WHAT DO TUCKER CARLSON, MICHAEL SCHELLENBERGER, AND
CARL SAGAN HAVE IN COMMON?
A good eye for factoids, contempt for fact-checking, and a bad sense of timing.
Former Breakthrough Institute president Michael Schellenberger has become Tucker Carlson's Sciency Guy since his think-tank tanked. But even as he damned Gate's interest in geoengineering as the greatest threat to civilization since Windows 95, an ungoverned volcanic eruption turned the sun dim as his host from Martinique to Barbados and beyond.
Tucker Carlson Tonight seems to have been channeling Carl Sagan's last Nightline gig. As the oil wells of Kuwait went up in black smoke in 1991, Sagan told Ted Koppel the fallout would kill millions in an apocalyptic 'nuclear winter'.
"Like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs?" Koppel asked. "Exactly", Sagan replied. Only one thing went wrong with Sagan's hyperbolic prediction: It didn't happen.
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Carlson may be too clueless to recognize recycled Cold War hype, or realize that the kilogram-scale aerosol SRM experiments that have been proposed are dwarfed by kiloton volcanic dust-ups on weekly basis, but Schellenberger ought to know better: climate communication has problems enough without conspiracy theories, photoshopped catastrophes or prophets of doom who fail to deliver.
Last week's St.Vincent eruption certainly did happen- the volcanic debris kicked into the tropopause adumbrated millions of square kilometers, and 16,000 souls were evacuated from the eruption zone lest hot rocks land on their heads. But as with the Gulf War oil fires, the modest optical depth of the vast and scary downwind plume didn't translate into enough cooling to merit a wire service story -- the Climate Desk can't be everywhere
The ground truth in Barbados is amply grim, but the problem is not the wan sun. It's still mighty warm, and falling ash has clogged every air conditioner on the heavily touristed island- the wind at the elevation of the volcano plume blows opposite to the trade winds, creating a jet stream conveyor belt. The ash falls softly as snow, and as la Soufriere's explosive eruption continues, the bulk of what goes up on St.Vincent comes down on Barbados in a matter of hours: the last eruption on this scale, in 1902, lasted eight months, and killed 1.800.
