The Diane Rehm Show

There is an ancient Sumerian fable in which man (hunter gatherer) is given a choice. Civilization or not. With civilization comes: education, art, science, etc... but also pollution, war, and massive human disasters. Once taken civilization can not be given back and man must take the good with the bad.
In my estimation the genie is out of the bottle, we have changed our environment, and now we must ride this science train until our eventual self destruction.

I would highly recommend the book "Useless Arithmetic" by Pilkey and Pilkey for a sobering look at all the things that can and have gone wrong in environmental modeling, and engineering based upon it.

So many environmental interventions have involved unforeseen side effects that far outweighed any benefits. Clever as some scientists and engineers seem to think they are, they do not have a good track record when it comes to manipulating complex environmental processes.

A politician's definition of need is way too sensitive to transient human conditions, and, if any of these techniques are ever developed, I'm sure they will be used to simply prop up the GDP and win the next election.

By the way, I think there is some evidence that contrails from planes may affect the climate. On 9/11, when all the planes were grounded, the ground temperature did increase according to one study, although that may have since been refuted:

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate/index....

The use of the phrase "Manhattan project" is ironic. We already have an alternative to much of the coal use. It is nuclear power.

Cloud seeding is not only real, but regularly used by all sorts of people (governments, municipalities, states, etc). Just check it out on wikipedia or something and you can even see photos of equipment. I hope people don't believe that it is a "conspiracy". Check it out.

about the trails other than con-trails in the sky:

i always thought it was a ridiculous concept too... then i started just looking up in the sky. you can see this on a nearly daily basis. it's a grid-work pattern-- something i never saw in the sky growing up as a child (i am 34 years old), really even not up until several years ago... it's the strangest thing, multiple low-flying planes creating ALOT of streaks across the sky that stay there for a really really long time and usually form parallel and perpendicular lines (not normal flight patterns that splay out from an epi-center).

i think the problem is that we don't look up to see them, and it's just happening right in front of us... all i want to know is what are they doing? if it's not some secret thing, then why aren't our very legitimate questions being answered by the powers that be?

why do regular people with questions about what we're seeing happening in front of us get classified as conspiracy theorists and get deemed the reason no 'real' work on the climate gets done? that is very frustrating.

i thought for sure one of the guests today would have something to say about it other than blatant dismissal and condescension. i would love nothing more than this to be explained-away to set our minds at ease.

and as an aside, why is it so crazy to think that the government wouldn't do something without the public's knowledge? hasn't that been proven to be the case throughout history? it is very naive to think that everything the government does is on the 'up-and-up'.

perhaps they are harmless. if so, then whoever 'they' are can tell us why they are doing it.

thank you for your time in considering the viability of this concern.

I am excited that we can start to talk about engineering for the environment in a broad public forum. Personally however I fall on the side of supporting more ecological engineering projects than geo-engineering projects. The key difference in ecological engineering projects is the reliance on self organization and systems ecology to design effective "Interfaces" between humans and their environments.
The purpose of such projects are to naturally attenuate waste products resultant from human activities (eg mining residues, storm and wastwater, etc...). These projects rely mostly on solar energy as a driving force and indeed are less expensive, while equally effective, as mechanically driven facilities. I realize that i am no expert, but to me engineering solutions historically have the tendency to concentrate and transport waste from areas of issue, creating another solid waste disposal problem. That being said, I feel that engineering landscapes and systems (industrial and natural) to maximize ecosystem diversity and function is a more direct method of waste prevention and treatment.

also, just google chemtrail pictures to see all the photos people have been taking for years of the skies in their home towns...

I think we have a serious problem in this country with the quality of information that is in available to people.

Most academic journals are not freely available on the web; access is normally by payment or subscription, and, if you are not affiliated with an academic institution, the costs are prohibitive. As a result, there is all manner of disinformation freely available on the web, while all the real scientific literature is sequestered within academia.

With climate change, for example, the scientific literature is vast, with thousands of articles investigating all manner of subtleties of the subject. I think that, if all of this information were freely available, people would get a sense of the quality of thinking and research that is going into the science, and would back off on the pseudoscience.

