http://blogs.redding.com/dcraig/archives/2013/05/the-conservativ-2.html

The conservative flip-flop on climate change (2)

May 20, 2013 11:57 PM | No Comments

Back in the 2008, Diana Furchtgott-Roth wrote this for the
ultra-conservative Hudson Institute, "Released CO2 gas makes the atmosphere
more like a greenhouse, or it gets absorbed by the oceans and acidifies
them. It's not that the world faces a shortage of oil and gas. Rather, the
problem is that there may be no longer enough buffering capacity in the
seas and the sky to hide the results of CO2 released by man and protect us
from the consequences."Cuts in carbon are proposed because scientists
report that it causes global warming and adversely affects the earth's
climate. But some scientists, including Nobel Prize winning atmospheric
chemist Paul Crutzen, now believe that altering features of the Earth's
environment would be more effective and efficient against stopping global
warming. This is called 'geoengineering.'"Advocates of geoengineering
suggest it as a complement to reduce the use of carbon as a way to prevent
or retard global warming. Successful geoengineering would permit Earth's
population to make far smaller reductions in carbon use and still achieve
the same retarding effect on global warming at a lower cost."Instead of
denying global climate change, as they usually do, the Hudson Institute
advocates that we fight the normally non-existent problem with
airplane-injected sulfur into our atmosphere because it will cost us less
than reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.And they are not the only one.
While the American Enterprise Institute continues to deny that global
warming is real, at the same time they are strongly advocating the radical
transformation of our atmosphere with geoengineering to combat the problem
that isn't real.According to the Economist, The Heartland Institute is "the
world's most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made
climate change." And yet they are advocates for geoengineering the
climate, which includes injecting massive amounts of sulfur into our
atmosphere forever more to protect us from our Sun and the heat death of
global warming.While the Hudson Institute regularly publishes articles
denying that global warming is real or human-caused, many of those pieces
are written by Lee Lane, a resident fellow at AEI and codirector of the AEI
Geoengineering Project, who has advocated researching the use of climate
engineering (CE) technologies like solar radiation management (SRM).Lane
was the lead author of a paper that offered, "a preliminary and exploratory
assessment of the potential benefits and costs of climate engineering (CE).
We examine two families of CE technologies, solar radiation management
(SRM) and air capture (AC), under three emissions control environments: no
controls, optimal abatement, and limiting temperature change to 2°C."Our
analysis suggests that, today, SRM offers larger net benefits than AC, but
that both deserve to be investigated further. In the case of SRM, we
investigate three specific technologies: the injection of aerosols into the
stratosphere, the increase of marine cloud albedo, and the deployment of a
space-based sunshade."We estimate direct benefit-cost (B/C) ratios of
around 25 to 1 for aerosols and around 5000 to 1 for cloud albedo
enhancement."In other words, conservatives insist that global warming is
not real or human-caused if the solution is carbon taxes or government
regulation. However, if the solution is the highly profitable business of
geoengineering, they not only believe global warming is real and
human-caused, they think we need to get cracking on saving ourselves from
it.

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