The invention of Philip

Despite my being immersed for years in the Wild World of Woo-Woo, I still occasionally run across things that I'd never heard of.  Some of them are apparently famous enough that I think, after finding out about them, "How on earth did I miss that one?"

Take, for example, the "Philip Experiment," which I bumped into for the first time yesterday morning.  The "experiment" -- although I myself would have hesitated to use that term to describe it -- was the brainchild of Iris Owen, leader of the "Owen Group," which was a team of parapsychology investigators in Toronto in the 1970s.  Owen and her pals apparently were tired of contacting the spirits of actual dead people, so they came up with an interesting idea; would it be possible to invent a fake dead person, and have that dead person's soul become real?

I was already laughing by this point, but it gets even funnier.  Owen & Co. dreamed up "Philip Aylesford," a fictional 17th century Englishman.  Philip, according to the site Mystica, "...was born in England in 1624 and followed an early military career.  At the age of sixteen he was knighted. He had an illustrious role in the Civil War.  He became a personal friend of Prince Charles (later Charles II) and worked for him as a secret agent.  But Philip brought about his own undoing by having an affair with a Gypsy girl.  When his wife found out she accused the girl of witchcraft, and the girl was burned at the stake.  In despair Philip committed suicide in 1654 at the age of thirty."

One of the more artistically-minded Owen Group members even drew Philip's portrait:

So the Owen Group began to meditate on Philip's life, meeting frequently to have deep discussions about All Things Philip.  After fleshing out the details of Philip's history, they finally decided to have a séance to see if they could raise Philip's soul from the afterlife.

Have I been emphatic enough on the point that Philip Aylesford wasn't a real guy?

I doubt anyone will be surprised, however, that the séance and "table tipping" sessions that followed showed some serious results.  Philip did the "rap once for yes, twice for no" thing, giving correct answers to questions about his life.  Questions that, of course, everyone in the room knew the answer to.  The table in the room where the séance was held moved in a mystifying manner; Philip, one source recounts, would "move the table, sliding it from side to side despite the fact that the floor was covered with thick carpeting.  At times it would even 'dance' on one leg."  Mystica tells us that Philip "...had a special rapport with Iris Owen," and even whispered some answers to her, although efforts to catch the whispers on an audio recording were "inconclusive."

We are told, by way of an "explanation" (although again I am reluctant to use that word here), that Philip was an egrigor -- "a supernatural intelligence produced by the will or visualization of participants in a group."  Whatever that means.  I, predictably, would offer the alternative definition of, "a delightful mélange of collective delusion, hoax, wishful thinking and the ideomotor effect."

Of course, this hasn't stopped the whole thing from being spread about as solid evidence of the paranormal.  It was the subject of a YouTube video, which I encourage you all to watch for the humor value alone.  Even funnier, the "Philip Experiment" encouraged other parapsychology buffs to try to replicate the results.  The Paranormal Phenomena site (linked above) tells us that other groups have been successful at making contact with Lilith, a French Canadian spy; Sebastian, a medieval alchemist; Axel, a man from the future; and Skippy Cartman, a 14-year-old Australian girl.

I bet you think I'm going to say "I made the last one up."  Sorry, but no.  The "Skippy Experiment" is a real thing, and "Skippy Cartman" was able to communicate via "raps and scratching sounds."

It's probably too much to hope for that she asked for "some goddamn Cheesy Poofs."

I know I've written about some ridiculous things before, but this one has got to be in the Top Ten.  All through doing the research for this post, I kept having to stop to do two things: (1) checking to see if this was some kind of parody, and (2) getting paper towels to wipe up the coffee that I'd choke-snorted all over my computer monitor.  I mean, really, people.  If the paranormalists actually want us skeptical science-minded types to take them seriously -- to consider what they do to be valid experimentation -- they need to stop pulling this kind of crapola.  I know that skeptics can sometimes be guilty of doing the throw-out-the-baby-with-the-bath thing, better known as the Package Deal Fallacy -- "some of this is nonsense, so it's all nonsense."  But still.  The fact that a lot of the paranormal sites that feature the Philip Experiment were completely uncritical in their support of its validity makes me rather doubt that they can tell a good experiment from a bad one in general.

