Planetary liposuction

Monbiot stole my analogy. I have had a post drafted for the last couple of months based on the idea that geoengineering attempts to rapidly modify the climate with techno-fixes are the equivalent of liposuction for an obese planet, retrospective attempts to undo slowly accumulated damage overnight that may bring temporary cosmetic improvements (and perhaps mild benefits of more valuable kinds) at significant risk of their own.

I intend to say quite a bit more about geoeingeering, as I suspect that it is not going to go away, but will only become more significant in and ethical and political debates about climate change. This is another topic that Christian ethicists will need to contemplate, and once again, there are no shortcuts to learning about the details of the various proposals, which range from putting millions of tiny mirrors in space to reflect a small amount of incoming sunlight, to seeding the ocean with iron filings to generate algal blooms that soak up carbon dioxide and fall to the ocean floor, to adding sulphur to aviation fuel (a substance that we've been trying to get out of the atmosphere for other reasons for some time) to reduce solar radiation entering the atmosphere, to crushing certain kinds of rock into powder and scattering them on the ground to accelerate a natural carbon sink (this last proposal may have some merit, by the way).

How Genghis Khan cooled the planet

Frank ponders how to give an eco-friendly gift, and ends up discussing the difference between hope and stress.

Ben Myers has stopped blogging about faith and theology and has become a short story writer (briefly). And he is frustrating brilliant at that too! It was bugging me that most of his stories seem to be set in the US. I was about to comment on that trend when I came across this one and I felt right at home.

Amidst all the climate records set in 2010, a new melt record for the Greenland ice sheet was set in 2010.

And Mongabay tells of How Genghis Khan and Hernán Cortés cooled the planet (perhaps Christopher Columbus should get the credit). I'm not advocating that we try that particular strategy of geoengineering.

Give us this day our daily bread

The Coming Famine: The global food crisis and what we can do to avoid it by Julian Cribb. The world has consumed more food than it has produced in nine of the past 10 years and food crises are likely to become more common.

FT: Water in the desert, some Gulf cities are quickly running out. Globally, groundwater depletion rates are accelerating.

NYT: Bleaching is back in fashion, coral bleaching that is, with disastrous effects on already stressed fish populations.

Climate central: Arctic sea ice loss, why does it matter? (though fortunately, there is good news on that front). Rolling Stone also has a good article on the future of ice, including this quote: "If you look at all these dramatic changes, water is doing it all. The vulnerability the ice sheets have to heat from the ocean is the key to all of this. And there's orders of magnitude more than enough heat in the ocean to kill the ice sheet, on whatever time scale the ocean and atmosphere conspire to deliver that heat. It's not at all about subsequent warming or future warming of the oceans. We don't have to warm up the ocean any more at all. The vulnerability is really from climate change altering the atmospheric circulation and how much that's going to alter the ocean circulation. The ice sheets have no defense against warm water. They don't really stand a chance."

Science Daily: Beetle populations responsible for massive pine forest die-off likely to keep rising.

US Clean Air Act has benefits forty times greater than costs of regulation. This Act has some impressive credentials under its belt after forty years, and it inspired a number of other similar bills elsewhere.

Guardian: Good thing the UK has the greenest government in history.

Hot Topic: Have the climate wars begun?

Scared of the dangers of massive untested geoengineering projects? We've been doing them for some time.

SMH: And in Sydney, we've decided to start fracking next to Warragamba Dam. Seriously.