Things on the web that get publicity from Fox News or Alex Jones or any of the others that traffic in fear-mongering are severely damaging our public discourse. It is a lot easier to click to one of those sites and get whipped up into a frenzy of opinion than it is to come to an informed opinion.

I don't know much about "chemtrails", but the body of the article Rachel mentioned doesn't seem to refer to them, and the pictures just look like contrails. If barium were raining out of the sky, I would be surprised if it went unnoticed by the hundreds and possibly thousands of researchers who study the atmosphere all day every day.

I'm a regular listener, and enjoy the show.
I found the calls relating to the chemtrails amusing. I first found out about the chemtrail conspiracy theories by googling my own web page, and found that I was being used as a source for the proof of the chemtrails due to having posted some WWII pictures of contrails behind B-17s, which made formation flying dangerous for the crews due to reduced visibility.
The caller who stated that contrails go away in a few seconds is simply wrong. As one of the guests correctly responded, they can last for long periods of time if the temperature and humidity are correct, and airliners following the same route can appear to leave a regular pattern or grid since the wind moves the contrail before the next plane comes along, so that the next contrail is displaced from the previous one.
Contrails are very common, and have been around since aircraft have flown at high altitudes. Contrails are simply caused by condensation and freezing of supersaturated water vapor from combustion products, and if the conditions are right, particularly at low temperatures, they can last a long time, since the evaporation of ice at low temperatures is quite slow.
I realize that most of the believers of this conspiracy theory are well meaning, but they are being mislead by web pages that use references many of which don't even support the theory. There is simply no proof of, no possible way of funding, and no logical reason for there being any conspiracy to systematically spray chemicals over the country. It is unfortunate that the otherwise interesting discussion was hijacked by this subject.

What I would like to hear is a direct and thoughtful rebuttal of the claim that a majority of scientists reject climate change evidence. A caller asserted that 40,000 scientists have signed a statement that warming "isn't real," yet none of the guests addressed that assertion.

Such claims need to be addressed loudly and frequently. Disbelief is the convenient stance, and the stance that most will take if they are not forced to recognize its absurdity.

To Rachel Chase: the 'chemtrails' trails you see in the sky are just vapor from the jet engines discharging hot moist air into the cold surrounding air, just like a car exhaust on a cold morning. To my knowledge spent jet fuel doesn't have any barium in it.

Jim from Huntsville, AL who claimed that with “ the fraudulent documentation that came out of East Anglia University in Great Britain where it was deliberately doctored and with the coldest winter on record. Do you people really believe that the American public is so ridiculously stupid to buy your series?”

I don’t see why Jim underestimates the American public’s “stupidity” when he is living proof of how misinformation and false analogies can be used to galvanize public sentiment toward falsehoods.

1) The East Anglia Controversy, as the panelist Rob pointed out an independent investigation found no “doctoring” of data as the caller claimed. Furthermore, say that the caller is right. One data point does not invalidate a large data set created by hundreds if not thousands of scientists over decades. Does the caller think that everything could have been “doctored?” Does the caller think that the glaciers around the world are in conspiracy too and thus have shrunk dramatically not because of climate change but because glacier’s have a politically motivated point to prove? Or the plants and animals that are clearly showing their “liberal” bias by shifting their habitation range northward (or southward, lets not be so Northern Hemisphere centric).

GMC makes a good point, however I think the panelists and geoengineers already agree with him.

They went out of their way to state that no one wants to try these geoengineerinig methods and much less apply them at a global scale unless it is a last resort.

So GMC you a contenting a point that everyone already agrees with.

During the demonization of coal its use for power generation was mentioned, along with use as chemical feedstock.

A very important use of coal was neglected – it is an essential ingredient in steelmaking. Petroleum and natural gas (methane) can be used, and may be better, for making nylon and most plastics, but if anyone has come up with a suitable substitute for coal to make coke for adding the carbon to steel it hasn’t made the news.