That said, I have to say that if we really can communicate with fictional entities, there are a few characters from some of my novels that I wouldn't mind having a chat with.  Tyler Vaughan, the main character from Signal to Noise, would be a good place to start, although I have it on good authority that Tyler is so much like me that I probably wouldn't gain much by talking to him.  It'd be kind of cool to meet Nick Calladine from We All Fall Down to tell him he made the right decision, and Bethany Hale from The Parsifal Snowe Mysteries because she's badass and tough and smokin' hot.

But it's not possible, of course.  And if all I got were some "raps and scratching noises" for my effort, it'd probably not be worth the effort in any case.

Fear tactics and fleeing bison

Is there some facet of human personality that craves disaster?

I ask this question because of a story sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia called, "Reports of Bison 'Fleeing' Yellowstone Amid Fears Quake Could Trigger Eruption of Park's Supervolcano."  In it, we read a lot of fairly terrifying stuff about the supervolcano that lies beneath the park, and what havoc it could cause if it erupted:

Yellowstone National Park sits atop the Yellowstone Caldera, the crater of a massive supervolcano. The park attracts millions of visitors each year to its famous geysers and hot springs, powered by the hot lava below. 

In recent years, scientists discovered the caldera is 48 kilometres wide — far larger than previously thought... 

The Yellowstone super volcano has had three cataclysmic eruptions — 2 million, 1.3 million and 640,000 years ago, creating a series of ‘nesting’ calderas, say scientists.
The eruption 2 million years ago was the most catastrophic, covering half of North America with ash and wiping out prehistoric animals, reports the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory... 

The inevitable next ‘big one’ will wipe out the surroundings for hundreds of kilometres, covering the US and Canada in ash, [University of Oregon geologist Ilya Bindeman] told EarthSky. It would devastate agriculture and cause global cooling for a decade, he says. 

A volcanic eruption of that size “hasn’t happened in modern civilisation,” he said.

All of which is true, of course.  And we're even told at the end, seemingly as an afterthought, that scientists are pretty sure that an eruption isn't imminent and that we'll have plenty of warning before one occurs (not that we'll be able to do much to stop it).

But before getting that reassurance, we're shown a video clip of some bison "fleeing for their lives" and told that the "animals may be leaving the park because they sense an impending catastrophic volcanic eruption triggered by recent earthquakes."

[image courtesy of photographer Jack Dykinga and the Wikimedia Commons]

Well, I looked at the video, and the first thing I noticed was that the bison didn't seem particularly alarmed.  I didn't get the "fleeing for their lives" vibe from them.  They were more moseying for their lives, or possibly even ambling for their lives.

But second, what the hell is the writer of the article trying to do by telling us in one breath that the bison were running away because the volcano is going to erupt, and in the next saying that scientists don't think it's going to erupt?  I've seen bison, and I know a good many scientists, and I think I can say without fear of contradiction that most scientists are smarter than your average bison.

But we don't have a very good track record of listening to scientists, do we?  I'm honestly not surprised that the American citizenry would discount what a scientist is saying in favor of prognostications by a large ungulate, given our general approach on evolution, climate change, and vaccination.

Now, of course I know why the media loves stories like this; it gets people to click the links and read the articles.  But I'm more mystified why the general public likes disaster stories.  Since I was sent the link, I've seen the story posted three times on Facebook and twice on Twitter.  Why are people so eager to spread around a bogus story (and I'm convinced that anyone that has more brains than a bowl of chowder could tell that it was bogus just by reading all the way to the end and seeing the disclaimer about scientists doubting that we were going to see an eruption soon)?

So something must be appealing to people about "We're All Gonna Die" stories, but I'm damned if I see what it is.  At least the other idiotic stories that you see floating around -- stories of the "Miley Cyrus Pregnant With Bigfoot's Love Chid" type -- don't leave you with the impression that civilization is about to end.

Although now that I think of it, I can understand how you might pray for the apocalypse after seeing the Miley Cyrus "twerking" video.  I know I did.  So maybe there's some justification after all.

