Just call him Bill “Phaethon” Gates
When I read this story I thought of the ancient Greeks, who had a fine sense of hubris/nemesis:
Bill Gates, among others, is backing the Harvard Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment. The SCoPEx is researching a form of “geoengineering” to prevent global warming. In this case, they’re exploring the idea of spraying tiny particles into the air to reflect sunlight and make the earth cooler. Towards that end, Harvard scientists are planning to fly a balloon full of equipment 12 miles above Sweden next year to gather data.
People across the ideological spectrum are not fans of this idea.
Let me join their ranks.
When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it injected an estimated 20 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere — the atmospheric layer that stretches from about 10 to 50 kilometres above Earth’s surface. The eruption created a haze of sulfate particles that cooled the planet by around 0.5?°C. For about 18 months, Earth’s average temperature returned to what it was before the arrival of the steam engine.
The idea that humans might turn down Earth’s thermostat by similar, artificial means is several decades old. It fits into a broader class of planet-cooling schemes known as geoengineering that have long generated intense debate and, in some cases, fear.
Researchers have largely restricted their work on such tactics to computer models. Among the concerns is that dimming the Sun could backfire, or at least strongly disadvantage some areas of the world by, for example, robbing crops of sunlight and shifting rain patterns.
Many details at the link. The cautionary tales practically write themselves.
Which brings Phaethon to mind. Phaethon was the son of Helios (or variously Phoebus), driver of the horses of the sun in their course. But like many sons, Phaeton wanted the power without the strength and experience, and so he begged Helios to let him drive the horses just once. And Helios, against his better judgment, acquiesced [my emphasis]:
In the version of the myth told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, Phaethon ascends into heaven, the home of his suspected father. His mother Clymene had boasted that his father was the Sun-God or Phoebus. Phaethon went to his father who swore by the river Styx to give Phaethon anything he would ask for in order to prove his divine sonship. Phaethon wanted to drive the chariot of the sun for a day. Phoebus tried to talk him out of it by telling him that not even Jupiter (the king of the gods) would dare to drive it, as the chariot was fiery hot and the horses breathed out flames…
Phaethon was adamant. When the day came, the fierce horses that drew the chariot felt that it was empty because of the lack of the sun-god’s weight and went out of control. Terrified, Phaethon dropped the reins. The horses veered from their course, scorching the earth, burning the vegetation, bringing the blood of the Ethiopians to the surface of their skin and so turning it black, changing much of Africa into a desert, drying up rivers and lakes and shrinking the sea. Earth cried out to Jupiter who was forced to intervene by striking Phaethon with a lightning bolt. Like a falling star, Phaethon plunged blazing into the river Eridanos.
The epitaph on his tomb was:
“Here Phaethon lies who in the sun-god’s chariot fared. And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.”
We never learn from myth or history, it seems.
Maybe physicsguy could comment on whether or not this carbon dioxide sequestration method is for real. Or if it is hokem.
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-stone-carbon-dioxide-good.html
Back in the day I saw Paul Erlich give informal classes in Berserkeley, and worked with one of his former students. Famine is on the way, Paul Erlich told us 50 years ago. Didn’t work out that way, didn’t it?
Egg on Their Faces: 10 Climate Alarmist Predictions for 2020 That Went Horribly Wrong
Duck Duck go Search:10 failed AGW predictions
Hey! They mean well. What could go wrong with such good intentions?
Hold them personally responsible. Not for being wrong but for arrogantly dismissing reasoned objections.
You don’t put a gun to your head and pull the trigger, on the off chance that the gun is unloaded, just because someone has suggested that it’s probably unloaded.
Back in the day I saw Paul Erlich give informal classes in Berserkeley, and worked with one of his former students. Famine is on the way, Paul Erlich told us 50 years ago. Didn’t work out that way, didn’t it?
One thing that persuaded me that that Ehrlich was a self-aggrandizing purveyor of disaster porn was reading The Population Bomb in 1979, when its absurdity was already manifest. Some years later, the young Charles Krauthammer wrote an article on the eschatological impulse in the culture, maintaining that the writings of Hal Lindsay, Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, Paul Erdman, and Helen Caldicott were all drawing on the same cultural reservoir.
These globalist schemes promoted by elites almost always end up hurting the poor the most. Hubris is dangerous.
