The same people who claim to love nature in principle don’t seem to have much use for it in practice. Consider for instance the Los Angeles Times headline “Plan to reflect sunlight to power solar panels at night upsets astronomers”. Oh sorry. Did you spit out your coffee? We came close too. But the essence of it is that solar power is just such a great, organic solution to the dreaded carbon pollution that all we have to do is redesign the whole planet to a kind of flat earth where the sun doesn’t set and it might actually work. And the only problem this mighty legacy media outlet seems to have is that we couldn’t see the stars quite as well.

No, really. The bullet summary, in case AI has reduced you to an automaton unable to digest anything more substantive than a small dish of pablum, is:

“* California startup Reflect Orbital plans to launch thousands of satellites with mirrors to redirect sunlight to solar farms at night.
*Astronomers warn the bright reflected light could be “ruinous” to ground-based telescopes that rely on dark skies for research”

We could of course suggest that any form of energy alleged to be cheaper and more reliable that requires some startup to fill the sky with junk in order to fill the night sky with light makes a mockery of praise for solar as organic and efficient. And we will.

We also agree that it would be tough for astronomers to have to put telescopes in space to avoid this glaring example of hubristic geoengineering. But of course if this startup manages to get a single demonstration satellite aloft by 2025 and then “launch dozens more over the next two years, with a goal of having about 4,000 satellites in orbit by 2030” maybe they could put a telescope or two onto this massive if imaginary space fleet. But what about kids who already have trouble seeing the night sky because of all the light pollution that, unlike “carbon pollution”, is real and a real problem? Where shall they go? On one of Elon Musk’s rockets to Mars?

Speaking of giving nature the old iron boot, Tom Ough on UnHerd describes James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and his accusation that in our hubris we have violated Mother Nature:

“what Gaia gives, warned Lovelock, she can take away. With ‘breathtaking insolence’, he wrote, humans have cracked open Gaia’s stores of carbon, hitherto buried so as to keep oxygen at its proper level, and burnt them as fuel. We have ‘usurped Gaia’s authority and thwarted her obligation to keep the planet fit for life’. Gaia, whose maternal patience lasts only so long, ‘now threatens us with the ultimate punishment of extinction’. With oceanic temperatures rising, predicted Lovelock, algae will falter in their production of dimethyl sulphide, a gas that helps clouds to form. With fewer clouds to shield us, the planet will become hotter and hotter. Perhaps a more apt Greek reference than Gaia is Medea – a mother who kills her own children.”

Um OK. If you think planets are alive. But wait. There’s more. Ough thinks the solution to hubris is to pile an Ossa of the stuff onto a Pelion, if you like Greek references:

“Yet who among us has no weakness for animism?... It is tempting to imagine that Mother Earth is preparing to punish her errant children, or that we dwarves, to invoke J.R.R. Tolkien, have indeed delved too greedily and too deep, awakening shadow and flame. Lovelock’s hypothesis did not posit Gaia as encompassing the magmatic fury of our planet’s interior, but it should have.”

Actually the dwarves awakened a Balrog, a demon. But who’s counting? Instead Gotterdammerung or whatever:

“environmentalists still contend that, facing the vengeance of Mother Earth, we should simply submit to her will. Reduce, reuse, recycle – but do not re-engineer that dynamic physiological system. There are no workarounds, they argue; we must leave the planet as we found it. This well-meaning submissiveness has amounted, in some cases, to a taboo against interfering with nature — a taboo that is now butting up against the hard reality of climate change. It is true that the most pessimistic and Lovelockian forecasts now seem less likely to be realised. But what we could think of as the medium-bad forecasts, in which we heat the planet by more than 2°C, are near-certain to be vindicated. The denialists, who have long insisted that climate change is not real, are as deluded as the environmentalists who insist it will eradicate humanity.”

Actually we stinking denialists say it’s largely natural not that it’s not real. But who’s reading their adversaries’ actual writings instead of Paradise Lost but with demons as heroes? Thus:

“Our planet’s inarguable warming has led some iconoclasts – thick-skinned scientists and even a couple of audacious entrepreneurs – to argue that we should break the taboo against meddling. It is past time, in this view, that we rejected the authority of Mother Earth. There is one particular act of meddling that will, over the coming years, prompt particular acrimony and vituperation. The act is ‘stratospheric aerosol injection’, by which we release a balloon filled with sulphur dioxide, a gas whose particles are reflective. The balloon, if it also contains helium, will rise — and when it pops, it will scatter those reflective particles… then those particles will reflect the Sun’s brilliant white light back into space. … Tiny amounts of sulphur dioxide can offset the heating effect of one’s annual carbon footprint. A sustained, large-scale operation, the argument goes, could do the same for humanity.”

