The planet is straining under
the effects of climate change. Many researchers believe
we have to intervene to prevent the worst
from happening. To many people it might
sound a bit like playing god. Manipulating oceans,
seeding clouds, creating a sun-shade for
the Earth out of sulfur. These are just
some of the ideas. You can’t tackle something of this
scale, this scope, moving this fast? with just
science. Modifying our
climate: is it hubris? In Iceland, researchers have already
turned greenhouse gases into stone. You can see sort
of white spots. That’s the CO2, we inject
it into the pilot reservoir. That’s the solution
to our climate change? Definitely in
my opinion, this should be one of the
solutions we apply in large scale. Scientists want to interfere
with the earth’s processes. Can geo-engineering
save us? Not just by getting harmful
CO2 out of the atmosphere, but also by
cooling our planet? We’re on our way to meet some
researchers pursuing radical ideas. I’m worried, that climate change has
become a kind of political abstraction and people have lost track of a drive
to protect the environment they love. David Keith of
Harvard University is one of the most controversial
climate researchers. He believes it's high time
we had an emergency plan. His idea is to create a sort
of screen using dust particles, which would reflect
the sun’s rays, weakening or even
halting global warming. But the first big pilot project,
named “Scopex”, keeps being postponed. There’s still too
much opposition. It might, in combination
with overall emission cuts, reduce the overall climate
risk, maybe substantially, that’s the evidence we
have from climate models. So the
question is: to what extent could solar
engineering reduce climate risks that actually harm people
and the environment, like extreme storms,
extreme temperatures, sea levels rise, those are the research questions,
that we don’t know the answer to. So-called “Solar radiation
management” is a gamble. Little research has
been done on the risks. And yet it could
be a last lifeline when it comes to
curbing global warming. In practice it would mean
at least 10,000 aircraft injecting the stratosphere
every two years. The planes would release Sulphur
particles as evenly as possible, at altitudes of
more than 10km. These particles would reflect 1%
or 2% of the incoming sunlight. The fact that dust in the
stratosphere cools the planet has been shown by powerful
volcanic eruptions, such as Pinatubo in the
Philippines, in 1991. At that time, the global
temperature dropped by 0.4°C. How much do you have
to put in there? Well, it depends how much
solar geoengineering we want. There is no right
answer to that. The quantity we measure in something
like a million tons a year. Is that
a lot? It’s a lot and
not a lot. We’re putting billions of tons
a year of CO2 in the atmosphere. So one of the ways to think about
it: there is a 1,000,000:1 ratio between the amount of warming
power of CO2 in the atmosphere and the amount of cooling
power of sulphuric acid or some other material
in the stratosphere. So a million tons is not
technologically a lot, it's a real direct perturbation to
the environment and doesn’t cost much. Doesn’t that
tell us also that the stratosphere is a
place you shouldn’t interfere, because it is
so sensitive? You’re speaking as if the
alternative is non-interference, but the CO2 is already
in the atmosphere. Even if we cut emissions
to zero tomorrow, which is basically impossible, even if we cut emissions very
quickly, which we could do, that doesn’t make the
climate problem go away. And humanity is a long
way from zero emissions. Once we started pouring
sulphur into the stratosphere, the "sunshade" would have
to be replaced regularly. Otherwise,
temperatures could rise to levels even higher than they would
be without the manipulation. The technology
has its sceptics. My biggest fear is, climate
change will advance to the point, where this planet can no
longer sustain human life. Climate activist Dru Jay fears
that solar geo-engineering will change weather and precipitation
patterns, damage the ozone layer, and produce
more acid rain. Some studies
show such risks. For Dru, geo-engineering is
worse than climate change itself, and even researching the
methods is dangerous. Governments are watching closely, oil
companies are watching this closely, the military is
watching this closely, so there's a political
experiment happening that says you know what, if we could go this
route and you’re opening up a pathway and the further you
go down that pathway and the more you
make it seem real so the experiment is research
but is also political theater. You will never stop
