Rejoice! After much strenuous and vigorous research, a cure has been found! No, not for cancer, AIDS or any other serious malady responsible for millions of deaths each year. Oh no, we’ve found a cure for a much bigger problem: global warming.

Global warming ‘cure’ found by scientists

A “technical fix” that could stop global warming by taking billions of tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and save the coral reefs from being destroyed by acidification has been developed by scientists.

The process could be used on an industrial scale to remove excess carbon dioxide caused by the burning of fossil fuels from the atmosphere in “a matter of decades rather than millennia,” according to researchers from Harvard and Penn State universities.

The process relies on speeding up a process that happens naturally, whereby carbon dioxide dissolved in sea water breaks down volcanic rock and soils to make alkaline carbonic salts.

The water flows into the ocean and increases its alkalinity. Sea water containing more alkali can absorb more carbon, so more carbon from the atmosphere is “locked up” and becomes harmless bottom sediments, according to the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Researchers estimate that it would take a cube of volcanic rock 10 kilometres across to return the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere to pre-industrial levels.

Unlike other proposed “technical fixes” that “sequester” carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, this one makes the sea more alkaline and therefore counteracts the other side effect of more carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere - the acidification of the sea.

Well isn’t that wonderful. All we have to do to solve the non-problem of global warming is change the alkalinity of the entire ocean. There’s no possible way a plan this simple could go wrong and cause unintended consequences worse than those we’re trying to avoid. Nope, not at all.

Meanwhile, the very “scientific body” (the IPCC is really a governmental body) that has been pushing warming the hardest doesn’t even agree that the consequences are bad, as this survey demonstrates.

The responses to the survey?s first four questions were predictable ─ between 83% to 90% of the respondents favored the view that manmade emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are driving or helping to drive global climate to unprecedentedly warmer temperatures and that limiting manmade CO2 emissions would reduce such climate change.

But despite the apparent ?consensus? on these four questions, the responses to the last two questions expose that consensus as potentially meaningless.

Less than 50% of the respondents said that an increase in global temperature of 1-degree Celsius is flatly undesirable. Half of the respondents said that such a temperature increase is desirable, desirable for some but undesirable for others or too difficult to assess.
Among survey respondents, then, there?s no consensus on desirability of 1-degree Celsius of global warming ─ twice the level of warming that occurred during the 20th century.

When asked about the ideal climate, only 14% said that the ideal climate was cooler than the present climate. Sixty-one percent said that there is no such thing as an ideal climate.

But if there?s no agreement on what the target climate should be, what precisely is the point of taking action on global warming? What is the climatic goal at which we are aiming?

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