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Reading the New York Times on Friday was like picking up one of those tabloids in the supermarket checkout line. You know, the ones with articles entitled TAYLOR AND TRAVIS CANOODLE IN THE CARIBBEAN and HOW TO LOSE SIXTY POUNDS WHILE EATING ONLY CHEESECAKE AND ICE CREAM, along with crazy stuff, such as SCIENTISTS PLAN TO LAUNCH GIANT UMBRELLA TO BLOT OUT THE SUN. But this was, after all, the New York Times, and there was the article, all dressed up in Gray Lady language but still just as tarty a tabloid story as you could imagine: “Could a Giant Parasol in Outer Space Help Solve the Climate Crisis?”
Yes, it’s real. The author, Cara Buckley (or “Buckely,” as the scrupulously careful and accurate Paper of Record refers to her in one mention), is identified as a “reporter on the climate team at The Times who focuses on people working toward climate solutions.” That’s enough in itself to know she’s crazy, and she proves it with the opening paragraph of her article about the latest on the crisis that could destroy the world as we know it (no, Taylor and Travis aren’t breaking up; I’m referring to global warming).
“It’s come to this,” Buckley writes breathlessly. “With Earth at its hottest point in recorded history, and humans doing far from enough to stop its overheating, a small but growing number of astronomers and physicists are proposing a potential fix that could have leaped from the pages of science fiction: The equivalent of a giant beach umbrella, floating in outer space.”
Which astronomers and physicists? Dr. Jekyll? Dr. Strangelove? Dr. Frankenstein? Dr. Yakub, the evil scientist who, according to Nation of Islam lore, created white people on the island of Patmos, and thereby introduced evil into the world? The New York Times, which is supposed to be a serious paper, is actually taking seriously a scheme to launch a gigantic umbrella into space to shield us from the sun’s rays?
And I do mean gigantic: “To block the necessary amount of solar radiation,” Buckley informs us, with no indication that she has ingested any hallucinogenics, “the shade would have to be about a million square miles, roughly the size of Argentina.”
Oh. Okay. So “scientists” are plotting to launch an umbrella the size of Argentina into space to protect us from global warming, and this is the Paper of Record, and we should trust the science, eh? Dr. Roy Spencer, who is an actual scientist and a leading skeptic regarding the left’s climate change mythology, disputes the central premise of Buckley’s article and the giant umbrella plot: the idea that the earth is hotter now than it has ever been, and that it’s the fault of human activity. Spencer explains:
Since there is so much year-to-year (and even decade-to-decade) variability in global average temperatures, whether it has warmed or cooled depends upon how far back you look in time. For instance, over the last 100 years, there was an overall warming which was stronger toward the end of the 20th Century. This is why some say “warming is accelerating.” But if we look at a shorter, more recent period of time, say since the record warm year of 1998, one could say that it has cooled in the last 10-12 years. But, as I mentioned above, neither of these can tell us anything about whether warming is happening “now,” or will happen in the future.
There is, however, one thing that we can be sure of about the future: the New York Times and the rest of the left’s propaganda apparatus will continue to push the climate change mythology upon the nation, demanding that Americans acquiesce to third-world status for the sake of the planet, while China, which is a massive polluter but remains unchallenged by the climate hysterics, gains global economic hegemony.
Ultimately, it’s all a shakedown for those who hatch schemes such as blocking out the sun with an umbrella the size of a South American nation. Buckley reports that one Yoram Rozen, “a physics professor and the director of the Asher Space Research Institute at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology,” is “ready to design a prototype shade of 100 square feet and is seeking between $10 million and $20 million to fund the demonstration.” Oh, is that all! Watch for Old Joe and his henchmen to pony up readily: after all, the kleptocrat-in-chief is a fair-skinned old fellow, and he’d probably be grateful for an interplanetary sunscreen paid for by the American taxpayers he so loves to soak.
One other thing is certain as well. I’m no scientist, but I’m nevertheless unhesitant about making this prediction: if these mad scientists ever really do shoot their Argentina-sized umbrella into space, it will have unforeseen effects that will be catastrophic for the people of the earth, and cause much more harm than the phony crisis they’re claiming to solve. Luckily, however, all that is likely to come of this plot is a few millionaire “scientists,” and another hit to the credibility of the paper that Donald Trump indelibly dubbed “the failing New York Times.”
From which Assylum did this screwball escape from?
It all about CO2 and without adequate CO2, in fact more is better, we will all die and that will include those who think man drives the climate.
Do you mean Robert Spencer?
