Bush Has Smoke and Mirrors for Global Warming

Lately, Bush has changed tactics on Global Warming. He now acknowledges it's a problem. Behind the scenes he continues to play down the dire warnings of science.
In public, he makes it clear there will be no meaningful change in policy. He gives lip service to alternative energy. Then he banks on spending our tax dollars with his buddies in the technology field with a far fetched plan to place mirrors in space. They don't even know what the results will be, but he's happy to throw more billions of tax dollars in his new barely disguesed scheme of redistribution of wealth back to the wealthy and continuing to "starve the beast" of government so that the country can't afford a spending federal government.
Los Angeles Times

So it's significant that the Bush administration has decided not to fight the IPCC's substantive scientific conclusions, though Washington's response to the draft does churlishly complain about its "focus on the negative effects of climate change." Back in the day, the administration wouldn't have stopped there. Vice President Dick Cheney would have wasted no time designating all 2,500 IPCC scientists as enemy combatants and shipping them off to Guantanamo.


What caused the policy shift? November's GOP electoral drubbing? Increasing anxiety within the corporate community about the economic impact of climate change? Growing alarm within the military and intelligence communities about the national security impact of global warming?


Whatever the cause, the shift is good news. But don't get too excited because there's bad news too. The administration's grudging admission that maybe, just maybe, there's something to this global warming stuff doesn't mean it is actually going to back a mandatory cap on carbon emissions, which most experts say would be needed to seriously reduce global warming.


Instead, the administration has its own cunning plan to combat global warming. As the president suggested in his State of the Union message, we'll try to shift to alternative energy sources that produce fewer carbon emissions. But if that doesn't work, we'll turn to our secret weapon: We'll reduce the amount of sunlight that hits the Earth by shining giant mirrors back at the sun.


The administration is reportedly lobbying the U.N. panel to include in its report criticisms of the mandatory emissions caps imposed by the Kyoto Protocol (which the White House still hates). And the administration wants to add language noting that space mirrors and other techniques for "modifying solar radiance" could provide "insurance" against global warming. Keep the emissions, deploy the tin foil hats!


The idea is not completely bananas. Some scientists are researching alternative global climate control methods, ranging from the deployment of lots of shiny balloons to the giant space mirrors apparently now favored by the administration. The logic: Just as nomads in the scalding desert wear white robes to reflect the sun's heat away from them, the whole Earth could essentially don a reflective garment to keep from getting too hot. If the mirrors could be constantly adjusted, it would be like having a global thermostat.


But as the IPCC's draft report noted, these technologies are "speculative, uncosted and with potential unknown side-effects." You don't have to be a sci-fi buff to imagine some of those: more space crud, bad stuff happening elsewhere in the galaxy when we start beaming more light up or, creepiest of all, deliberate climate change induced in some regions as a method of political control. (Imagine Cheney controlling the world's thermostat!)