False flags and Fort Hood

Sometimes I can simply laugh at the goofy ideas people have.  It was the genesis of this blog, really; to shine some light, both in the sense of "illumination" and also in the figurative sense of "light-heartedness," on the loopy stuff that we see on a daily basis.  And being a naturally optimistic person, I like it when my daily excursion into wingnuttery doesn't bring me down.

But there are times that I just want to scream.

Like today.  Because the conspiracy theorists are already howling about the Fort Hood shooting being a setup, a false flag, a hoax, before the victims have even been named, barely giving the smoke time to clear.

[image courtesy of photographer Michael Heckman and the Wikimedia Commons]

What, it's not enough for you people that four people are dead, including the shooter, and sixteen are wounded?  It's not enough that the gunman's widow, the mother of a three-year-old child, was "hysterical" upon finding out what her husband had done?  It's not enough that she now has to cope with raising a child who will forever live under the stigma of her father's crime?

Nope.  The tragedy itself is never enough for you people, is it?  It always has to be more.  It always has to be a plot, a piece of the Big Evil Puzzle that is how you see the world.  Don't believe me?  Here's a sampling of the comments that appeared on the Conspiracy subreddit today:

SOLDIERS shooting SOLDIERS means only one thing... TYRANNY... someone CHOOSE [sic] GOD OVER MONEY... IF you believe what the ZIONIST BANKER OWNED MEDIA SAYS your [sic] TRULY ASLEEP... YOU have chosen the GREEN PILL OF THE MATRIX... 

Active shooter = false flag know that the words coming from the media is a LIE.  ACTIVE SHOOTER IS ALL WE HERE.  STOP THE FAKE SHOOTINGS FUCKERS!!! 

Wherever u hear the phrase ACTIVE SHOOTER. this is a drill people. just another hoax!!!  Active shooter = drill and or false flag to disarm the people.  Watch how shady this BULLSHIT story changes 100 times! 

Another Obama Muslim gone psycho?  I suppose Obama will also give this brutal attack another mere "workplace violence" status instead of a "military attack" or "invasion."  I smell another Obama false flag plot, like all the rest of the phoney-baloney false flag terrorist attacks. 

This is a distraction, people.  They're getting too close to finding Flight 370 and needed something to turn our attention to.  Every time we get close to the truth, they set up something like this and most Americans fall for it.  Wake up!

Okay, let me say this loud and clear, so you wackos can hear me:

You have zero information on this.  You are doing what you do best, which is making shit up to force the story to conform to your warped worldview.  The shooter -- Ivan Lopez -- is only now being investigated, and so we don't yet know who he was or why he did what he did.  Could he have been a terrorist?  Maybe.  Could he have been some kind of Muslim convert, with a jihadist axe to grind?  I guess, although there's no indication of it.  Could he have had PTSD and had some kind of psychotic break?  Possible.  The point here is that you don't know, and I don't either.

The difference is that I'm not claiming that I do.

What I find most stomach-turning about the people who yammer on about this sort of thing is that they really feel like they're being noble and courageous and iconoclastic by making these sorts of statements.  But you know what?  All it amounts to is using the human cost of an as-yet unexplained tragedy to score political points, which when you think about it, is kind of the opposite of noble and courageous.  Because they don't care about facts, or logic, or evidence; all they care about is using any means they can to bolster a bitter, twisted worldview that sees everything in the world as evidence of a conspiracy.

It may be that in the days to come we will find out more about Ivan Lopez and why he took a gun and shot 19 of his fellow soldiers.  Because Lopez ended the shooting by taking his own life, it may be that we will never know.  It is the sad truth about many tragedies of this type that the real reasons behind it might be forever out of our reach.

So to the wackos who are circling around this story like flies around roadkill, I would like to recommend that you do what a responsible person does when (s)he has no facts or information: shut the fuck up.

Cracking the infinity codes

Okay, I know I'm no genius, but I think I can place myself with confidence in the "above average intelligence" category.