The idea that mankind (humankind) can somehow control the temperature of the earth is all part of the magical thinking that motivates most progressives.. And as Thomas Sowell has pointed out they engage in Stage I thinking and never quite consider the consequences of their great ideas. More people die of cold than heat and plants prefer warmth.
Its Cold Outside, but just wait!!
Tuvea,
It’s a good technique to sequester CO2. The real question, of course, is do we need to do this?? The whole scheme of CO2 driving the climate is based on models (uh oh models again!) where a positive feedback loop is initiated with CO2 driving up water vapor. Water is the true greenhouse gas, not CO2. It outperforms CO2 in IR absorption by a factor of a 1000. The models are not performing well against real data, but that has not stopped the climate change train from slowing down for the past 25 years. Too good a con to keep the masses and economy under government control.
Bill Gates is a typical People’s Republic Of Puget Sound (PROPS) liberal. Only he has more money than all of them. I applaud his desire to do good with his money. What is passing strange is the form that takes. He consults academics for ideas to use his money to solve BIG problems. Unfortunately, most of those people have no real practical experience. They have BIG ideas, but are short on actual results. Gates could do more good by using his wealth to create new companies and the jobs that go with them than by these vast schemes to solve non-problems like global warming. That’s what his old partner, Paul Allen, did. Mike Rowe does more good for humanity than Bill Gates, even though he hasn’t got Gates’ money.
Heck, if he really wants to do good, he could use his money to try to solve the addiction/mental health problems that are causing the homeless crisis right here in PROPS. But, no, that’s too small a problem for a man of his wealth and genius. Yes, he’s very much like Phaeton.
Physicsguy, I like your explanation of the warmers theory of global warming. Simple and understandable. I hope you don’t mind if I steal it to use in my debates on AGW.
One thing I used to badger the Real Climate experts about was the double-edged sword affect of clouds. Clouds can trap the heat beneath them, but they can also prevent heat from reaching Earth. No one needs to be a scientist to understand that. So, water vapor is both a heat trapper and a heat reflector. Since water vapor is unevenly dispersed (Dry air masses and wet air masses.) about the Earth, it makes it extremely difficult to predict or “model” whether water vapor is causing more heating or more cooling. What’s your opinion about that?
Physicsguy, thanks for yet another great SCIENCE based CLEAR explanation.
Neo, thanks for hosting a fact based blog.
Everyone … Happy New Year!
@JJ’s
If Bill Gates were to take on the Sacklers and the PRC to try to stem the drug devastation scything through the peasantry in his nation, *that* would be flying to close to the sun. Which one of the above would burn him to a crisp faster is left as an exercise for the reader. Me, personally, I’d start a Land War in Asia before belling the Sackler Cat 😛
Gates is possibly just a super high-functioning sperg. All his early behaviour points to this. He only got ‘religion’ double quickfast when the entire equally corrupt establishment went after him in the 90s for his utterly amoral business practices. He received the shock of his life when he realised that he *could* be taken down in a state / federal pile-on witch hunt (because after all he was a total #@#$bag and had accumulated tons of enemies). So he got religion and rapidly acquired a wife plus set up a massive foundation to improve optics and pay off anyone who needed paying off.
(FWIW, I’ve run into more than one very successful high functioning sperg who relies utterly on his wife to manage the social aspects of his business as well as personal life. Being genius level smart only gets you so far and some of them are clued up enough to realise that going into partnership with a ‘WifeBot’ who gets those pesky humans will work wonders. Problem for the rest of us pesky humans is that said wives tend to be far to the left of their husbands who they proceed to lead around by their noses or other appendages — cf. Jobs a totally apolitical sociopath whose fortune now controlled by progressive witch widow. And of course foundations rapidly take on lives of their own, said lives always being progressive ones.)
But… end of the day… we’re all just Ants to the likes of Gates. He hasn’t had much interaction with regular humanoids during his entire life. Plus on the spectrum to boot. Experimenting on us is no doubtless no different to what he was doing with ants and magnifying glass at age 6. Whatever fun games he gets to play with the environment, they’re not going to hurt him if they go wrong.
Eventually, we will have the technology and power to enact global changes in climate. For now, we are not even close.
