A very original idea to address climate change
ByI’m a big fan of TED because of the wealth or thought-provoking ideas the speakers bring to the stage. While browsing through some of their videos I found this one by David Keith:
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_ideas_on_climate_change.html
In all the talk about climate change, this is one of the most original ideas I’ve heard. By using particals in the atmosphere to reduce the warming of the sun, we can control our own climate. Its been proven by nature – when volcanoes erupt and fill our atmosphere with particals they reflect enough sunlight we can actually measure a difference in the Earth’s temperature.
What I like about his presentation (other than his quirky presenting style) is he admits this is not THE solution, there are potentially many other hazards we could cause by doing this, and the main one being the moral-risk – if we know we can do a quick fix to cool the planet, does that mean we’ll stop trying to control our emissions, the real root of the problem? However – many heads are better than one, its when the best ideas surface, and this fringe idea from some leading scientists should definately be seriously debated because based on the current climate change data, we may need to do something like this to slow down the climate change so we can give ourselves more time to address the root of the problem.
After Copenhagen, I learnt that Politics only gets in the way of needed change. We can’t rely on governments to take action on our behalf anymore, we need to take the lead ourselves with great ideas, open debate, and all Government should be doing is supporting that, putting the framework in place so that people with great ideas can execute them. Juan Enriquez’s talk on TED about Bioenergy raised another good idea – Governments should fix oil prices to ensure companies with great ideas don’t go bust everytime oil prices dive. Thats a great example of how Government can support the entrepreneurs who have the ideas and ambition to realy address the core issues of climate change..
David Gildeh 
No clue where you’re situated, but most of northern hemisphere is experiencing a remarkably solid winter. Britain frozen to a standstill, the US with record snow cover, pack ice in china. And global temperatures have certifiably _not_ risen beyond the 1999’er level, while co2 levels have, unimpeded. The recent relatively underreported events known as “climategate” haven’t helped the case for anthropogenic global warming, either. Quite obviously, the system has been rigged to produce the desired result, quite reminiscent of such impeccable arbiters of truth as the Warren commission, 9/11 commission, spanish inquisition and even more worthless ions.
Then, there’s this — an intriguing exploration of some climate history. Looking at that actually makes me hope for some global warming…
I don’t have data to back up my opinion on climate change to hand, so I won’t dispute your facts. I think there’s too many companies with vested interests clouding the data with their own interpretations and “facts” to put doubt into people’s minds, just the same way they did (and has been proven) with the smoking industry, with the mobile phone cancer debate, and other heavily disputed facts!
I think with the world’s population increasingly getting richer, and bigger, CO2 emissions are only going to rise if nothings done to do something about it, and if the naysayers who predict the “end of the world” are right then that’s a worse outcome than the other scientists who claim we aren’t really heading for a massive climate shift, we need to be prepared for the worst as the risks are too great…