Lay Off the Rum: NYT Guest Essay Calls for ‘Geoengineering the Oceans’ to Fight Climate Change

September 18th, 2023 9:58 AM

The New York Times seems to get a kick out of pushing hubris-riddled blather normalizing the ridiculous notion that governments can control Mother Nature to fight climate change.

A Sept. 14 Times guest essay whined that switching to clean energy from fossil fuels wasn’t enough of a radical change to “stave off climate catastrophe.” The essay, which had three co-authors, was adamant that “we desperately need another solution.”

Their so-called “solution” was nothing short of cuckoo, and the co-authors even admitted as much: “As crazy as it might sound, geoengineering the oceans by adding iron — in effect, fertilizing them — may offer the best, most effective and most affordable way not just to slow the march of global warming but to reverse its course by directly drawing carbon out of the atmosphere.” The essay called for the U.S. government to immediately start testing the bonkers theory “now before the climate system spins off into an even more disastrous state.” 

The new leftist motto, said Climate Depot founder Marc Morano to MRC Business, “seems to be: The government will control the weather, and you will be Happy." Morano called out how climate activists have become so “convinced of their own doomsday rhetoric that they want to experiment with risky, unproven, with unknown effects of climate and weather engineering.” In Morano’s estimation, “Dumping iron into the ocean may or may not be effective in removing CO2, but it will definitely cost billions and enrich a lot of academics, politicians, and corporations.” 

Junkscience.com founder Steve Milloy ripped the essay’s “solution” as “Bizzare.” Milloy told MRC Business that leftists’ have developed an acute affinity for not being consistent with their scare-porn. “Such geoengineering could actually be quite damaging if algal growth gets out of control. I've already seen climate alarmists trying to frighten people about the oceans changing color, becoming greener from algal growth.”

Milloy would later respond to The Times essay on X (formerly Twitter) by comparing it to a contradicting story from The Washington Post ginning up fears over the explosion of algae growth in the oceans. The irony is that essay's authors conceded the "legitimate" "concern about inadvertent effects, including toxic algae blooms and impacts on commercially important fish species." In essence, “Yesterday's BS climate horror is today's BS climate solution,” as Milloy mocked. 

But the essay proceeded to double-down anyway:

We urgently need more aggressive measures to reduce atmospheric carbon on a large scale. Whatever questions ocean fertilization presents, they pale compared with what we already know about the escalating climate catastrophe if we continue on our current path.

The essay's logic sounds eerily similar to when nutty climate change extremists were advocating for “melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot” to stop global cooling in the 1970s. Morano also pointed out the déjà vu: “This is retro 1970s. In the 1970s, they believed fossil fuels were creating aerosols blocking the sun, creating man-made global cooling.” The Times, reverse-engineering the 70s logic, is also on the record promoting the fringe theory of “blocking the sun” to stop the climate change bogeyman.

This kind of mad science would make a good segment on late night comedy if it wasn’t also so “dangerously stupid” at the same time, as Milloy concluded

Conservatives are under attack. Contact The New York Times at 1-800-698-4637 and tell it to stop hawking insane leftist propaganda about the government controlling the weather.