By Daniel de la Calle
If there is one possible scenario that frightens me more than our current lack of action to stop the countless maladies we are inflicting upon the planet it is this very tempting flight forward casino gamble of geoengineering.
Just two unoriginal thoughts I want to throw out there:
No scientist would claim to know a tenth of the millions of factors that determine what life in the planet is and how it finds its dynamic equilibrium amongst the myriad of species, ecosystems and climates. Every single time we have played doctors or gods in the backyard it has been an absolute disaster, resulting in the loss of species or worse scenarios. I always remember the tragicomic story of the introduction of the mongoose in the Hawaiian archipelago as a means to get rid of rats (that delightful Norwegian Rat possibly brought along by Captain Cook together with the first batch of mosquitoes). I will not go into details, you can read about it here.
But what really fires me up is how we are like wasted heroin junkies who know exactly the origin of their addiction and future decay, but pathetically, helplessly admit that we just can’t give up the habit, it is beyond us, surpasses us, the world would have to blow up in pieces before we thought of moving on to new sources of energy. We are going to drink, burn and cook it ALL up, yum yum, and then we will see where we stand, how things look the morning after.
Thinking about all this I can more easily understand all the Iron Hypothesis and assorted megalomaniac geoengineering ideas out there, brought forward for our consideration, without blushing.