people from thinking and from searching for
ideas and solutions so the idea is already in the
world you can't stop that. You can't stop the idea of
engineering from existing but what you can stop is it in
being considered a good idea. Many people including me have talked about how
unequal solar engineering is, how it would help one place and hurt
another, but in climate models when we put an even amount
of solar geoengineering in, it seems like really every
major region in the world has their climate
risk reduced. Experimentation with this leads
to a planetary wide experiment. You have one planet and you're risking
the whole planet for that experiment. For sure,
solar geoengineering has risks, but not doing solar
geoengineering also has risks. While we’re increasingly aware
of the effects of climate change, we can’t accurately predict the
consequences of geo-engineering. We’re on our way to visit
an environmental activist who’s committed to strengthening
nature’s own self-healing capacity. Do you know what
my biggest fear is? The history of the collapse of
civilization is really repetitive and we’re seeing
the tail end of one of the most expansive
civilizations in human history. In remote South America,
Kris Tompkins and her husband Doug have given vast areas
of land back to nature. Together with the governments
of Chile and Argentina, they created 13
national parks. An area the size
of Switzerland. The first was
Patagonia Park. Since the death of her husband,
Kris Tompkins lives here alone. She’s told us to come into the house,
and to please take our shoes off. Hello. Hello
Kristin! Welcome! Nice Place at the
end of the world! Kristine Tompkins was head of the
outdoor clothing company Patagonia. Her husband had founded the
brands Esprit and Northface. In the 1990s,
they left the business world and went on to invest around $350
million in nature conservation. I don’t believe that technology
is some sort of technofix, that will fix all the technology
that got us here in the first place. Look, if I thought that
was even remotely possible, in the short term I’d say
great, and then I really do say, why are you showing up so late,
the party started a long time ago. Is there a way
to turn it back? There are no Messiahs
when it comes to this. You can’t tackle something
of this scale, this scope, moving this fast
with just science. Edward Wilson said we should give
half the earth back to nature. In the size and the scale you do it: can that make an
ecological difference? You can enter these places and you
understand what is, was, could be and that's an enormous,
enormous contribution. I have begun to see the value in
things or measure the value of things more by their
absence. Kris Tompkins laments the destruction
and inequality in the world. In her mind, entire regions
should be protected from humans, and especially from the clutches
of the globalized economy. Can that save us from
climate catastrophe? Probably not, but maybe
there’s more to it than that. It’s about spaces where
natural systems can regenerate, where we can save the things that
represent life on this planet. We believe that all life
has intrinsic value. The nonhuman world is struggling and
much of the human world is struggling. We see the health of all life on the
planet going in the wrong direction and have done for the
last 30 years let’s say. They call this age the
age of the Anthropocene. And I’m not
interested in that. I don’t believe that gets us
where we want to go as humans, and for the nonhuman world in the
long term, not even in the short term. What does that mean for our
approach to fighting climate change? Is it better to leave things alone, or
to intervene and try to limit warming, to give plants and animals in their
present climatic zones a chance? In Davos, a meteorologist is investigating
another way of cooling the earth. One of my biggest fears
about climate change is that water supplies will
become even more unequal. More droughts,
more floods. And especially in
terms of more droughts, that there’ll be more climate-refugees
and wars fought because of climate. Ulrike Lohmann thinks it’s possible
to manipulate cloud formation in such a way that
global temperatures fall. The likeliest candidates
seem to be cirrus clouds. Cirrus clouds have
a greenhouse effect: they hold more heat-radiation
in the earth’s atmosphere than they reflect
sunlight. It’s the only type of cloud that
we know has a warming effect. Cirrus are thin
streaks of ice-cloud that form many kilometers
above the Earth’s surface. Theoretically,
if you got rid of all cirrus clouds, you’d cancel out the
doubling in CO2 levels. Clouds have a big influence
on climate and temperature. The lower ones cool the Earth.
