Geoengineering: has science finally gone mad?

t's what we get for calling them ‘four-eyes’ and locking them in their locker when they were little. First they invented the Bomb. Then the Pill. Then Covid. And now Solar Geoengineering. It's as if they're competing to see who can find the best way to get revenge.

While scientists across the country are complaining to the press about US President Trump taking away their cheese, the UK is planning to commit what could turn out to be the biggest—and last—mistake in human history. In the belief that carbon dioxide is causing “catastrophic” global warming, they've greenlit an experiment to partially block out the sun by spraying calcium carbonate aerosols into the stratosphere.

It's ironic that climate alarmists have tricked governments into thinking that carbon is a hazard, and the solution is more carbon, in the form of carbonate. It's also ironic that they seem to have abandoned the so-called precautionary principle.

It's not clear what they hope to see. Most likely any effect will be indiscernible in the noise, which means they'll have to try it again on much larger scales—or maybe, critics say, they'll just falsify the data to make it appear successful. But whatever happens, it's a clear sign that the environmentalist movement has gone stark raving mad.

A paper just came out in Nature Communications claiming that climate change isn't warming anymore, but warming and cooling at the same time, what they call ‘temperature flips.’^[1] The paper shows a number of graphs purporting to show “rapid changes from extreme warm to cold,” which is even worse than ordinary everyday global warming because it affects low-income nations the hardest. Not coincidentally, it also means skeptics can't point to the past decade of freezing winters and unusually mild hurricanes as evidence that global warming is a load of hooey.

Is there anything CO₂ can't do?

Suppose it's true. How do we know, then, that this geoengineering won't cause a temperature flip? If CO₂ doesn't cause warming but instead makes the climate flip-flop more than Jimmy Carter ever did, how will they measure a change? Perhaps they'll go to a low-income nation, where it's worse, and measure it there.

Won't somebody please think of the stratosphere?

In fact, one effect of any tampering with the stratosphere could be a long-term disruption of the ozone layer.

You might think that calcite (calcium carbonate, CaCO₃) wouldn't do much in the infrared. But in fact, carbonate absorbs many but not all of the wavelengths absorbed by CO₂, with strong absorbance maxima at 6.97, 11.42, and 14.03 microns and weaker peaks at 3.93 and 5.50 microns.^[2] Unlike gases, solids like calcite absorb in broad bands instead of a series of narrow peaks. NIST has a nice spectrum.

This means that putting carbonate particles in the stratosphere won't just reflect visible light; it will also absorb and scatter outgoing thermal infrared radiation, thereby cooling or warming the stratosphere depending on where the particles were dispersed.

Cziczo et al.^[3] say that calcite can react with acidic materials in the stratosphere, producing aqueous and hydrate phases that lead to ozone loss. Other researchers claim it could increase ozone. But nobody can say for sure.

The ozone hole theory says that even trace amounts of foreign chemicals can disrupt the delicate chemical reactions that occur. Even if the CFC theory is wrong—and the evidence so far suggests that it may be—there is little doubt that stratospheric ozone creation is strongly affected by temperature.

If the carbonate experiment works, they'll likely plow ahead thinking they're doing a good deed, and then, ten years later somebody will suddenly discover to everyone's surprise that the ozone layer no longer exists. Environmentalists will say a collective ‘whoops-a-daisy’ and the science establishment will likely go into denial mode again as they did during Covid.

Save the Earth, ban environmentalists

If people become convinced that the climate studies groups are so off their rocker that they'll risk plunging the earth into an irreversible ice age, they'll take action by demanding that their political leaders rein in these risky experiments and take away their remaining cheese permanently.

They won't forget that climate studies was at one time a branch of science. And they know mainstream science sees it as a cash cow. The science establishment lied about Covid, they'll say, and now they want to risk the entire biosphere on the basis of an unproven—and likely unprovable—hypothesis about a modest increase in CO₂ being a crisis.

Just last week an article came out by Caroline H Gebara at the Technical University of Denmark [paywalled, so no link] claiming that we must never eat beef, but we may eat 255 grams of pork or chicken a week—for now. That amounts to 0.562 pounds, or 2.529 chicken wings per week as your entire intake of animal-based food. Any more, the authors say, and you become culpable in causing warming. So saith their computer model. The authors add that doing this will extend your life by 11.67 hours a week.

Few people will believe it'll stop at 255 grams. It's a rachet effect as environmentalists, animal rights people, and nutritionists with out of date knowledge invent reasons to tell us what to do.

Let's get engaged, baby

Science mag has a nice article that calls for more public engagement, saying “foregoing public engagement has already had fatal consequences for solar geoengineering projects.” They quote a sociologist named Livia Fritz, who let slip that it was all political:

Some participants didn't believe the public should be involved in decision-making, citing concerns about people being manipulated by misinformation, then making consequential decisions, Fritz says. Brexit, for example, was mentioned a lot here.

In an attempt to discredit critics, the author tries to link geoengineering with conspiratorial beliefs such as belief in chemtrails, and says engagement will inoculate against what she calls “misinfor­ma­tion.” The concern over misinfor­mation is a wildly popular topic in the science literature. It means, as it did during Covid, not that the science establish­ment is lying through their teeth about masks, the vax, and the origin of Covid, but that people are expressing skepticism about it.

Part of me wants the humans to go through with it. If there were a deity, that deity would surely demonstrate his wrath for the environmentalists' biblical-scale arrogance. It's almost Tower-of-Babel-like in its hubris.

Still, engagement is essential if we're ever going to resolve this dispute. CO₂ is gradually increasing, and although there's a debate over temperatures, the CO₂ hypothesis that says the two are causally connected is still only hypothetical. What would really be nice would be to come up with, oh I don't know, maybe some evidence that the CO₂ hypothesis is valid. Or is that asking too much?

apr 24 2025, 7:53 am. updated 11:52 am