From The Guardian UK: http://www.theguardian.com/world/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/jan/15/geo-al-gore-engineering-climate-disaster-instant-solutio
Belief in an instant planet-wide quick-fix, such as blocking sunlight with sulphur, is delusional, US activist declares
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
theguardian.com, Wednesday 15 January 2014
Al Gore said on Wednesday it would be “insane, utterly mad and delusional in the extreme” to turn to geo-engineering projects to avoid a climate catastrophe.
The UN climate panel, in the next edition of its blockbuster reports, will warn that governments might have to extract vast amounts of greenhouses gases from the air by 2100 to limit climate change, according to a draft copy of the report seen by Reuters.
But the former vice president of the US said that searches for an instant solution, which he said were born of desperation, were misguided and could lead to an even bigger catastrophe.
“The idea that we can put a different form of pollution into the atmosphere to cancel out the effects of global warming pollution is utterly insane,” he told a conference call for South African reporters.
He added: “The fact that some scientists who should know better are actually engaged in serious discussion of those alternatives is a mark of how desperate some of them are feeling due to the paralysis in the global political system.”
In March Gore will expand his climate leadership training programmes to South Africa. He said he believed those leadership training sessions (this is his 24th) had developed a cadre of leaders who were helping to find political solutions for climate change.
The draft climate report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due for release in Germany in April, said governments might have to turn increasingly to technologies for “carbon dioxide removal” to keep warming below the dangerous threshold of 2 degrees.
The draft said those technologies might involve capturing and burying emissions from coal-fired power plants, or planting more forests. But there has been debate in the environmental community over other more radical solutions.
On geo-engineering Gore drew a distinction between small-scale interventions, such as white roofs, and large-scale projects meant to extract or neutralise emissions from the air or block the sunlight. Those ideas, he said, carried enormous risks.
“The most discussed so-called geo-engineering proposals – like putting sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere to reflect incoming sunlight – that’s just insane. Let’s just describe that clearly – it is utterly mad,” Gore told the conference call.
Continue reading at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/jan/15/geo-al-gore-engineering-climate-disaster-instant-solutio