They should definitely stay. But cirrus clouds
have a warming effect. They form when ice nuclei
are present in the air, like when an airplane’s
turbines condense water vapor. Cirrus clouds form naturally in
cold, humid conditions. Although they do reflect some
sunlight back into space, they only allow some of the thermal
radiation from the Earth to escape. So on balance
they heat us up. To cool the planet, cirrus clouds
would be prevented from forming. Likely parts of the
atmosphere could be seeded, with desert dust,
for example. The ice nuclei would grow
faster, become larger and fall to
Earth as hail. The radiation
balance would change, and the temperature
would drop a little. The advantage of
Sahara dust would be that we know that wouldn’t do too
much to the ecosystem. It would have
no side effects. But when it comes to testing this
method out, a small-scale test would get lost amid the noise of
natural variability of the clouds. You would really have to do
something on a very large scale to see if
it worked. I’m not sure that would
be possible politically, because who would
make the decisions? Which bodies
would decide? Which individual country
would do something like this? And in any case,
who would benefit from it? In order to answer
that question, Ulrike Lohmann wants to learn a
lot more about cloud formation. This measuring device,
attached to a balloon, uses a laser to examine
individual cloud particles. It’s not clear that thinning out
cirrus clouds in Central Europe would have an
overall benefit. And, if the seeding
was done incorrectly, it might cause even
more cirrus to form. But perhaps this method
of halting warming would be effective
in the far north. It would definitely make sense
to seed arctic cirrus clouds, especially in
the winter. Because we have no sunlight
during the winter months. So it would really just be
cancelling out their warming effects. And yes: we want to preserve
the Arctic sea ice, of course. But there are economic interests
in the Arctic being navigable. So who wins out? Manipulating the warming
cirrus clouds is still theory, but making thunderclouds rain down
in order to prevent damage from hail has long been
practice in Germany. So-called “hail fliers”
like Holger Miconi show that weather isn’t
just a question of fate. So what’s in
there, Holger? You’ve got the liquid, an acetone
solution with 3% silver iodide. You’ve got a pump and a
valve, controlled from inside. Behind is a
combustion chamber. And there's an atomizer nozzle
where the mixture ignites. These days people across the
world manipulate the weather. China has a huge government agency
that sends rockets into the clouds. How and whether the silver iodide
works hasn’t been conclusively proven. It probably creates
smaller ice crystals, which become rain
more quickly. Since large-scale hail damage in the
area around Donaueschingen in 2006, there have been no more
instances in the region. Because of
turbulence the plane gets pulled upwards
and also pushed downwards. That can cause
stalling. You have to make sure the
structure doesn’t get overloaded, that the clouds don’t
pull you into areas where you aren’t
in control anymore. Holger Miconi flies where
other pilots wouldn’t. He tries to spread the
silver iodide into updrafts. That way, it can rise and get
distributed into the cloud from above. In one sense, climate is nothing
but the sum of weather events. To change the
climate, weather has to be manipulated on
a large scale, and permanently. “Hail flyers” only aim to
influence weather on a local level. What we’re doing isn’t exactly
geo-engineering. It’s more like
protection. We’re trying to change the material
state from solid to liquid. In that sense the impact on the
atmosphere is relatively small. But in
general, I don’t think it’s a good idea to
interfere with the weather globally. Why not? You’re letting a genie out of the
bottle and it could have its revenge if things change to the point where
people can’t control it anymore. I don’t think anyone
wants to experience that. People will probably be prepared
to take bigger and bigger risks as the effects of
climate change worsen. Glaciers are melting everywhere, like
the Aletsch here in the Swiss Alps. The mountains
are crumbling. When I think of the
climate and global warming, I also think of all
these steep mountains, where rockfalls and
landslides can happen. I worry about the
people who live there. Switzerland is one of
the European countries most affected by
climate change. Rendez-vous
on a glacier! Yes! Hugo Raetzo has been observing
the Aletsch for a long time. Over the last 6-8 years, the glacier
melt has again accelerated enormously. The glacier’s terminus has
receded 3km since 1870. Now it loses an average of 50m or
60m of length a year. Sometimes 100m. So how many years until
it’s completely gone? Based on models, I think in 80 years
it’ll be a long way up, really tiny. Doesn’t it make
your heart bleed? It hurts to think of a glacier
like this, huge and very beautiful, and picture
it being gone. The melting glacier isn’t
just an aesthetic problem. The mountain we’re on, the
Moosfluh, has started to move. An incredible 150,000,000 m²
