The blame goes to climate change every summer. The geoengineers offering to dim the sun and dam the Bering Strait might be the bigger worry.
RIGHT TIMES WITH KATHY GYNGELL
A guest post by Ivor Williams.
It was inevitable that climate change should be blamed for the wildfires burning around the world. The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, warned that ‘Spain and the Iberian peninsula were suffering the effects of the climate emergency.’ ‘France has been struck by three heatwaves since May as part of increasingly common extreme weather episodes linked to climate change.’
Eire: ‘Experts say this summer has offered a glimpse of how climate change is reshaping life across Europe.’ And ‘Wildfires are becoming more frequent and severe as climate change drives hotter, drier conditions across the United States.’
There seem to be no doubts. But it may not be quite like that. Firstly: we in western Europe are suffering from an unusual spell of hot dry weather which may or may not be part of a changing climate. Our weather is governed by the jet stream, an airflow west to east high in the atmosphere. This has locked in high pressure systems which have brought clear skies, lots of sunshine and bone-dry timber since May.
Secondly: the spirit of global warming doesn’t go around with a flame-thrower. The natural way of starting a forest fire is by way of lightning strikes, but these have been very rare over western Europe this summer. There has to be more than a suspicion of human interference, accidental or otherwise. But we simply must not put the blame on climate change. If very hot weather started fires then half the world would be uninhabitable.
It is admittedly difficult to stay sane when the warnings come all day and every day:
‘Concerns rise about the growing spate of extreme weather events and their likely links to global warming and climate disruption.’
‘The rapid transformation of our climate is harder than ever to ignore.’
‘The number of people exposed to extreme heat is growing exponentially due to climate change in all world regions.’
But the worst comes from the New Scientist, really trying to disturb your dreams. ‘If it’s like this now,’ they complained, ‘what’s it going to be like in 10, 20 or 30 years’ time? The answer, of course, is hotter and hotter and hotter.’ And that from an article headed ‘If you aren’t terrified by this heatwave you should be.’
If you are convinced that global warming is causing Europe to burn then you will ask ‘What can we do about it before it’s too late? Please help, we need to be rescued!’ And we may be, but not quite in the way you might choose.
Try to calm down before I really scare you. We’re back inside the real world even though you might find it hard to believe because we are now into geo-engineering, an utterly crazy, desperately worrying but very real science. Experiments in this field cannot be contained in secure laboratories as they need to be carried out in the atmosphere. Yes, the one we live in.
‘Modifying the Earth’s climate with large-scale geoengineering intervention is inevitable,’ said a well-argued Nature article last year, a geoengineering hubris I first reported in TCW in 2022. But do you realise what this means? The mainstream idea is to dim the sun by means of ejecting aerosols in the high atmosphere. Then presumably waiting to see what happens.
But even the Royal Society agrees. ‘If deployed in an informed and globally-coordinated way,’ they reported recently, ‘SRM [Solar Radiation Management] could ameliorate many, but not all, of the adverse impacts of climate change.’
There are many other proposals, all very serious. Sending up a giant mirror into space, for instance, so that it reflects sunlight down to all the earth’s solar panels at night. Or there’s one about erecting a 50-mile wall to block warm seas melting the huge Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, hoping that this will slow down sea level rise. Another group advocates pumping seawater on to Arctic snow to make the ice thicker. And there is support for increasing the brightness of clouds over the sea so more sunlight is reflected back. There are others reported in a three part TCW series, What are they doing to our skies?, by Jonathon Riley here, here, here and here, in 2024
Geo-engineering is not new. Way back in the 1950s there was an idea to explode ten 10-megaton bombs in the Arctic Ocean in winter. The resulting huge clouds would have a warming effect. That was a time of worry about earth’s temperature falling. Recently a very similar plan has been put forward, this time to explode an atomic bomb under an ocean seabed to generate pulverised basaltic rock, which would, they claim, soak up CO2 and thereby help to slow the rate of warming. Unbelievable, but read on, it gets worse.
Back again to the 1950s, Soviet scientists had a plan to put a dam across the Bering Strait, that 50-mile stretch of water between Alaska and Siberia. The idea was to keep icebergs out of the Pacific Ocean and at the same time pump water from the Pacific into the Arctic. This would warm the climate across huge areas of the earth.
There is a current plan to build that dam, this time to stop the collapse of an important ocean current and thereby preventing Europe freezing.
Your world is in the hands of these geo-engineering ‘experts’. I finish with a quote from that same very sensible Nature article. The problem is ‘forecasting the consequences of climate intervention accurately in a system for which we have incomplete observations and an imperfect understanding.’
I can’t put it any better than that. If we shout ‘help!’ too loudly, we may end up with something far worse.
Ivor Williams is a freelance writer and has been a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society since 1984.
(UKR)