Speaking of deniers, a headline in MSN tells us of “The multi-million dollar race to shade the sun and stop climate change”. Now the actual story admits that geoengineering has a potential downside, a topic worth exploring at length. As we have and will again. But notice the naïve, comically ill-informed “stop climate change.” Far too many people involved with this issue, including journalactivists, really do not know that the climate has always changed. And it’s not an innocent misunderstanding for all kinds of reasons including that they swallow unchewed claims that recent temperatures changes were unprecedented in speed, magnitude or both that are plainly untrue. In the longest credible series we have, for Central England, there was 2˚C of warming in just 40 years between 1695 and 1733, while Matthew Wielicki notes a number of points during the Holocene where the Greenland temperature rose, or fell, at least as fast as today. Even more cosmically, the notion that temperature and weather were essentially stable for thousands of years until we started spewing CO2, which we must observe humans did not start doing in 1695, an idiotic claim Al Gore made in An Inconvenient Truth, makes it superficially plausible to believe we know what temperature the planet “should” be and lets alarmists off the hook for the question of how they know what the correct global and local temperature is and how they know it.

The specific quotation from Al Gore is worth repeating because it’s so mind-bogglingly ignorant:

“The places where people live were chosen because of the climate pattern that has been pretty much the same on Earth since the end of the last ice age 11,000 years ago.”

So he is not only a world history denier but a climate change denier too. He denies obvious, well-established, widely-known, constant changes in climate. And so do, and are, are many journalists and activists.

As we frequently have occasion to remark, it’s not a lie, part of some cunning plan to get rich, take over the planet or both. Gore really didn’t know and possibly still doesn’t. And the reason he got away with it, for better or worse, is that others covering the issue, yelling about it, and throwing soup at paintings over it, don’t either.

People who talk and think like that headline writer, or Al Gore, obviously have no idea where we get temperature data, how reliable it is, how little we know about the specifics of temperature changes in the past and how even that little tells us both that it has been considerably warmer than today even during the Holocene and that the beginning and end of cold and warm periods in the last 12,000 years have often been very abrupt indeed. And to be fair, it wasn’t even the headline on the original item in The Independent, let alone present in its text. But that item did say:

“The basic idea is to limit how much of the sun’s energy reaches the Earth’s surface. While this won’t tackle the root cause of the climate crisis – still-rising greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels – ‘solar radiation modification’ could reduce the global temperature and slow the melting of the polar ice caps, buying us all some much-needed time.”

A classic case where if you don’t know one obvious thing, it raises the justified suspicion that you don’t know a lot of other things as well, including that we know “still-rising greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels” is 100% nailed as the cause of the 100% for-sure “crisis” of melting polar ice caps and temperatures not being where they were around 1215 AD. And do not ask this writer to tell you what the weather was like then, in England or anywhere, or again how they think they know it.

The journalist does get part marks for being aware of, and mentioning, public opposition to geoengineering, and also scientific opposition, and including the vital detail that a major concern is “unintended consequences”. But only part marks because they also prate that:

“Geoengineering’s selective application, without a coordinated global framework, could have adverse climate impacts like increasing the ferocity of hurricanes, exacerbating drought patterns in Africa, or causing a global ‘termination shock’ if these projects suddenly end and temperatures rapidly increase, the UK Royal Society outlined in a report earlier this year.”

Which again is astounding ignorance, of basic science and of political science. The issue isn’t “selective application, without a coordinated global framework” and in fact it is stupid to say it is. If an attempt to cool the planet to the “right” temperature, without knowing what it is or how, goes badly wrong and either increases what it was trying to decrease, or decreases it far more than was intended, it won’t be less disastrous if it’s done worldwide with great intensity rather than sporadically and feebly. Not entirely surprising once you discover that the writer is a “a Social Justice Reporter” who almost won an award for his anti-death-penalty journalactivism and has the regrettably typical degree in “creative writing”, aka making stuff up instead of looking it up.

Which might explain why he’s all-in on a plan that might sentence the entire human race to death in a burst of ill-informed hubris, writing:

“Despite these concerns, the daily glut of increasingly dire climate updates – including the recent news of the likely irreversible decline of ocean corals – has given new momentum to this once fringe idea.”

The daily glut of increasingly dire climate updates. Another thing he just imagined, or heard and thought yeah, might as well repeat it, what loser researches coral reefs?