Consider… when Mt. St. Helen erupted in 2008 the release of energy was greater than the total sum of all energy generated by all human beings to date. That eruption, in the duration of seconds, blasted enough dust particles into the stratosphere blocking sunlight, to produce a slightly measurable drop in global temperatures for two years.
We simply do not yet have the magnitudes of power needed to make such changes. Which is a good thing… When you have all your eggs in one basket, is it really wise to experiment on that basket?
Eventually, we may get a chance to try to terra-form other planets. When we do that, there won’t be live humans on the planet at the time.
The hubris and arrogance of some folks, like Bill Gates, is beyond description.
Check it out; planet earth many times in the past has been as warm or warmer than present; well before humans could have affected the climate and well after the present configuration of the continents was established.
Nobody knows what caused ice ages to commence / terminate; no one knows what caused previous warm periods to start / end.
And when has earth’s climate not changed??
If the historical climate cannot be explained how can one presume to predict the climate 50, 100, 200 years hence??
We all still await the permanent inundation of lower Manhattan as predicted by Hansen in about 1990 or so.
The global warming scam is a perfect example of the effectiveness of persistent, determined, repetitive propaganda. Despite its proponents having a near perfect record of being totally wrong over the last 30 years, many average folks believe in this fraud.
By the way, this fellow Hansen – the guy who literally started the warming scam – in the 1970s was one of the key players in warning about The Coming Ice Age. He, and others , based this upon the previous 30 years or so of very cold winters.
(Wait a minute; if CO2 has consistently risen since 1900, how is it possible that a 30 year +/- period of colder climate could have “snuck in” in the middle of the 20th century?? Oh well, let’s move on)
On youtube you can watch a pseudo-documentary on The Coming Ice Age with interviews of scientists and scenes of Arctic like weather in the USA. Yep, it’s very convincing.
Roy Nathanson:
You have confused the climate effects eruption of Mt Pinatubo with the eruption of Mt. St Helens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo.
The faith expressed in science fiction is something to behold.
Total hubris.
They have NO idea what that will unleash IF they are successful, which I doubt.
Cannot stand those people who think they are gods.
Zaphod: “He only got ‘religion’ double quickfast when the entire equally corrupt establishment went after him in the 90s for his utterly amoral business practices.”
Thanks for the memory. I had forgotten how we was taken to task for buying up all the competition. He must wonder what’s going on now. Facebook, Google and others are much more rapacious than he was.
Best news aggregator of the ‘Webz has the last word.
https://notthebee.com/article/hey-bill-gates-quit-messin-with-stuff-would-ya-this-dudes-funding-a-project-to-dim-the-sun-to-fight-climate-change
Om,
I have confused nothing. The Mt. St. Helen’s eruption was just one I happen to know something about.
Do have anything actually relevant to contribute or do you just come here to demean others in an attempt to inflate your own ego?
Before Gates starts messing with the atmosphere, I think he should get the bugs out of Win10.
Rusty: he doesn’t work at Microsoft anymore, technically. Even Gates gave up on Windows!
Roy Nathanson:
I actually worked for BN on the Mt St Helens geothermal prospect in the summer that Mt St Helens erupted, the prospect and property wound up mostly in eastern WA. BN wound up trading their land to the Forest Service, no longer a viable prospect being on an active volcano. ….. So I know a bit about the eruption and the geology\volcanology. Mt. Pinatubo had a significant impact on global climate thought to be a result of sulfur based aerosols in the upper atmosphere. Mt St. Helens not so much.
Your point is what again?
Your faith in science fiction speaks for itself.
Have these arrogant fools considered the decline in sunspot activity in recent years that will almost certainly lead to global cooling, over several decades, and whether this extra cooling they so wisely decided to provide us would have an additive or multiplicative effect?
This is unbelievably dangerous. Gates, with his WHO and vaccines for all craziness has become one of my least favorite people.
A dumb idea based on hubris that we completely understand how the world works, well enough to “fix” it without screwing it up worse. Never mind that the world does not belong to us in the first place, These people are insufferable.
Roy Nathanson:
Of course the non airborne part of Mt St Helens eruption mostly went down the Cowlitz River and into the Columbia River (debris flow/mud flow) IIRC. And of course it erupted in May 1980 not 2008. Details matter sometimes even more than ego?