Geoengineering plays a pivotal role in the new book, “The Collapse of Western Civilization <http://smile.amazon.com/Collapse-Western-Civilization-View-Future/dp/023116954X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407002525&sr=1-1&keywords=the+collapse+of+western+civilization+a+view+from+the+future>” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.
The book is short: the main text is only 50 pages. It is a fictional history, supposedly written hundreds of years in the future, of what happened as climate change overwhelmed contemporary civilization during the period from now to 2093. "This is a work of fiction" said Oreskes in a WBUR "On Point" interview <https://onpoint.wbur.org/2014/07/29/climate-change-science-fiction-future> associated with promoting this book recently, "but it has footnotes". "Absolutely everything that happens in the book is based on scientific data and projections". In the book, geoengineering, i.e. SRM, was not employed until 2059. This was after “panic ensued with food riots in virtually every major city”, including “widespread outbreaks of typhus, cholera, dengue fever, yellow fever, and viral and retroviral agents never before seen”. As “social order began to break down”, “governments were overthrown… in many parts of Asia and Europe”, and the US government declared “martial law to prevent food riots and looting”. Only then, by international agreement: “sulphate particles [were injected] into the stratosphere at a rate of approximately 2.0 teragrams per year”, an amount thought to reduce global temperature 2 degrees C in twenty years. 4 years after this particular form of SRM was started, the Indian monsoon failed: “crop failures and famine swept across India”. The program was immediately halted. The halt caused: “a fatal chain of events”, starting with “termination shock”. In “the following 18 months” “temperature rapidly rebounded, regaining not just the 0.4 degrees C that had been reduced during the project but an additional 0.6 degrees”. “Whether it was caused by this sudden additional heating or was already imminent is not known” even to "historians" three hundred years later, “but the greenhouse effect then reached a global tipping point.” The Arctic permafrost released 1,000 gigatonnes of carbon over ten years “effectively doubling the total atmospheric carbon load”. "Planetary temperature increased by an additional 6 degrees Celsius over the 5 degree rise that had already occurred”. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed. The ice on Greenland slid into the sea. A second Black Death appeared killing half of the people in Europe. Mayhem ensued. Etc. Survivors, at this point, faced far worse, because after the 11 degrees C of global warming in such a short period: a “runaway greenhouse would have followed”. Hansen once predicted, in a Bjerknes lecture <http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/AGUBjerknes_20081217.pdf> no less, that if humans continue to move all the carbon it is possible to move into the atmosphere as fast as they can, it is possible for the Earth to become uninhabitable. Oreskes, in the interview associated with promoting this book cited above, says: "I'm absolutely, 100% convinced, that the human race will continue, but it will not continue in the same way that we live today” Whatever Oreskes and Conway mean by a "runaway greenhouse", what saves the planet from it in their book is a form of geoengineering. A fungus created in a genetic engineering lab is released. Details are said to be sketchy. No one seems to have been able to definitively document exactly what happened even after hundreds of years. What is clear: around 2090 a genetically engineered organism was released from a lab in Japan that “measurably altered atmospheric CO2” within 20 years. The fungus didn’t reduce the concentration of CO2 - it merely “slowed the increase of atmospheric CO2 dramatically”, but this, assisted by a “grand Solar Minimum” which reduced incoming solar radiation by “0.5%”, slowed “the rise of surface and oceanic temperatures for nearly a century”, which was enough to allow “survivors” of the collapse of Western Civilization to “begin to regroup and rebuild”. What isn’t clear: whether the development and deployment of this fungus was the work of a single rogue scientist or whether one country, a group of countries, one financier, or a group of financiers were responsible for funding the researcher and deploying the result. Contemporary climate scientists as a group are praised in this book, for warning civilization about what was about to happen, but no individual climate scientist is named. Perhaps there are too many. However, a few far seeing individuals from our time are singled out. In the “some environmentalists” “who anticipated what was to come” department, we find a certain “*Clive Hamilton*”. So, in this book, we have one attempt at geoengineering depicted as the trigger for the ruination of everything, discrediting an already suspiciously regarded concept so much so that when another attempt at geoengineering saves the day even historians writing hundreds of years later can’t bring themselves to call what happened geoengineering. We’re to believe no one wanted the credit for the success in the end. And it's "all based on scientific data and projections". -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
