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Proposal For United Nations To Study Climate-Cooling Technologies Rejected (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A push to launch a high-level study of potentially risky technological fixes to curb climate change was abandoned on Thursday at a U.N. environmental conference in Nairobi, as countries including the United States raised objections. "Geoengineering" technologies, which are gaining prominence as international efforts to curb climate-changing emissions fall short, aim to pull carbon out of the atmosphere or block some of the sun's warmth to cool the Earth. They could help fend off some of the worst impacts of runaway climate change, including worsening storms and heatwaves, backers say. But opponents argue the emerging technologies pose huge potential risks to people and nature, and could undermine efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not least because many are backed by fossil-fuel interests. Observers at the U.N. Environment Assembly in Nairobi said the Swiss-backed proposal was rejected in part because it called for a "precautionary principle" approach to geoengineering the climate. That principle says great care must be taken in starting activities that have unclear risks for human health or the environment. The United States, Saudi Arabia and Brazil were among the strongest opponents of the proposal, with Japan also expressing reservations.
You don't solve a problem by trying to tip the scales in the other direction. You solve it by doing things in a balanced way from now on so that over time, the net result is balanced.
It's not like Lincoln said "okay, that's enough with black slavery, let's make the white man be slaves for a couple of centuries to balance things out"
You fix a problem by doing the right thing, today, and moving forward.
In this particular case, it means passing laws which put stricter limits on emissions than what currently exist, so that manufacturers are forced (yes forced, because as much as we might want them to, they aren't going to do it entirely voluntarily... or certainly not at the speeds that are required) to innovate and come up with long term environmentally friendly solutions to the problems that we are facing.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The problem is that climate change has become totally politicized. It wasn't always this way. In 2007, a debate moderator asked the Republican candidates if they thought climate change was a "serious problem". All but Fred Thompson agreed. That is unimaginable today. Denialism has become a right wing litmus test.
The left isn't much better. They mostly see climate change as an opportunity to push an agenda for taxes, coercive big government, and centralization. So they reject even considering solutions that don't serve that agenda. They don't fear geo-engineering will have unintended consequences. They fear the opposite: That it will turn out to be a good solution.
Um, no. The left does not fear that climate change will have a good solution. You're just being silly.
they would have no reason to attempt to steal all our money and bring poverty to the citizens of the USA.
You would have been spot on with this sharp and super-smart observation, if not for the small fact that The United States, Saudi Arabia and Brazil were among the strongest opponents of the proposal, with Japan also expressing reservations.
Its hard to believe that there are those that do NOT see that this movement is engineered in Moscow in order to damage their chief rival, the USA
This conspiracy theory would have been very interesting as well, except that Moscow is, as a major fossil fuels exporter, among the staunchest opponents of CO2 emissions reductions.
You're probably just as "well" informed about the other aspects of the global warming issues.
Yes, and in order to gain that knowledge you must... NOT study it?
They didn't vote down implementing technologies, they voted down gaining knowledge.
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the research could actually go towards helping prove that APGW is real, rather than just a theory.
I disagree with your choice of words, as "just a theory" makes it sound as if it's someone's hunch/idea/opinion/guess/hypothesis. A scientific theory is something very different, and presents both explanatory and predictive claims that have been tested and stood up to falsification attempts. A scientific theory can never be "proved," as those hard statements are reserved for mathematics and philosophy. Religious folk would muddy the waters with the same "just a theory" argument about the theories of evolution and heliocentricism, and it's very misleading.
It may also help identify better metrics so we can make an accurate prediction as well... since we know they have only failed in all of their models.
I must disagree here as well. Climate models tend to do pretty well at making predictions that are subsequently backed up by observations. See https://www.skepticalscience.c... for a primer on the topic, along with some illustrative videos.
All the things mentioned are much less a problem than the simple fact that new nuclear costs over ten cents per kWh. Nobody's going to build such a thing anymore. Why, when wind turbines cost 60-70% less?
Ezekiel 23:20