The determination of climate alarmists to redesign the environment and get it right for a change is undented by various failures in less ambitious ventures. For instance AFP announces “California startup to ‘sponge’ CO2 from the atmosphere” using, of all things, limestone. Which we never had before. Uh, except in astronomical quantities deposited on the ocean floor by calciferous sea creatures whose often tiny individual shells have been sucking so much carbon from the overall cycle that atmospheric levels have fallen perilously low, hitting just 180 ppm in the Last Glacial Maximum. But this time for sure.

The news story, predictably, focuses on the wrong things in the usual breathless tone. It starts “Scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air is imperative if humanity is to limit global warming, experts say”. And when experts say, can hubris and one-sided drivel be far behind?

To repeat, atmospheric CO2 has been plunging for millions of years, pretty much throughout the entire Cenozoic era, the 66 million years or so from the time the non-avian dinosaurs died off to today. And the planet has been cooling, though the relationship of the one to the other is unclear. But it is not unclear that in the most recent, Pleistocene epoch over the last 2.6 million years or so, temperatures have been so low that glaciers have repeatedly flowed over much of the planet’s land mass and atmospheric CO2 has fallen close to the level at which all C3 photosynthesis plants die including all trees. This the “experts” call a catastrophe of overheating and excess carbon pollution or so the journalists would have you believe. But now some company in California is going to do exactly what nature has been doing for tens of millions of years except properly and… um… kill off the entire biosphere. Great.