A few things, however, defeat me.  A lot of physics rests on mathematics that I frankly do not comprehend, despite my B.S. in physics and minor in math.  When I look at academic papers from physics journals, and am confronted with such arcane beasts as tensors and cross products and weak isospin, I become tense, my eyes cross, and I become all weak and spinn-y.  (I usually require at least one glass of scotch to recover completely.)

Likewise, the deeper waters of philosophy drown me entirely.  I read the first paragraph of a friend's Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy, and said, in a rather thin voice, "That's... nice," and decided forthwith that I should confine myself to the epistemological and metaphysical questions raised by The Cat in the Hat instead.

With the exception of the aforementioned, however, I can usually hold my own fairly well in intellectual pursuits, which is fortunate, given that I'm a teacher.  So it is seldom that I look at a sample of writing, study it from various angles, think about it, and then still come up completely empty-handed.  Which is what I did when I looked at a website called Infinity Codes that a friend sent me, along with the message, "Curious to see what you'll think of this."

What I thought, after forty-five minutes' increasingly perplexed study, was (to borrow a line from the inimitable Eddie Izzard), "Quod... the fuck?"  And lest you think that I'm just being lazy -- or, perhaps, that my brain isn't as all-that-and-a-bag-of-potato-chips as I claim it is -- here's a sample, so you can make your own assessment:

PURPOSE and INTENT

-- Finding the spiral thread --

Split into 4 sets of templates the Infinity Codes have been designed to assist re-establishing our connection to the cycles of the cosmos and the earth (macrocosm and microcosm). The codes are arranged in a fractal sequence in order to reveal the spiral thread of interconnected-ness between us, nature and the universe...

Their purpose is to liberate and inform us with the knowledge of geometric patterns, fractal harmonics and organic ratios of the 13D reality in which we live. Each graphic has ancient wisdom encoded within it that our ancestors knew and based their systems of time and space measurement upon.

Living in a non-linear matrix of time and space, which they understood primarily through observing the movements of the 7 visible ‘spheres’ (5 planets + sun + moon), our ancestors were far beyond us in their development. This enabled them to perceive the fractal design of the tree of life, and our place in it - via the 28 = (4x7), the 365 = (13x28) +1, and 365.242 (1 year). This created a fractal matrix of the alchemy of the organic + geometric, that could then be aligned to zodiacal + celestial, in an eternal map of the cosmos.

And that's just from the freakin' introduction.

If you go to "What is the context?" -- a question I was certainly asking by this point -- you read the following:

Living in the end times (Solstice Sun aligned with the Galactic Center), beginning of the 21st century (7:7:7), Age of Aquarius geometrically speaking, yet in reality (organically speaking) the Age of Aquarius starts circa 2600ad, information Age, cyber era… Peak moment of 2012, Dec 21st, next Winter solstice!

Well, what strikes me about this is the part about the Sun being lined up with the Galactic Center at the beginning of the 21st century.  Which is true, but can someone explain to me how two points could not be lined up?  I mean, didn't Euclid have something to say about this?  If somehow the Sun and the Galactic Center didn't fall on a straight line, that would be a little odder, don't you think?

And then, we have mystifying illustrations like the following:

 

Which are pretty, I suppose, but what the hell do they mean?

But if you really want to make your head spin, though, go to the page called "Cosmic Formulas," wherein we get to see the mathematical basis for all of it.   I think.  I mean, as far as I can tell, and applying my reasonably decent background in mathematics, it looks like he's just multiplying random numbers together, adding them to other random numbers, and saying, "So cosmic, right?  Of course right."

I finally gave up after about an hour of messing about on the site.  What finally induced me to quit was when I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the monitor screen, and I realized that my expression looked like that on the face of my dog when I try to explain complex and difficult concepts to him, like why he shouldn't dump the garbage and eat the plastic wrapper that the cheese came in.  He tips his head to one side, his brow furrows, and he gets this really... intent look in his eyes.  You can tell that he wants to understand, he's trying his hardest, but it's just not going to happen.

That's the way I looked after an hour of trying to decipher the Infinity Codes.