“ disputes the central premise of Buckley’s article and the giant umbrella plot: the idea that the earth is hotter now than it has ever been, ”
I have not read Buckley’s article, so I cannot comment authoritatively on it. However, no half way intelligent person believes that the earth is hotter today than it has ever been. Indeed, for millions of years, it was far too hot to support the type of life that that exists on the earth today. I will wager a guess that that claim came out of Robert’s perfervid, I’ll-informed imagination. That would speak volumes about Robert’s intellectual integrity- never very high in my estimation- as well as his general knowledge of the subject about which he writes.
But even beyond that, the article has nothing of value to say. There is no concerted argument, and the author demonstrates no knowledge of the subject about which he pontificates with such great authority. All very much in character for this pretentious man.
I wonder if humanity is allowed to say NO to such a God-like proposal. God has been erased from their hearts but what about ours?
Science needs to be rigorous, or it isn’t science.
These people wouldn’t know actual science, the methodology used to explain the world around us, if it bit them on the… well, you know. They only know SCIENCE(tm)!!! That scam that screams that it is settled and “don’t you dare contradict me, I have a degree in SCIENCE(tm).”
$10 to $20 million for a 100 square foot prototype? My tile didn’t charge that much.
Right! That’s 10 feet by 10 feet, the same size as the rug in my living room. $100,000 to $200,000 per square foot, and expect a cost overrun of 300%.
Well, realistically, your living room rug didn’t have to be launched into geosynchronous orbit.
They’re already doing it, they deny geoengineering is happening but it is, one only has to look into the sky to see the clouds forming at right angles to each other and in straight lines.
They don’t, however, get the $20,000,000 per 100 sq ft.
It is called airel spraying. Miss named con-trails.
Just watch the skys. There is plenty of proof.
I’m still trying to figure out who is responsible for it. Surely the elites are breathing the same air we breathe. Or not??
Yes, there’s plenty of proof if you just look skyward!
The last few mornings, in my state, have been sunny. Going out early to run errands while it was sunny I noticed aerol spraying(contrails) from planes all across the morning sky. Sure enough, as I continued my errands (about an hour and a half of stops around town) those contrails had spread out and become clouds. Trying to record this phenomena, I took pictures which show the blue sky with a few planes spraying which then turned into a clouded up sky—thin clouds BUT just enough cloud cover to BLOCK OUT the SUN!
Frightening!
There was a lot of that going on over Europe in WW2.
I see the streaks quite often over my city. It’s scary. Aluminum, strontium, all kinds of chemicals. We are poisoning ourselves.
100 sq. ft? That’s only 10×10 feet, smaller than most all third or fourth bedrooms. I have a throw rug larger than that.
Have you ever tried to launch it into a stable geosynchronous orbit?
As a retired satellite communications industry professional, achieving a geosynchronous orbit is relatively easy. However, achieving a geostationary orbit (the location of a typical global communications satellite) is quite difficult.
Think of it as being analogous to parallel parking car in a tight space where the number of parking spots are limited.
FYI:
Any satellite that has a rotational period around the earth of 23hrs, 56 min, 4.09 sec is considered to be geosynchronous. However, for global communications, a satellite in a geosynchronous orbit it’s not very useful.
However, a satellite that has the same rotational period as the earth, rotating in the same direction as the earth and in the equatorial plane of the earth is in a geostationary orbit. That is to say, it is always in the same location in the sky 24/7/365. Thus the term “geostationary.”
Most global communications satellites, aka GEOSATs, are in a geostationary orbit around the planet. A communications satellite in geostationary orbit requires the least amount of fuel to keep the satellite on station and has a useful life of 10+ years. LEOSATs and MEOSATS on the other hand, use up their fuel rather quickly and are short lived (2 to 4 years at most) but are cheaper to build.
BTW: In the industry, we take offense to the term geosynchronous which sounds good to an industry outsider but doesn’t convey anything about where the satellite is located and is therefore in essence a meaningless term.
Think of it as akin to trying to describe a dog and only using the term “dog.” Calling it a dog doesn’t tell you much of anything. What breed of dog? What color is it? Is it male or female? What’s it’s name? Etc., etc.
I have a better idea: let’s launch a million eco-freaks into space, floating near the Riussell’s Teapot, each carrying an umbrella and a teacup.
A million? Let’s be really caring for the planet: ten millions.
In my reckless youth my friends and I got so stoned that we started throwing rocks at the sun to put it out. We were on drugs then. These people are not. That’s scary.
I like the way you think!!
These mad scientists have just inadvertently admitted that it isn’t CO2 that causes global warming—it’s the sun!
This excellent essay clowns the “woke” climate clowns. It also provoked an echo from long-ago TV sci-fi maven Rod Serling: “You are about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!”
