Al Gore says use of geo-engineering to head off climate disaster is insane

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Al Gore says use of geo-engineering to head off climate disaster is insane

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
theguardian.com, Wednesday 15 January 2014 18.47 GMT

Al Gore said on Wednesday it would be "insane, utterly mad and delusional in the extreme" to turn to geo-engineering projects to avoid a climate catastrophe.

The UN climate panel, in the next edition of its blockbuster reports, will warn that governments might have to extract vast amounts of greenhouses gases from the air by 2100 to limit climate change, according to a draft copy of the report seen by Reuters.

But the former vice president of the US said that searches for an instant solution, which he said were born of desperation, were misguided and could lead to an even bigger catastrophe.

"The idea that we can put a different form of pollution into the atmosphere to cancel out the effects of global warming pollution is utterly insane," he told a conference call for South African reporters.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/jan/15/geo-al-gore-engineering-climate-disaster-instant-solutio

[Demeter]

1. Well, it's certainly untested

and pretty much untestable.

BUT---if a rigorously designed and analyzed proposal came forward, that could be spot tested, it might be worth the risk. So far, we don't have anything like that.

Whatever happened with the guy who dumped all the iron filings in the Pacific Ocean? Anybody taking data on that little experiment?

[djean111]

2. Wasn't Sir Richard Branson (Virgin Everything) offering a huge reward for

something like that?
I am afraid money will trump everything anyway. I seem to recall that some people had some devices that would skim off the oil in the Gulf, but BP went ahead and dumped Corexit anyway.

[Warren Stupidity]

3. Sane solutions are becoming increasingly unlikely.

Our 20th century corporate states are incapable of acting in a rational way to avoid catastrophe. They will, however, act to develop yet another cash spigot from national treasuries to financial cartels to develop insane technology projects that, at a huge cost, will do little or nothing, or perhaps make things worse.