This press release by CIEL, an NGO that has long been perhaps the most implacable opponent of direct climate cooling, indicates that the effort by Switzerland to establish an expert science group on SRM at the United Nations Environment Assembly meeting in Nairobi this week failed because of opposition from the Pacific island states, the EU, and countries from Africa and Latin America.
Support for Switzerland was voiced by the US, Saudi Arabia, Japan and smaller countries such as Monaco (a very small country!) Georgia and Israel. Interestingly a previous attempt to create a similar entity a few years back was opposed by the United States when Trump was president and Saudi Arabia demonstrates how the politics of cooling is shifting in perhaps unpredictable ways. The outcome also demonstrated the limited ability of the United States, particularly in the absence of support from the EU to influence support for this initiative. If anyone comes across articles from more neutral observers or traditional journalists please circulate. This disappointing outcome simply reinforces the position that I and others hold that progress towards actualizing cooling will remain difficult not impossible to achieve in the absence of a well resourced international non-governmental organization whose primary mission is to demonstrate to world leaders and the public that safe and effective cooling is essential to avoid planetary dystopia. Let’s hope that there are individuals and institutions with influence and resources who are working behind the scenes to establish such an entity. With the next round of IPCC reports not due till near the end of the decade and the proposed special reports not focused on cooling it’s unlikely that any authoritative international scientific assessment in support of cooling will occur anytime soon. It’s unclear what if anything would need to happen for these same countries that opposed Switzerland this week to turn around and embrace cooling at November’s COP in Baku. Perhaps the inevitable avalanche of unprecedented extreme weather across the globe in the coming months will open the eyes of world leaders that ERA - emission reductions alone - is no longer a viable option to save their countries from ruin. Herb https://www.ciel.org/news/ciel-response-to-geoengineering-srm-technology-rejection-unea-6/ Herb Simmens Author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future “A SciencePoem and an Inspiration.” Kim Stanley Robinson @herbsimmens HerbSimmens.com -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/9D229C41-0CDB-45E2-AC7D-3DC0AB17F1FC%40gmail.com.