The only thing that should be launched is a good left hook followed by a solid right to the jaw of every eco-nut out there. When trying to teach someone something, the only thing that really works is ‘pain’ ! Remember when you were a kid? Didja ever get a spanking ? Did you ever get the ‘rod of correction’ applied to the ‘seat’ of the problem ?? Hmmmm. Worked, didn’t it ! I rest my case.
(Oh yes, the only difference between a man and a boy is the price of his toys’. That axiom has never changed either). 🙂
A left followed by a right would give the Left south-pause.
No one has to be a scientist … to know a scam when you see one.
But that’s an understatement.
The Anthropogenic Global Warming Big Lie is one of the biggest and most evil lies ever invented. Never mind you’re lying eyes … you’re lying memory … you’re grandmother’s tales of hot, dry years back in the 30s … or the Global Cooling scam in the 70s …
No. It’s just that it’s scientifically impossible.
Seriously … there is actual science that proves that it’s a lie.
Yes, we know Arrhenius discovered that CO2 absorbs a few wavelengths of infrared … and he is rightly applauded for his equation for calculating reaction rates …
… But he was wrong.
… And I’m right … because I stand on the shoulder’s of giants – lots of them – who came after Arrhenius and studied the behavior of gases.
And guess what? … The temperature of a gas has nothing to do with it’s composition. It’s entirely a function of thermal input, thermal output, and the volume or pressure.
Translation: Climate will change – or not – with or without carbon dioxide.
BTW … the Holocene climate has been incredibly stable compared to the past.
… And the development of ice sheets correlates so strongly with obliquity … that obliquity is probably the only factor besides insolation (sun power flux) that has an impact on climate.
Also btw … volcanoes have almost no effect. Massive, long term continuous eruptions over millions of years will affect climate (yes, that’s happened), but nothing like that is happening right now. What happens when a volcano goes off (VEI 6 to 8) … is a powerful effect on the weather, but only for a few years at most. That can be very bad – and likely caused the Dark Ages – and the bronze age collapse – but they don’t change climate.
That’s why they say that AD 536 was the absolute worst year to be alive. Unless you also consider 1250 BC. Very bad times for humans to be alive.
I was an industrial designer at Stanford University for eight years. I learned one thing about scientific research, that it is not motivated so much by scientific curiosity as by research funding. And that funding often depends on a desired (and even predetermined) result. So this madness does not surprise me.
I consulted my local fortune teller. She said if I leave a dead chicken with $50,000 inside of it on a chair by my front door, the temperature will remain steady until the next installment. Comparison shopping is a good skill to have, especially when lacking Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth.
They should try it out on Venus first, to see if it works, but no, they’ll make US the “Guinea Pigs”. Science? They don’t yet know what GRAVITY is, or how it works! “Grey Lady” down. Wasn’t that a movie about a submarine? “Don’t fool around with something when you don’t know what it is”! Best Sci-Fi movie dialog snip ever!
I seem to recall that just a few years ago there was a serious(?) proposal, advocated by none other than Bill Gates (yes, the same man who has recently said, on the record (I think at the WEF in Davos), that Earth’s current human population of some 7 billion souls needs to be reduced to 500 million, requiring the, ahem, “liquidation” of the other 6.5 billion of us) to use rockets to explode an earth-blanketing cloud of reflective micro-particles into the atmosphere in order to “shield” our planet from the Sun’s “harmful” light and warmth.
I won’t be surprised if these Warmist lunatics next propose altering the orbit of some huge asteroid so that it strikes Earth instead of whizzing by in a “near miss” of a million miles, as a few of the big ones–including a very recent one–most often safely do.
It is now believed that such a strike by a gigantic asteroid that crashed at supersonic speed into the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago (evidence of its 65-mile-wide crater has been identified on the ocean floor) sent so much smoke and earth-smothering debris into the atmosphere that it blocked the Sun’s light and warmth for decades (or maybe centuries), resulting in drastic, sudden, world-wide darkness and the concomitant “cooling,” quickly killing off most of the Earth’s lush vegetation and ending the Age of the Dinosaurs.
Oops! I shouldn’t have mentioned that possible Final Solution to “Climate Change” and the now-fashionable hoax of anthropogenic “Global Warming”–I don’t want to give these dangerous lunatic oligarchs any dangerous ideas that they haven’t already thought of!
There is a view amongst some Creationists that the earth was originally shrouded in a cloud canopy, shielding it from the sun, and that this was dispelled at the time of the Flood. The loss of the cloud canopy accounted for the first rainbow, for the seasons, and for the shortening of the human life span from centuries to decades. If true, this would raise the question of whether God will permit human beings to partly replace the cloud canopy, especially if there is any potential for lifespans to lengthen again once harmful radiation is occluded. My own belief is that the shortening of lifespans on earth is what Sheldon Vanauken would have called a “severe mercy” – because who would want to live 900 years on a planet where people are becoming more wicked by leaps and bounds?
