Here’s a guy who wants to solve global warming by mimicking volcanoes:

For two years after Pinatubo erupted, the average temperature across the Earth decreased by 0.6C.

The volcano’s location close to the equator helped make Pinatubo the perfect model for explaining how sulphur in the stratosphere could reduce global warming.

Instead, controversially, he wants to duplicate the effects of volcanic eruptions and create a man-made sulphur screen in the sky.

His solution would see hundreds of rockets filled with sulphur launched into the stratosphere. He envisages one million tonnes of sulphur to create his cooling blanket.

A million tonnes. This would be a great market for suborbital vehicles.

If you can deliver a ton per flight, that would be a million flights. Let’s say that the marginal cost per flight is a hundred thousand or so (I think we can do a lot better than that). That would be a hundred billion dollar program. That seems like a bargain compared to many of the nostrums currently proposed. And boy would it give us a flight rate.

Of course, someone over at Free Republic pooh poohs it, because he doesn’t understand the concept. Even if one were to use a Titan (can’t be done–they’re out of production), the payload he quotes for it is to GEO. Just tossing stuff up in the atmosphere, you could probably get a hundred tons at a time. In fact, even if they were still in production, a Titan would be the worst conceivable choice for this mission. Deltas would make a lot more sense–clean propellants, and new vehicles with a high-rate production line, and their upper-stage performance issues would be irrelevant, since they wouldn’t need one. But it would be crazy to do it with expendables of any kind.

With suborbitals, I’d think you could do a hundred flights a day out of a given spaceport. If there are a ten spaceports scattered around the world, that’s a thousand flights per day. At that rate, you’d get the stuff up in three years.

Eric Scheie wonders why the global warming scolds don’t scold us about eating meat.

Razib asks.

One of the early proponents of anthropogenic global warming has changed his mind:

His break with what he now sees as environmental cant on climate change came in September, in an article entitled “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in l’ Express, the French weekly. His article cited evidence that Antarctica is gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro’s retreating snow caps, among other global-warming concerns, come from natural causes. “The cause of this climate change is unknown,” he states matter of factly. There is no basis for saying, as most do, that the “science is settled.”

Let the inquisition begin.

I found this over at Free Republic. I also found it cute.

And Andrew Bolt talks about the problem with offsets, and the “do what we say, not what we do” hypocrisy:

…there’s a moral problem. Offsets are really best suited for people rich enough — like Gore — to afford them.

They let the rich pay someone else to use less so they can use more. And so the aristocrat can party on under the chandeliers, while the power-rationed peasants sit out in his dark.

Of course, one hypocrite like Gore shouldn’t discredit an entire cause. Yet it can’t be an accident that global warming attracts more hypocrites than most faiths.

There’s Tim Flannery, criss-crossing the world by jet to tell us to use less oil.

There’s British PM Tony Blair lecturing Britons to cut their emissions, but declaring it “unreasonable” to expect him therefore to stop flying off on his overseas holidays.

And there’s Prince Charles booking out all of a jet’s first and second class to fly to New York to accept a green award from Gore.

Ah, Gore again. Which reminds me of Laurie David, one of the producers of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

David, too, demands we save the world by cutting our gasses, yet turns out to be as addicted to private jets as her friend Al.

Asked recently to explain such inconvenient hypocrisy, David spluttered: “Yes, I take a private plane on holiday a couple of times a year.”

But — and here’s where she shows she’s nobler than you — “I feel horribly guilty about it.”

See? The global warming faith is more about how you feel than what you actually do. Even the makers of An Inconvenient Truth demonstrate that. What a circus.

Two flow charts.

[Via Geek Press]

Gore’s hypocrisy is apparently even greater than we thought. Bill Hobbes explains.

And I agree with him (and Glenn Reynolds) that there are lots of non-GW reasons to reduce our use of fossil fuels. When the enviros get serious about this, and stop looking for excuses to abandon technologies, and run our lives through watermelon social-control schemes, there will be lots of solutions, including nuclear ones.

[Late-afternoon update]

Some interesting thoughts on Al Gore’s motives:

If he believed what he was saying on its own merits, then he would be behaving differently. Since his behavior and his rhetoric do not match, we learn something about him: that there is likely some other motivation for his policy preferences.

Those policy preferences – limit carbon, mandate the use of certain technologies, restrict land use, etc. – all seem to entail increasing governmental control over the economy. Mr. Gore

Lileks, on Gorebal Warming:

The demands of the faith are specific and exacting. You must believe that climate change is largely the fault of man

Here’s some interesting data on sexual orientation of sheep that, if it holds for humans as well, would seem to confirm my thesis (actually, a better exposition of it is found here):

A bare majority of rams turn out to be heterosexual. One in five swings both ways. About 15 percent are asexual, and 7 percent to 10 percent are gay.

That seems, to me, empirically to be about right for humans as well.

Does anyone here really believe that there are Freudian explanations for this among sheep? Well, I think the ones for humans are just as bogus.

And the potential consequences?

The more likely path is gentler. Science will gradually convince us that sexual orientation is innate, more like the color of your skin than like the content of your character. Condemnation of homosexuality as a sin will subside. Freed from the culture wars, we’ll turn to the biological differences between race and sexual orientation: Homosexuality defies the aspiration to procreate with your mate, and it’s easier to isolate and alter in embryonic development. Resentment will give way to pity. We’ll come to view homosexuality as a kind of infertility

Here’s some interesting data on sexual orientation of sheep that, if it holds for humans as well, would seem to confirm my thesis (actually, a better exposition of it is found here):

A bare majority of rams turn out to be heterosexual. One in five swings both ways. About 15 percent are asexual, and 7 percent to 10 percent are gay.

That seems, to me, empirically to be about right for humans as well.

Does anyone here really believe that there are Freudian explanations for this among sheep? Well, I think the ones for humans are just as bogus.

And the potential consequences?

The more likely path is gentler. Science will gradually convince us that sexual orientation is innate, more like the color of your skin than like the content of your character. Condemnation of homosexuality as a sin will subside. Freed from the culture wars, we’ll turn to the biological differences between race and sexual orientation: Homosexuality defies the aspiration to procreate with your mate, and it’s easier to isolate and alter in embryonic development. Resentment will give way to pity. We’ll come to view homosexuality as a kind of infertility