Geoengineering (4) - Quareness Series 170th "Lecture".
It was not until the early 1970s (when the Board of Directors of the United Nations Environment Program was created and when the United Nations Scientific Conference became aware of the environmental issues) that the First Earth Summit was held in Stockholm (1972) focusing on the impact and control of agricultural pollutants. This summit also "exposed" the impact of human activities contributing to climate change. However, it was not until the 1980s that the United Nations expressed its concern for the ozone layer, acid rain and climate change, "making clear" the interrelation between industrial development and the environment. This in turn led on in 1988 to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) creating the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to become the world authority on the subject.
In 1990, during the Second World Climate Conference, climate was presented as a global problem that required a global response, laying the foundation for a framework of international agreements aimed at protecting the global environment which would materialise in the Rio Earth Summit Declaration and Agenda 21 in 1992, and culminate in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The objective of this protocol was to return to the levels of CO2 emissions recorded in 1990, which meant reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases of industrialised countries by at least 5% between 2008 and 2012. The Kyoto Protocol entered into force on 16th February, 2005 after seven years of negotiation between 160 countries.
The catastrophist narrative of global warming/climate change linked to the rights of future generations and to the practice of sustainable development in order to promote wider acceptance of the necessary adjustments suffered a setback in 2007 as a consequence of the “Climate Gate” disclosure. After the publication of some emails from Climate Research Unit scientists at the University of East Anglia (UK), conclusions were drawn of a manipulation of data and measurements to justify and maintain the theory of anthropogenic global warming. The subsequent Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change in 2009 resulted in failure due to the impossibility of setting emissions reduction quotas and not achieving the commitment of the different countries to them. This is the background which determined the script for the Climate Summit in Paris 2015...one needing to project the image of total success or else the individual credibility of the participating states and the collective credibility of the United Nations, UNEP, WMO, IPCC, etc., would be undermined.
Despite having been the first "militarised summit" in history under the state of emergency which allowed for the repression of environmental activists, the Paris Summit concluded as expected. Nevertheless this much hyped victory for humanity was hardly soundly based when CO2 emissions not only had not been reduced in all the years of barren negotiations but rather had increased, without registering any rise in global temperatures. And despite these "facts on the ground", covert geoengineering was the real deal that governments signed up to in the Paris Climate Agreements.
It's worth noting here that the earlier 1992 Treaty of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) had prohibited any future treaties on climate change impacting on international commerce...a matter of great import for the world's hegemonic economies such as United States, China, European Union, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Japan. This little known prohibition essentially hinders any effective "natural" action to fight climate change and inevitably leads all the "up front" negotiations to a dead-end, thereby "justifying" the need for the geoengineering approach. At this stage the two sides of this same coin are being illustrated through vigorous propagation of certain buzz terms e.g. environmental protection, sustainable development, future generations, fossil fuels, global warming, climate change, scientific consensus, interest of the parties, climate emergency, geoengineering, national security, military issue and military spending.
Geoengineering, however, inherently involves many "downside" (even contradictory) risks such as the following small sampling:
- Should the atmospheric dispersal of aerosols be suppressed (e.g. due to war or as a consequence of abandoning an international agreement or discovery of major negative effects) we could see abrupt warming to unprecedented levels causing enormous economic damage.
- Aerosol geoengineering in itself could destroy polar ozone. It can hardly counteract ocean acidification caused by the reaction between CO2 and seawater, which acidification itself can have a negative impact on coral colonies and their dependent species.
- Aerosol concentrations can affect our climate system properties such as El Nino, rain and temperature patterns, summer monsoons of Africa and Asia.
Protected by the Convention of the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, geoengineers are claiming legitimisation on the grounds of extreme weather events and the failure of CO2 mitigation measures whilst at the same time not openly backing geoengineering in the face of political institutions. On top of this anti-democratic dynamic we have some social scientists from high-end universities claiming the role of interface between the citizenry and geoengineers, in effect arrogating to themselves the representation of society in this matter.
In our practical everyday world, however, we hear of more and more farmers noticing atmospheric phenomena that they have never seen before and that they do not understand but whose consequences are a substantial loss of soil productivity. They're reporting abnormal formation of clouds, disappearance of rain clouds from one moment to the next, obscuration of the sun by a strange white layer that prevents the ripening of fruits, promotes the colonisation of trees by fungi and lichens causing the forest to die, the spreading of strange wildfires, crop decline or failure, the occurrence of aluminum particles in soil and rainwater, and the rise of serious health problems. Are we looking here at growing evidence of technological driven droughts and contamination by materials dispersed in the atmosphere for the purpose of manipulating the climate impairing the productivity of the soil? Sunlight of course is not only essential for the process of photosynthesis, production, reproduction and ripening for plants, for the evapotranspiration and creation of clouds, but also for the immune system and human health.
Coal fly ash i.e. coal combustion residues from power plants (perhaps a main ingredient in this atmospheric spraying) is extremely toxic, containing neurodegenerative elements such as aluminum, barium, mercury, etc. Some scientists have concluded that the geoengineering programs being deployed are not only not alleviating global warming but they are generating it, with deadly ultraviolet radiation UV-B and UV-C now penetrating the Earth’s surface causing devastating effects on humans, phytoplankton, coral, insects and plants. Such aerial spraying of coal fly ash is seen as placing vast amounts of chlorine, bromine, fluorine and iodine into the atmosphere...all of which can deplete the ozone layer.
The late American astronomer Carl Sagan once pointed out that science being much more than a body of knowledge is a way of thinking, a sceptical way of questioning the universe with a subtle understanding of human power. Indeed if we're not able to ask sceptical questions of those who tell us that something is true, or to be sceptical of those who maintain authority, we must leave ourselves open to some sort of political religiosity.
To be continued...
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
September, 2022.