of rock has begun to slide. Since 2012 it’s happening
faster and faster. Cracks are forming,
dozens of meters deep. The entire mountain could
come down on the glacier. Before humans began warming the world,
the Aletsch was about 400m thicker. 400 meters of ice gives
about 30 bars of pressure. So that 30-bar pushed
against the mountain. Because that pressure’s now
gone, as the glacier’s melted, the mountain is sliding down
to the glacier’s terminus. It’s just
sliding away. Unimaginable
forces. It’s almost 2km wide and 1.3km
long and everything is moving. That’s
unbelievably big. Hugo Raetzo listens to the
mountain using geophones. GPS devices measure the displacement,
while satellites observe with radar. Even if the great
catastrophe can’t be stopped, the Swiss want to be prepared
when the mountain collapses. They spend CHF 250 million a year
on securing their mountains. For us as specialists what’s
happening is extremely striking, because you
rarely see it. It’s unbelievable that new
fractures are occurring not only in
existing weak areas, but also right across the
“gneiss”, the hard stone. Nature is telling
us something. Saying, Don’t turn the
heat up any more! Right? Right, like we’re being shown how
it’ll be if we keep on like this, yes. Getting the genie back into
the bottle is no easy thing. In Peru, researchers are
asking how the oceans might help us avert a
climate catastrophe. The ocean is such a fascinating
and beautiful habitat. I worry that my grandchildren won’t be
able to experience it in its beauty, in all its
richness. For marine researcher
Ulf Riebesell, the plan isn’t to cool
Earth by reducing sunlight, but to mitigate the
greenhouse effect itself. He wants to influence
the oceans in such a way that they absorb greenhouse
gases from the atmosphere and so reduce the very thing
that causes temperatures to rise. I'm excited
about the idea. To many people it might sound a bit
like playing god, but after all, we change so
much on land. We’re wildly active
and don't think twice about land-clearing here or creating
another man-made ecosystem there. But when it
comes to the sea, we find it hard to say why we
shouldn’t make sensible changes. The oceans are already a
gigantic CO2 reservoir, 50x larger than
the atmosphere. They already absorb 1/4
of our greenhouse gases. Is that the limit of
the oceans’ potential? Or is it possible to make
them do a little more? Ulf Riebesell heads an
international research group of 60 scientists
and technicians. They want to understand how
climate change is affecting the special current
system off Peru. The best thing
we can do now is to really tap these options
and not wait any longer. Because in 10 years, we're going
to have to start employing them. In 10 years we’ll have to begin
climate engineering measures, these so-called negative
emission technologies, somehow getting CO2 from the
atmosphere and storing it elsewhere. Otherwise we’re not going to achieve
the climate targets set in Paris. Ulf Riebesell's idea is to
artificially create a system like the natural one caused by the
Humboldt Current here off Peru, which ensures
rich algae growth. Fish and other marine
animals benefit too. It's an incredibly
productive system here. Nutrient-rich water from
the depths is brought up through what’s
called “upwelling”. That creates a lot of
phytoplankton growth, leading to a very
efficient food chain. Could it be replicated as a kind
of global air conditioning system? To access the deep water, hoses up to 100m long would
be lowered into the sea. The cold, nutrient-rich water
would be pumped upwards. Floating wind turbines could
provide the required energy. When it reached the surface,
the deep water would cool the air, but above all it would fertilise
the upper layer of water. Plankton would begin to grow,
absorbing CO2 from the air. And when it died, it would take the greenhouse
gas with it into the depths. There’s already a lot of upwelling
here. But the question is, could we do it in regions that
are completely unproductive today? We call them
“oceanic deserts”. They're not dry, but they're
nutrient-poor, so nothing grows. They make up a good 50% of the
oceans, these so-called deserts. The idea we’re looking into is this: if you artificially
create upwelling there, you could absorb more CO2, and you
could also boost the fishing yield. There would have to be thousands
of these systems in the oceans to make a real
difference. In Lima’s military port, Ulf Riebesell
shows us his experimental setups. The aim of his research is to better
understand marine food chains. He calls the floating
racks "mesocosms". This is what artificial systems for
upwelling deep water would look like. Technically speaking,
it’s possible. The question is whether
we want to do it. But the potential of
the oceans is huge. The supply of nutrients in the ocean
depths is virtually inexhaustible. Ulf Riebesell hopes that a
significant portion of human-made greenhouse gases could be
absorbed into the oceans in this way. His experiments have already
yielded an important finding: In order to absorb more CO2
than is transported upwards from the