How are these geniuses going to keep what is essentially a solar sail between the earth and the sun from blowing into the earth and deorbiting? This is even more absurd than those idiots that wanted to cover Greenland in a reflective sheet a decade or two ago.
The L1 Lagrange point between the earth and sun is a long term stable position. We keep many of our solar observation satellites there now.
But I agree with your basic premise regarding solar pressure and the size of this proposal. This is another reason to favor many smaller shades.
The mass to area ratio required to keep them from blowing out of the L1 point anyway, and the total mass required for such a grid presupposes that we are extensively mining the asteroid belt and have moved industry into orbit or the earth-moon L4 and L5 points. Essential goals to mankind’s long term survival I support anyway, but not happening anytime soon (or ever, if the left has its’ way), and certainly not before the left claims life on earth is doomed. And that doesn’t even count the effort required to maintain it.
Then there’s the questions of who controls it, who gets their crops stunted, and what global temp average is best (that should keep them arguing for the next millenia, at least, and should be determined before any attempt to change it). Until we know a lot more about sol and plate tectonics, we’re shooting blind. And like orbital solar collection and power transmission to ground stations, it’s also a doomsday WMD..
Look, it is not a bad idea, except in the details of this proposal.
The sun IS getting hotter from the accumulation of helium in the core (when we lost our first greenhouse gases and got our oxygen atmosphere the sun was so cool the oceans froze over for a billion years, and only thawed out as the sun warmed). The oceans will start to boil away in as many years in the future as the dinosaurs all died in the past. IF we last long enough we WILL have to do this, even if the current global warming is bogus.
A better approach would be a few hundred smaller (stadium sized?) shades that can be rotated to act like Venetian blinds, so that the radiation can be fine tuned. A shade the size of Argentina would be too hard to control properly. BTW, our observations of the sun are really in their infancy, we do not know if there are long term multi-century cycles that would require constant adjustments.
Ah, but the cord would have to be very long and would get tangled up in the slats and everything they pass on the ground. I think we should just all hold our breath until we have deprived the atmosphere of CO2. It’s no weirder an idea than a shade the size of Argentia.
chuckle
Just in case you meant it, the answer is each satellite. would be physically independent and would rotate via reaction control wheels, a la the Hubble telescope.
Here’s a better idea. Why not just leave the Earth the heck alone? We are not heating the planet with our technology or exhaust, if history is any judge. Ask yourself why Roman legions were growing vinyards in the British isles 2k years ago (which can’t be done now due do the cooler climate). Ask why cow flatulence is so environmentally deadly when, some 500 years ago, European explorers discovered massive heards of bison in the central North American continent (estimated between 30M and 100M head – all those buffalo farts every day up into the ozone), and we were in the middle of the Little Ice Age! Sheesh! Too much CO2? Plant more trees. It’s not that hard. And save your sails for the Sci-fi channel!
Actually, our increased CO2 levels will be very useful in the next Little Ice Age. It may not be a bad thing at all, for awhile.
OK, well, there’s a few things you need to ponder first. Ask yourself how it is frozen Mammoths are found in the Arctic with UNDIGESTED Tropical vegetation in their mouths, unswallowed, and in their stomachs, when there is NO KNOWN cold that is COLD ENOUGHT or FAST enough to freeze them. THEN, review these presentations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j635Cv2aOlA&t=0s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEMXp1HlzUs&t=0s . Then, understand Einstein figured it out, but couldn’t find the geophysical mechanism that would cause it. And this: World in peril the origin, mission, and scientific findings of the 46th/72nd Reconnaissance Squadron by Ken White. May be available here: https://annas-archive.org/md5/7e288f256acf2e7db72cb0b5e7ed83fc . RE: your comment above, there is Nothing, of ANY size, that could be placed at LaGrange L1 or L2, that would cast a shadow on Earth. 90% of the “Science” we learned in school is wrong.
Even if it was 70 million, instead of 300-450 million years i believe, before the oceans boil, it’s not meaningful against the time of our recorded history and advancement, much less a priority now.
It does point out the absurdity of AGW hoaxers’ arguments, and the ultimately self-fulfilling nature of global warming ‘prophecy.’ Their ‘solutions’ will eliminate any chance of what you propose from ever happening.
Just as stupid as the idea of using giant Kites to propel ships while Glass Coated Kite String is not safe for Birds