. Cardinal Bellarmine denounced Copernican theory as “a very dangerous thing, not only by irritating all the philosophers and scholastic theologians, but also by injuring our holy faith and rendering the Holy Scriptures false.”

Today we have a radical role reversal. Climate heretics like Dr. Fred Singer and MIT’s Prof. Richard Lindzen are telling truth to power — and they are bitterly criticized by our science politicians, just as the pope criticized Galileo. Singer and Lindzen are our Galileos, telling a truth that the leftist establishment and its organs of propaganda do not want to hear.

Today we have our own official science czar in the White House. John Holdren is a true believer in the imaginary faith of global warming. We even have an office for the propagation of the faith, spearheaded by NASA’s James Hansen. It is Hansen who goes around saying that the oceans could rise by 20 feet and that heretics — like oil company execs — deserve to be put on trial for “high crimes against humanity and nature.” This witch-hunting talk apparently passes for normal scientific discourse in Dr. Hansen’s mind. Hansen has not yet proposed burning oil company execs at the stake, but he is no longer a scientist — he is a true believer, just like a Scientologist. Real scientists don’t know the answers before the evidence is in. Hansen and Holdren know the answers — their faith passeth mere human understanding.

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Wired | Mar 17, 2009

By Noah Shachtman

Some of the military’s leading scientific advisers are looking into the idea of remaking the planet’s environment, to stave off global warming.

The idea of “geoengineering” — hacking the Earth’s climate, to prevent more radical changes — has been kicking around the scientific fringes for years. One scheme calls for adding iron to the ocean, to stimulate the growth of greenhouse gas-absorbing algae. Another for “loading the skies” with sulfate particles that “act as mini-reflectors, shading out sunlight and cooling the Earth.” A third, “covering the Arctic with dust.” Most mainstream climatologists have responded to the proposals with a combination of snickers and horror; the environment is such a chatoic system, they argue, that there’s no telling what such wholesale monkeying around with it will do.

In recent months, however, several “top institutions have launched efforts to study the subject,” the ScienceInsider blog notes. The Pentagon’s secretive JASON scientific panel is schedule to discuss geonengineering soon. The National Academies are hosting a workshop over the summer. The U.K. Royal Society should have study out by then, too.

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