deep water, the pumps in the hose systems should
be repeatedly switched on and off. This technique would
achieve a fourfold increase in the CO2 uptake of the
oceans in these areas. As a positive side effect, fish
populations would also be stimulated. But nothing stays on
the sea-bed forever. It would be a case of buying
time - time we desperately need. So far, governments haven’t engaged
with the topic of geo-engineering. There are important
questions to be answered. Like, who would decide what
measures to pursue? Who would pay? Is the UN the
right institution? What I’m worried about
is that my granddaughter, who is just 2 months old, she will
live to the end of the century and I don’t want her to live in a
world where somebody else decides to spray into the stratosphere to
cool the planet without asking her. Janos Pasztor lives
on Lake Geneva. He was the right-hand-man to UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon. Now he heads a
non-governmental initiative fighting to increase the political
awareness of geo-engineering. The scientific technical
engineering issues related to these new technologies
are sometimes quite challenging. The governance issues are
even more challenging. This is part of the culture
of managing climate risks that we have
to think about. We need all
options probably and we need more and we need them
sooner because we are in trouble. If individual nations manipulated
solar radiation on their own, Janos Pasztor fears it could unbalance
the climate in other countries. What is a plausible
scenario is that a country that is very
badly affected by climate change, for example a group of
small island countries, they’ll fix it, they decide to do it
and solar radiation modification is, at least the direct
costs scientists tell us, is not that expensive so a
medium-size country could do it. A wealthy individual could
do it: save the world. It could be done by
a major nation today. Which brings in
problems right? Of course but that's true
of all sorts of things. So there are lots of
things in this world to be done unilaterally
that aren’t done. Is David Keith going to look
people in the eye and say, the US government will
do this unilaterally but it will be fair
to the whole world. I don't think that's
a realistic scenario. Being able to take
advantage of the weather is something that of course gives a
nation an advantage if they can do it. I think it’s already
being done today, because the moment you seed
clouds to make it rain, then water that might have been bound
for a neighboring country is gone. You’ll have a
company that can go in the same way that arms dealers
go around the world and say, well if you want or if you want to be
safe, you know, buy our technology. Such unilateral
efforts could jeopardize the climate
of a neighboring country. Although the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change has warned of
the risks, it doesn’t rule out
geo-engineering as a last resort. Something the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change says must happen in order to prevent global
temperatures from rising, century after century: all CO2 that humanity has
released into the atmosphere by burning
fossil fuels has to be
removed. We’ve come to Iceland
to find out how. In Iceland's largest
geothermal power plant, it’s already being
achieved on a small scale: What I’m most afraid of,
when it comes to climate change, is that we will have a large
global refugee problem, that will turn nations
against each other. This is where Swiss firm
“Climeworks” tests its technology. It’s like it's like a vacuum.
We suck it in here. The CO2 sticks to the surface
of a specific chemical, that’s in this unit there and then we
get the CO2-free air out on this side. So it all comes
out through here and it lowers it from
400 parts per million? To less than 100
hundred, yeah. The concentration of CO2 is very
little in the air, but still too high. Yeah, it’s very little,
which makes direct air capture a bigger technological challenge than
capturing CO2 from point sources. CO2 filters all work
in a similar way. There’s nothing new about
Climeworks’ technology. The chemical processes
are based on amines, derivatives of ammonia
that can bind with CO2. When the amine mats are
full, they’re heated, then they release the
CO2 for final storage. The process is repeated
thousands of times. But the method - called carbon
capture - is very energy-intensive. Each ton of CO2 filtered from the
air requires 2,500KWh of energy. A huge
amount. So it only makes sense in places
with lots of excess renewable energy or waste
heat. Like here in Iceland with its
infinite geothermal energy. Can you imagine an earth with hundreds
of thousands of these machines to clear up
the atmosphere? Yeah,
I can. I can imagine such a world where
we strategically locate those units where we have the favorable
geological conditions for CCS. It has to make
sense of course. But I mean, we have to think
big, and we have to act big, if we are to be successful
in mitigating climate change. That won’t
be cheap. Each ton of CO2 filtered by
Climeworks costs about ?500. And what then?
