Evidently the latest plan to make sure we remove enough CO2 from the air to kill off the plants and then ourselves is a proposal to set off an ultra-massive hydrogen bomb off Antarctica, some 81 gigatons, some 1,600 times more powerful than anything humans have ever exploded before, to “pulverize billions of tons of basalt rock on the ocean floor, triggering a natural process that sucks carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.” Yeah. That’ll show that stupid nature that sequestering carbon slowly via calciferous sea creatures and creating a famine over millions of years is for amateurs. Mankind will show you how to create a snowball Earth and go oops. Hey, wait a minute.

Perhaps it sounds too ridiculous even for the climate field. But at least some people are taking it seriously. If by that phrase you mean there was an article in “Boing boing” which claims to be “The award-winning zine, blog and directory of mostly wonderful things.” Like playing God on the cheap, since:

“This single explosion could potentially lock away 30 years' worth of global carbon emissions. Price tag? A mere $10 billion – pocket change compared to the projected $100 trillion in climate change damages by 2100, an ‘an astronomical return on investment.’”

They don’t bother with petty details like who made that projection or on what laughable basis. And they throw caution to the winds in other ways too, saying:

“Sure, there are some minor hurdles – like convincing the world to okay the biggest nuclear blast in history. But Haverly maintains it's worth considering: ‘This is not to be taken lightly.’”

“Haverly” being “Andrew Haverly, a researcher at Rochester Institute of Technology's Department of Computer Engineering”. And indeed it’s not to be taken lightly, not least because that line about “convincing the world” is sheer gibberish.

Trivially, it’s not obvious how to phone the world, or text it, saying “OK if we nuke the ocean floor and radically change the climate and hope we did the math right and stuff?” But the big problem is that nobody owns the oceans, so you don’t need to “convince the world” that you should be allowed to overfish them, or set off a device to change the whole world’s weather and hope it’s not a mistake.

Worse, it’s not just “Boing boing” and some projector. Instead there are lots of private geoengineering ventures, fortunately most on a trivial scale, that people are carrying out without the “world” or physics saying to do it. And we don’t here mean the conspiracy theories about governments and vapour trails. We mean people releasing balloons full of sulphur dioxide or dumping things into the ocean meant to cause tipping points that are good ones because some kook figures it might be so.

Yeah, yeah, you may be saying, it’s an idea so crazy Dr. Strangelove would laugh out loud. But here’s the thing: Haverly’s actual paper proposing this madness explicitly aims at “accelerating carbon sequestration through Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW)”. And Enhanced Rock Weathering is an “in” thing with the alarmist crowd.

They study it, they advocate it, and we should trust them that they can remake the Earth and get it right this time unlike dumb old nature or that stupid God, so we don’t have to suffer through a prolonged interglacial where crops grow but can get right back to the slow spiral downward into a lethal snowball Earth. Only they call it saving us from global warming.

It even has its own Wikipedia entry. It’s an obsession that has the New York Times “Climate Forward” fretting “Will there be enough power to pull carbon from the sky?” To which the obvious answer is no, of course not, because the reason humanity is releasing CO2 is that it comes from far and away the most efficient way of generating power, so you’d have to use all the power we generated and then some to undo it unless you’d care to repeal the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Which they might try. And something called the “Climate Portal” at MIT enthuses about it that:

“Enhanced rock weathering is a strategy to help address climate change by taking carbon out of the air and storing it in rocks. It is one of several “carbon removal” techniques that target carbon dioxide (CO2), the most important climate-warming greenhouse gas humans have been adding to the atmosphere.”

And when we say enthuses, we mean it:

“Geologists and climate scientists agree that the basic idea of enhanced rock weathering is sound. The challenge is making this a practical solution to climate change.”

Climate scientists agree. Where have we heard that one before? And again, as with:

“Experts agree that, to meet the world’s targets for limiting climate change, some amount of carbon removal will be needed in the coming years.”

Experts agree. Net Zero is pitifully inadequate and unambitious. So you hicks with your concerns about safety and your silly “precautionary principle” can shut up and get out of the way while we grind, blast, acidify and generally stich the unmatched parts together and fire it up and see if it rampages.

Actually that one isn’t on their list. When the MIT portal talks about “making it a practical solution”, their concern is just making it cheap enough to do en masse and hope it all works out (“the biggest challenge, as with many ideas for carbon removal, is cost”) like good capitalist madcap global engineers. It’s not the insanity of deliberately changing the climate to make it less friendly given what they think has resulted from our accidentally changing the climate.

Now suppose for just one moment that people who thought the planet was too cold were planning radically to alter the whole biosphere to heat it up, possibly using massive nuclear devices in international waters. What do you suppose the alarmists would say about the hubris involved in hijacking the Earth, let alone the possibility of tipping points, unanticipated consequences and so forth?

Right. But when it’s them with their mad schemes, to borrow from Mater’s Tall Tales, we get the sequence “It’s aliiiiive” “I’m dead”.