Maybe you'll be able to make more of it.  If so, please enlighten me.  I'm perfectly willing to admit when I'm out of my depth, as I was with my friend's dissertation, and acknowledge the better understanding that someone else might bring to bear on a subject.  On the other hand, I strongly suspect that here, there's nothing actually there to understand, and that we all might be left (like Eddie Izzard) saying "Quod the fuck?"

What... is your quest?

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In yesterday's post, I pondered the question of why people seem to land on beliefs of various kinds despite there being little to no evidence of the kind that would be admissible in scientific circles.  Today, I want to consider the fact that in a lot of cases, it goes beyond people not caring whether they have evidence...

... they actively work against anyone trying to establish whether the claim is true.

The most famous example of this is, of course, the Shroud of Turin, the keepers of which resisted for years the requests of scientists to carbon-date the linen fiber from which it is made.  With good reason, as it turned out; the Shroud turned out to be only about seven hundred years old, which is impressive for a piece of cloth, but 1,300 years too recent (give or take a couple of decades) to be the burial cloth of Jesus.

So there's a justification for their reluctance, I suppose, but only if you accept the premise that "I'm pretty sure this is true" is somehow preferable to "I now am certain that this is false."

And we now have another relic to consider, because two historians, Margarita Torres and José Manuel Ortega del Rio, have written a book called The Kings of the Grail in which they identify a cup in the city of Léon, Spain as being the chalice used by Jesus at the Last Supper.

[The Chalice of Infanta Doña Urraca.  Image courtesy of photographer José-Manuel Benito Álvarez and the Wikimedia Commons]

This announcement, of course, caused an immediate riot of attention, and nearly in the literal sense:

Curators were forced to remove a precious cup from display in a Spanish church when crowds swarmed there after historians claimed it was the holy grail, staff said.

Visitors flocked to the San Isidro basilica in the north-western city of León after two historians published a book saying the ancient goblet was the mythical chalice from which Christ sipped at the last supper.

The director of the basilica's museum, Raquel Jaén, said the cup was taken off display on Friday while curators looked for an exhibition space large enough to accommodate the crowds.

Because "Hey, seems like the Grail to us!" is evidently enough to start a stampede amongst the faithful.

As far as why the two historians think this is the real deal, they are basing their conclusion on some Egyptian parchments they found at Cairo's Al-Azhar University that said that the Grail was made of agate and was missing a fragment.  Which this one is.  And apparently it was given to King Fernando of Spain back in the 11th century by a Muslim emir, and a lot of Muslims live in the Middle East, and so did Jesus.

Well, q.e.d., as far as I can see.

The researchers admitted, however, that there were over two hundred supposed Holy Grails just in Europe alone, which kind of muddies the waters a little.  And while the chalice was apparently made between 200 B. C. E. and 100 C. E., so were a lot of things.  In fact, a renowned scholar of ecclesiastical history, Diarmaid MacCulloch of Oxford, has already pronounced Torres and del Rio's assertion to be "idiotic."

So the jury is very much still out on this claim, as it would have to be.  There's damn little in the way of hard evidence that has survived since Christ's lifetime, what with the Fall of Rome and the Barbarian Hordes and the Dark Ages and all, not to mention various medieval religious wingnuts destroying old manuscripts because they were heretical.  So even if this was Jesus's chalice -- which odds are it wasn't -- it very much remains to be seen how you would establish it to the satisfaction of an unbiased historian.

Myself, I doubt the Holy Grail is in Spain.  I have it on good authority that in the Cave of Caer Bannog, carved in mystic runes upon the very living rock, are the last words of Olfin Bedwere of Rheged, which made plain the last resting place of the most Holy Grail.  And I'm told that they read, "Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea.  He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of Aaauuuggghhh."

But of course, I could be wrong as well.  I'm not sure that Tim the Enchanter is all that much more reliable than Torres and del Rio, frankly.

Dreams, wishful thinking, and religious belief

This post is, honestly, a question rather than an answer.