Where do we put it? The researchers
in Iceland have found a spectacular answer
with the “Carbfix” experiment. The first step is to dissolve
the CO2 in warm water, like soda. So we inject down
to 1km-2km depth and on top of that sits
800m of groundwater, meaning that we have
very high pressure, much higher pressure that in here
needed to keep everything dissolved. So more or less there is a lid on top
of it, so it can’t escape any more. And then we have the very exciting
chemistry happening as well because very quickly the CO2
interacts with the basalts so in less than two years it's
turned into a new type of rock and once it's rock it's just
rock, it’s not going anywhere. Basalt contains lots of
calcium, magnesium and iron. These minerals react
with the greenhouse gas. The theoretical storage
capacity of basalts on earth are a minimum of magnitude larger
than the CO2 that we would emit if we would burn all the
fossil fuel available on earth. Which we hope
will never happen. So far, just 12,000 tons of
CO2 per year are buried here. To make a difference, the number
would have to be in the billions. Concern for the state of the Earth
is what’s driving scientists, and conservationists
like Kris Tompkins. But her approach to preserving
the beauty of nature could hardly be
more different. She wants swathes of nature to
be restored as much as possible to the way they were
before human intervention. When we bought
this ranch, all of the guanacos were
forced into the high-grounds, because this was all used
for grazing livestock. This was a big fight between
ranchers and conservationists. It still is
in Argentina. Ranchers see Guanacos as competitors
and they want to get rid of them. Everywhere
around the world there is this inherent conflict
between conservation and development. It happens almost
everywhere really. The Patagonia Park shows what
challenges have to be overcome to turn back the clock and
save what can still be saved. 600km of fences had to be
removed, 30,000 sheep sold, roads dismantled
and trees planted. It took more than 10 years
just for the grasses to return. Bringing back native animals
has proven to be difficult. There’s now been success with
the endangered Andean deer. Pumas are also back. Other species
have to be bred back into the area. Here on the Argentinian
border of the park, birds native only to South
America are being raised: Nandus. They had completely
disappeared from this area. The creatures are flightless
- their feathers are there only to warm them through
the chilly Patagonian winter. 60 Nandus have already been
released into the wild. The plan is for a
population of 100. It requires huge effort to
retrieve what was once lost. The impacts of
climate change, loss of top predators and how that is
a cascading effect over all habitat, and how it effects human wellbeing
as well. All those things. It’s not something that’s
going to happen in the future. It’s happening now. A lot of
people don’t believe that’s true. But them not believing it
doesn’t make it any less true. Are we going
to survive, if you look at that process we’ve
been doing to the earth, the damage? I don’t think
that’s the question. I think that’s a very
anthropocentric question: Are we going to survive?
I don’t think all of us will. Why is that, why are we doing this.
That’s the question. And all the answers,
at the moment anyway, lead me to think we are
willing to risk everything, so that we can have our second
refrigerator, or I don’t know. That’s why people, young people
and old people, are in the streets, because “How dare you?” as Greta
says, from time to time. And Kris Tompkins
herself is no exception. If the younger
generation isn’t to end up being forced
into using geo-engineering, then climate-protection efforts
must increase dramatically. And yet the very prospect
of technical solutions could stymie efforts
to curb CO2 emissions. It’s a certainty that some people who
want to fight against emissions cuts like big oil or fossil-rich nations,
may exploit the work we’re doing, exaggerating how
well this works falsely, with lies that claim that we
don’t need to cut emissions. Of course that’s complete nonsense.
We need to cut emissions. But I think the fact that people
will exploit this a little bit, is a reason that we should
“Hear no evil, see no evil” and try and pretend
there is nothing here. I haven’t given up hope that
we’ll turn things around in time. And if
we do, I think it would be responsible to
do some geoengineering for a time. Just to flatten this peak
of warming a little bit. I’d say temporary solar
radiation management, because removing CO2
from the atmosphere will have to be done
over a long time. All the CO2 we’ve emitted has to
be taken out of the atmosphere. The term geoengineering
is a misnomer. We’ll never understand it in terms
of going in there like engineers. We have to feel our
way and learn as we go, and we’ll have to be
able to stop at any time without it coming
back to bite us. That’s a basic
requirement. I’ll only consider such
measures if we know for sure we can stop without
negative consequences. The science is
unambiguous: existing measures aren’t enough
to keep the climate stable. So it’s probably
only a matter of time until radical geoengineering
comes into play. How we act in the
next few years it’s really sort off a tipping
point on how things might turn out. If we are ready to drastically change
the way we live and reduce emissions, put a lot of effort and money into
the solutions that are available but we need to apply
them at a huge scale. If we do that we
will be successful. To destroy beauty to destroy
wholeness will come around to haunt us which is of course
what is happening. Whether its
climate change, the breakdown of social
structures and so on. So I think there is a wholeness,
a goodness, that rests in all of us. And if we are
paying attention we should start swaying
back the other direction.
Ex CIA director Brennan briefly glossing over it
"Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine?
We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.
The Machine develops — but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds — but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die."
The Machine Stops: 1909 E. M. Forster
I would like to share an interesting documentary from DW about geoengineering approach to mitigate warming effect of the climate change.