Geo-engineering Oversight Agency for Thermal Stabilization — GOATS

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 17 Oct 2022

Anthony Judge | Laetus in Praesens - TRANSCEND Media Service

Introduction

An editorial in the journal New Scientist (Time to rank the best ideas to engineer the climate, 29 October 2008) has just echoed the proposal of Philip W. Boyd (Ranking Geo-engineering Schemes, Nature Geoscience, 2008, 1, 26 October 2008, pp. 722 – 724) who argues:

Geoengineering proposals for mitigating climate change continue to proliferate without being tested. It is time to select and assess the most promising ideas according to efficacy, cost, all aspects of risk and, importantly, their rate of mitigation.

The New Scientist editorial notes that by coincidence, the UK’s Royal Society had just launched such a study. The editorial also cites Boyd to the effect that: “We will reach a tipping point, and none of the schemes will have been tested”.

Boyd proposes that an international body, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, rank the schemes according to risk, cost, effectiveness and how quickly they could get off the ground.

Such framings of the challenge imply that the problem has been well analyzed by a selection of natural science disciplines, who are now prepared to assess and recommend solutions supplied by technologists in a period when wider society has every reason to be extremely concerned about the trustworthiness of experts regarding global systems. It implies that, as with the crisis of the financial system, a “tipping point” will provide the political justification to ensure that the best ranked technical solution will be rammed through as a form of technical “bailout”. This will presumably be effected by a policy group claiming to act wisely in the best interests of all — despite views to contrary.

After reviewing a selection of proposals, the following argument focuses on the blinkered perspective which is being brought to the analysis of climate change and actions considered appropriate, especially in the light of the track record of projects of equivalent global scope.

From that perspective the following argument recommends the establishment of a Geo-engineering Oversight Agency for Thermal Stabilization (GOATS) as an appropriately named body within which to focus on such geoengineering solutions and to be appropriately tracked in turn.

This amendment to the 2008 version of this document is appropriate in the light of recent experience of the pandemic and the disastrous global strategic response to it. Reference to “oversight” is especially appropriate in that it is one of a few key words carefully employed in governance for its “dual use” potential — like “sanction” and “vice”. In the case of “oversight”, it is to be expected that the focus of GOATS will enable intentional blindspots to be “overlooked”, as has been the case with respect to the COVID pandemic and its sequels — and may be expected to be the case with respect to global warming (Application of Universal Vaccination Narrative to Climate Change: implications for biodiversity, human equality and anti-otherness, 2021)

As of 2018 the terms “geoengineering” and “climate engineering” are not used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The term “geoengineering” is deemed by some to be largely an artefact and a result of frequent use of the term in popular discourse, being so vague and all-encompassing as to have lost much meaning. Preference is now accorded to “solar geoengineering” or “solar radiation management“. The Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies has been convened to identify and develop risk reduction guidelines for climate intervention experimentation.

This amendment is limited to the following inclusion of recent references on the range of issues:

The strategic pattern to be anticipated is evident from the recent launching of thousands of communication satellites — without authorisation by any international body. This has already aroused protest from astronomers — aside from the other implications separately argued (Symbolic Disconnection from the Stars and the Universe? 2019). This can be understood in terms of surreptitious global implementation of full-spectrum dominance and shielding.

Curiously the pattern of inserting satellites into global orbit can be seen as paralleled by the inoculation of the global population — with the future prospect of systematically injecting aerosols into the atmosphere of Earth. These processes are now promoted globally by indoctrination via the media. More curious is the fundamental failure to acknowledge how the archetypal variant of the pattern — impregnation — is exacerbating the crises which governance has proven incapable of addressing effectively. Ironically the consequent increase in widespread social unrest can then be understood as engendering incarceration — whether of protestors by society or in the experiential sense of entrapment evident in the crisis of individual mental health.

Paper published on 4 Nov 2008 | Amended on 16 Oct 2022

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