<nettime> Brave New Climate

[Curt Hagenlocher <curth@motek.com>]

Why worry about global warming when we can make it disappear with
a simple wave of the technology wand?  But who exactly will we
entrust as the wielder?

--

Brave New Climate
by Patrick J. Michaels
http://www.cato.org/dailys/12-04-02-2.html

In any competition to determine what living person will be most
influential in the next decade, J. Craig Venter, president of the
Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives, surely is at the top of
the list. After decoding the human genome, he's now on a project to
genetically engineer the planet's temperature.

Technologically, this might not be so difficult, and Venter makes no
bones about what he is after: a homogenerated bacterium that reduces
atmospheric carbon dioxide. Increasing carbon dioxide is the likely
cause for a small rise in planetary temperature in the last 50 years
of about 0.4ºC. Despite the fact that the warming has consistently
been far beneath the early alarmist projections, there's no other
environmental issue that generates such emotional heat.

[...big snip...]

Perhaps the genie that is about to emerge from Craig Venter's petri
dishes will finally bring the world to its senses, not only on climate
change but also on the inevitability that Homo sapiens chooses and
engineers the planet and genetic ecosphere that it desires. It's been
happening for hundreds of years, and only the pace and the technology
are accelerating.

This was predicted a long time ago, in Genesis: "Be fruitful and
multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of
the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that
moves on the earth".

Craig Venter is likely to provide the key to that prophecy. But
determining how we fulfill it, and with what wisdom, is going to
occupy an awful lot of our time in coming decades.

(Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the
Cato Institute and author of the book "The Satanic Gases.")

--
Curt Hagenlocher
curth@motek.com

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