Cure Worse Than the Disease

Blue skies
Smiling at me
Nothing but blue skies
Do I see ~ Irving Berlin

Leave it to scientists to come up with the only way to make a bad situation worse. Some scientists have decided that to cure global warming they need only only cover the Earth with an aerosol shroud. Their plan is to geoengineer the globe by pumping tons of sulfur into the atmosphere, covering the Earth with a dull haze that will reflect sunlight and, thereby, cool the globe.

Beyond the utter insanity of trying to cure a problem caused by pollution by adding more pollution, in essence making the whole world Los Angeles during a Stage 2 smog alert, there are a plethora of possible nasty side-effects.

• Beautiful days will be a thing of the past as scientists will turn the world's skies into an endless depressing gray.
• Put sulfur with air, add sunlight, and you make sulfuric acid. Acid rain, remember?
• Reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth will lower temperatures at the cost of reducing the viability of plant life. The result will be shorter and less productive growing seasons. This will likely increase world famine worse than global warming will.
• It will accelerate ozone layer depletion. Expect increases in blindness, cancer, and additional negative effects on crops.
  
• The problem is Global Climate Change. Their solution is to replace one set of global climate problems with another, equal if not worse, set of problems.
• The whole concept is fucking unpredictable.
  

Global Climate Change is a real problem with a real, simple solution - reduce the infusion of carbon into the atmosphere. This scientific solution reminds me of an old children's song.

There was an old woman who swallowed a cow,
I don't know how she swallowed a cow!
She swallowed the cow to catch the goat,
She swallowed the goat to catch the dog,
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don't know why she swallowed the fly,
Perhaps she'll die.

There was an old woman who swallowed a horse,
She's dead—of course!