Yeah. And plunge us back into another glaciation in which we trade imaginary “overheating” for real overcooling. What could go wrong?

Gosh, nearly anything. Because you get more, much more, starting with Original Sin bite two:

“Stratospheric aerosol injection is therefore the forbidden fruit in the garden of climate intervention. So far, only a very small number of people have dabbled in this dark art. Among them are the two co-founders of a start-up, Make Sunsets, that sends up balloons on behalf of customers…. But it is not just these two climate cowboys who are interested in the dark arts. The US government, for instance, has funded research into solar geoengineering, which encompasses methods such as making clouds more reflective.”

And in case mere aerosol injection is too slow, heck, let’s blow the climate sky-high:

“decades of burning fossil fuels amounts, in its own way, to geoengineering. As a futurist scientist, Anders Sandberg, once said to me of the climate: “If you break it, you bought it.” But the purchase comes with catches, of which one is the increasing public paranoia about weather intervention…. Geoengineering is a Pandora’s box: not only environmentally, but also socio-politically.”

Block that metaphor, we cry in vain. And that project, including this disastrous bit:

“Yet some scientists dream of even more muscular interventions… Should Gaia punish us by unsealing a horde of volcanoes, we will have even more reason to learn to tame their kind. We must learn, now or later, to prevent the kind of mega-eruptions that, at several times in the Earth’s history, have caused massive loss of life worldwide. Around 74,000 years ago, for instance, the eruption of the Toba supervolcano, in what is now Indonesia, caused so much atmospheric smog – as stratospheric aerosol injection would, but involving many orders of magnitude more material – that it has been accused of wiping out almost every living human. Volcanic winter, as this phenomenon is called, kills first the plants that can no longer photosynthesise, and then the animals that can no longer eat the plants. The lethality of the Toba eruption has been contested, but we can say with confidence that severe volcanic events, those that come around every 50,000 to 100,000 years, would result in a world much like the one that followed the catastrophic arrival of Chicxulub, the asteroid that eradicated the dinosaurs…. Such was the amount of matter lofted into the atmosphere that most of them would have perished in the gloom that followed. The fossil record tells an eerie tale of an abundant planet transformed into one that was cold, dank and ruled by fungi. It was with these events in mind that, 10 years ago, some researchers at the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggested it might be possible to defuse a supervolcano. We would do so by extracting geothermal heat from it for millennia, thus wicking away the energy that would otherwise have found expression in an eruption. The paper remains a source of exasperation for geologists with even the most moderate streak of realism…. Sandberg, the futurist who made the quip about humanity having to buy the climate, is one of the few scientists to have made a serious case for volcano geoengineering…. Perhaps it would not be wholly for the best if humanity became better able to direct the behaviour of volcanoes.”

Or not:

“One need only to consider a dinosaur fossil to be reminded of the peril of a darkened planet. It is true that Gaia is a beneficent Mother Earth as well as a callous Medea. But a child is only a child for so long.”

Yeah. Then he gets a chemistry set, blows up his house and is a dead child. Do not allow such people political power.

Meanwhile back on what’s left of the Earth, in a doomed effort to seem like a skeptical observer not a shill, the Times does concede that:

“Reflecting sunlight to the dark side of Earth may have other pitfalls. Scientists have documented how artificial light at night can disrupt the behavior of nocturnal species such as moths, frogs and bats, and degrade some of the benefits ecosystems provide. Light pollution can also have adverse effects on human health, though with many large solar farms located far from population centers, that may be less of a concern. Reflect Orbital has pledged that it will assess the environmental impact and potential effects on local communities at every location the company serves.”

Yeah. Sure it will. And guess what it will discover. And putting large solar farms and this ghastly 24-7 artificial glare out in the dwindling number of places where you can still see the Milky Way as something other than a faint smear doesn’t really address the light pollution issue.

As for all those dumbo moths, frogs and bats (ugh), who cares about real nature when we’re saving the virtue-signalling kind. Like the surprising tendency of Green parties to believe that nature blundered when it created gender but we can fix it with our minds, like witches.

P.S. On the other side, we note a piece from the Washington Post “Climate Coach” from two years ago just drawn to our attention by an alert reader about “The surprising benefits of switching to ‘lamb mowers’”. It hails a revival of the strange 19^th-century practice of having animals eat grass instead of machines. But ponder the statement that “Europe, ravaged by wildfires, is now paying for fire flocks, herds of sheep to thin vegetation and reduce wildfire risk, resurrecting the silvopastoralism of the past.” Can it be that organic forest management rather than the technocratic kind will reduce wildfires? Because if so, it wasn’t “climate change” that set the forests ablaze. It was our arrogance. Oh dear.