Far Out Thought: Pollution Might Combat Global Warming?

By James Donahue

A recent story that moved through Associated Press quoted some "prominent scientists, among them a Nobel laureate" who are suggesting that a layer of polluted air, deliberately "spewed" into the atmosphere, might act like a shade from the sun's rays and help cool the planet.

The proposal brought mixed reactions when it was presented during a recent United Nations conference on climate change, held at Nairobi, Kenya. Some people at the meeting took the idea seriously, while others wrote it off as a "massive and drastic" bit of tomfoolery.

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist who made the proposal, Paul J. Crutzen, of Germany, admits he isn't very enthusiastic about the idea.

"It was meant to startle the policymakers," he said. "If they don't take action much more strongly then they have in the past, then in the end, we have to do experiments like this."

Believe it or not, there are some "scientists" in the field who appear to be taking Crutzen's idea seriously. NASA's Ames Research Center, in California, for instance, recently hosted a closed-door, high-level workshop in which the "global haze proposal" and other "geoengineering" ideas for warding off climate change were seriously examined.

There seems to be something going wrong with the thinking process of humans these days. That government leaders are pre-occupied with global competition for military, nuclear, oil and even space supremacy, and are ignoring the problems of overpopulation and pollution that threaten the life of our planet and global extinction of all life, is difficult to understand.

It would not surprise us if some secret government agency actually tries to carry out Crutzen's wild plan and consequently bring the drastic results that we all know, at least on a subconscious level, will happen.

Then Crutzen, like Einstein, can go down in the annuals as a man who created a monster that could not be captured once it was set free.

--November 2006