I know I come across as critical of religion at times, and in my own defense I have to say that usually it has to do with the kinds of things that religion incites people to do -- such as Pat Robertson's recent pronouncement that Christians are being oppressed by gays, and that Jesus would have been in favor of stoning gays to death, and evangelist Tristan Emmanuel's recommendation that Bill Maher should be publicly whipped because he's an atheist.

But as far as the religious beliefs themselves, mostly what I feel is incomprehension.  When I've asked people why they believe in god -- something I tend not to do, being that I'm not so excited about being publicly whipped myself -- I usually get answers that fall into one of the following categories:

1. Personal revelation -- the individual has had some kind of experience that convinces him/her that a deity exists.
2. Authority -- being raised in the church, and/or respecting its leaders and their views, have led the person to accept those beliefs as true.
3. It's appealing -- they'd like there to be a god, so there is one.

My problem with all of that is that I'm not especially confident of my own brain's ability, in the absence of hard evidence, to tell truth from fiction.   I know there have been times that I have desperately wanted something to be true -- usually in the realm of personal relationships -- but my own dubious ability to read the signs correctly, plus a regrettable tendency toward wishful thinking, led me to the wrong answer on more than one occasion.

So how likely would I be to land on the right answer with respect not only to whether or not a god exists, but what his/her/its nature is, given the thousands of different answers humans have come up with over the centuries?  It'd be pretty embarrassing, for example, to spend my life worshiping Yahweh, and then die and find out too late that I should have been making sacrifices to Anubis or something.

[image courtesy of Jeff Dahl and the Wikimedia Commons]

I ran into an especially good example of this yesterday on the site Charisma News, where a writer tried to explain how to know if your dreams come from god or not.  Because, I suppose, if you buy into that worldview, there are three choices: (1) your dream comes from god, and you should obey whatever it says; (2) your dream comes from the devil, and you should not do whatever it says; (3) or your dream is just a dream and you shouldn't worry about it.  I suspect that most of mine fall into the last category, because they tend to be bizarre, like my dream a couple of nights ago wherein I was trying to fight off a werewolf by spraying it in the face with a garden hose.

But Audrey Lee tells us in the Charisma News article that it's a real problem, and we don't want to get it wrong:

It would be naive and irresponsible to suggest that all spiritual dreams result in a true God connection.  Dreamers who mistake their own subconscious thoughts or even demonic influence as divine instruction can make grim and historic mistakes.  Recently a woman in a rural village sacrificed her child in the river out of obedience to what she thought was a dream from God.

So, yeah.  That'd be bad.  Lee goes on to tell us that there are four criteria that we should use to determine if our dreams are god-induced: (1) the dream's content doesn't contradict the bible; (2) it's "convicting" [sic]; (3) it lingers in the memory; and (4) it predicts things that come to pass.

So based on these four criteria, I'd guess the werewolf-and-garden-hose dream doesn't measure up except for the fact that I still remember it.  But it does raise a question, which is, couldn't you have a non-bible-contradicting dream that you remember and find convincing, and it still is just a dream?  Doesn't the whole thing still turn on your kind of looking at it and saying, "Yeah, seems right to me?", without anything resembling hard evidence?

I simply don't find that sort of thing a reliable protocol for determining the truth.  Maybe it's because I don't trust myself enough; but I think that our brains come pre-installed with so many ways of getting it wrong that we need to have an external standard in order to be certain.  For me, that standard is science -- i.e., evidence, logic, and rationality.  None of the "internal ways of knowing" have ever really made sense to me.

Now, I'll admit up front that I'm no philosopher, and deeper minds than mine may well have a better answer to all of this.  If so, I'm open to listening.  But until then, I still can't see any dependable way to get at the truth other than hard evidence -- much as my wishful thinking would like to say otherwise.

Cane toads and climate change

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As of Friday, 3/28, at 2:00 PM, the pageviews ticker was about 980,828, and at that point we took the counter down.  We've been averaging about a thousand hits a day, with a range of about 700 to about 1,400 on average days.  The highest number of hits in one day was a little over 70,000 -- but as great as that would be, it's not at all the norm, nor is it expected again soon!

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Humans, sad to say, have a fairly lousy track record for fixing problems that they've created through their own negligence and/or stupidity.

