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Adviser To Obama Mulls Planetary Cooling Idea
By Bradley Vasoli, The Bulletin
President Barack Obama’s science adviser said yesterday the administration is contemplating a cooling technology to counteract what it sees as an urgent global-warming threat.
Last month, the U.S. Senate confirmed Harvard physicist John Holdren, a man whose views on the relationship between development and climate change have alarmed some public officials.
But yesterday he said the federal government might, as a last resort, consider darting aerosols into the atmosphere to guard against solar rays, cooling the planet’s air in the process.
“We might get desperate enough to want to use it,” he said.
Some researchers say Dr. Holdren’s ideas are outlandish but add that his cooling idea, or “geoengineering,” is an emergency measure that wouldn’t be as drastic as his more mainstream desire for caps on carbon emissions.
“I’d hold off the alarm [on global warming]; we’ve got more pressing issues,” the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s energy policy analyst William Yeatman said. “I see in 100 years time, future generations looking back and just thinking how absurd this whole scare is.”
Mr. Yeatman said he it surprises him to find Dr. Holdren discussing geoengineering, an idea that many of the most fretful global-warming theorists regard as too-little-too-late. The Obama adviser has furthermore shown little desire to cool Earth in the past, worrying as late as 1977 that the world could experience “global cooling.”
Dr. Holdren has already spent his entire career making attention-grabbing statements about man’s relationship to the environment’s wellbeing.
“Population control, the redirection of technology, the transition from open to closed resource cycles, the equitable distribution of opportunity, and the ingredients of prosperity must all be accomplished if there is to be a future worth living,” Dr. Holdren wrote in 1971 with Stanford Entomologist Paul Ehrlich.
Dr. Ehrlich has earned a reputation over several decades as a population-control supporter who has made various frightful predictions about consequences of the growing global population that haven’t come to pass. In his notorious 1968 book The Population Bomb, he wrongly foresaw mass starvations as soon as the 1970s.
But his lesser-known research partner has made some striking predictions as well. Drs. Ehrlich and Holdren penned a 1971 piece in which they anticipated, “Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century.”
Another statement Dr. Holdren made in 1986 forecasted global warming would take the lives of 1 billion people by 2020. He did not back down from asserting this possibility when critical senators asked him about it during his confirmation hearing.
“Holdren’s way out there,” Mr. Yeatman said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Bradley Vasoli can be reached at bvasoli@thebulletin.us
Last month, the U.S. Senate confirmed Harvard physicist John Holdren, a man whose views on the relationship between development and climate change have alarmed some public officials.
But yesterday he said the federal government might, as a last resort, consider darting aerosols into the atmosphere to guard against solar rays, cooling the planet’s air in the process.
“We might get desperate enough to want to use it,” he said.
Some researchers say Dr. Holdren’s ideas are outlandish but add that his cooling idea, or “geoengineering,” is an emergency measure that wouldn’t be as drastic as his more mainstream desire for caps on carbon emissions.
“I’d hold off the alarm [on global warming]; we’ve got more pressing issues,” the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s energy policy analyst William Yeatman said. “I see in 100 years time, future generations looking back and just thinking how absurd this whole scare is.”
Mr. Yeatman said he it surprises him to find Dr. Holdren discussing geoengineering, an idea that many of the most fretful global-warming theorists regard as too-little-too-late. The Obama adviser has furthermore shown little desire to cool Earth in the past, worrying as late as 1977 that the world could experience “global cooling.”
Dr. Holdren has already spent his entire career making attention-grabbing statements about man’s relationship to the environment’s wellbeing.
“Population control, the redirection of technology, the transition from open to closed resource cycles, the equitable distribution of opportunity, and the ingredients of prosperity must all be accomplished if there is to be a future worth living,” Dr. Holdren wrote in 1971 with Stanford Entomologist Paul Ehrlich.
Dr. Ehrlich has earned a reputation over several decades as a population-control supporter who has made various frightful predictions about consequences of the growing global population that haven’t come to pass. In his notorious 1968 book The Population Bomb, he wrongly foresaw mass starvations as soon as the 1970s.
But his lesser-known research partner has made some striking predictions as well. Drs. Ehrlich and Holdren penned a 1971 piece in which they anticipated, “Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century.”
Another statement Dr. Holdren made in 1986 forecasted global warming would take the lives of 1 billion people by 2020. He did not back down from asserting this possibility when critical senators asked him about it during his confirmation hearing.
“Holdren’s way out there,” Mr. Yeatman said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Bradley Vasoli can be reached at bvasoli@thebulletin.us
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