Take, for example, the case of the gray-backed cane beetle, a native Australian insect that is a pest on sugar cane.  Back in the 1930s, sugar cane growers were having a devil of a time with the beetle, because not only do the larvae feed on the roots, the adults feed on the leaves, creating a double whammy that was playing hell with the crop yields.  So someone thought it'd be a smart idea to introduce the cane toad, a South American species with a voracious appetite, as a way of controlling the beetle.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem was that the individual who introduced them seemed to be unaware that beetles can fly and the majority of toads cannot.  Also, the toads are venomous, get huge, eat damn near everything in sight up to and including small mammals, and reproduce like mad.  The result: northeastern Australia still has cane beetles, and now it also has to contend with the cane toad, which seems to be spreading slowly south and west.

So I'm perhaps to be forgiven for expressing some doubt when I hear someone saying about an ecological problem, "Hey, this will fix it!"  Which is why, when my buddy and fellow writer Andrew Butters (of the wonderful blog Potato Chip Math) sent me an article proposing to use geoengineering to solve climate change, my immediate response was, "This may be the dumbest fucking idea I've heard in years."

The idea is not new, but it has a new champion; David Keith, professor of applied physics and public policy at Harvard.  And in the article I linked above, Chris Wodskou (writing for CBC News) tells us that what Keith is thinking about is not on a small scale:

Geoengineering is an attempt to arrest the course of climate change through a number of different schemes, such as seeding the atmosphere with reflective particles.  Or putting gigantic mirrors in orbit around the Earth to reflect sunlight back to space.  Or fertilizing the ocean with iron to stimulate the growth of carbon-absorbing plankton...  [Keith] is
particularly interested in solar geoengineering, or solar radiation management, which would involve putting tiny sulphur particles into the stratosphere, where they would reflect solar energy back to space.

Keith acknowledges the controversial nature of what he is proposing; in fact, he calls it a "brutally ugly technological fix" that does not get at the root of the problem.  But nevertheless, he says, we should be giving it serious consideration:

Carbon dioxide is like filling a bathtub.  The climate risk comes from the historical sum of all emissions.  The only way to stop adding to that risk is to stop putting more carbon dioxide in.  But let’s say you’re going to stop carbon dioxide emissions over 100 years.  If you do this solar geoengineering, you could spread out the climate change over 200 years, slowing down the amount of climate change, and I would say most climate risks have to do with the rate of change.

Well, okay, I agree with that, but there's a big "if" -- and that is "if we understand completely what the results of the geoengineering will be."  It took us 150 years just to notice the global result of all of the additional carbon dioxide we were adding to the atmosphere (counting the start date as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, give or take).  It's taken us another sixty to come to a reasonable scientific consensus, but due to special interests, the media, and sheer human pigheadedness, we are still yet to get up off our asses and do something about it.

And compare the results of climate change with the predictions.  Some of the predictions haven't come true, or at least not yet (e.g. the slowing of the Atlantic Conveyor).  Others have (e.g. loss of Arctic pack ice and the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves).  Some results have been entirely unexpected, such as this year's unhinged winter, with the northeastern United States being socked with temperatures that were more than once colder on the same day than Fairbanks, Alaska and Irkutsk, Siberia.

Honestly, though, this is more or less what the climate scientists expected.  You can't perturb a complex system like global climate and expect it to behave like a clockwork.

So why in the hell do we think we can perturb it even more and that this will somehow push it back into equilibrium?  Isn't it far more likely that the further perturbation will only serve to destabilize the climate more, and in far more unpredictable ways?

Listen, I'm no conspiracy theorist, as regular readers of this blog will know well enough.  My doubt about this plan isn't because I'm afraid of some Big Bad Government Plot To Destroy Us All (undoubtedly using HAARP and chemtrails and so forth).  It's more that we have shown, over and over, that we simply don't know enough to try some kind of brute force approach with this problem, simply because the one real solution -- cutting back on fossil fuels -- is too bitter a pill to swallow.

For cryin' in the sink, if we can't get something as simple as the cane toad right, what makes us think that we can manhandle climate change into submission?