Intellectual Ventures – a group of scientists who are coming up with viable scientific ideas that can help quell the effects of arctic ice loss due to global warming but imitation of volcanic spewing of sulphur dixoide into the stratosphere at about 60 degrees north, should cool the atmosphere.

Scientists love to isolate a problem and think outside the box.

Polluting in a controlled way introduces new chemistry into the delicate balance. It is like smoking menthol cigarettes, you are adding to the cause but suffer the effects less as the menthol sooths your lungs. In this case it reduces the length of the teeth as we ask the atmosphere to bite us.

It means that industry now has an excuse to pollute the air even more, adding to the real problem which is not arctic ice melt so much as destruction of the atmophere’s chemical composition. Is that really such a good idea?

The Intellectual Ventures invention that maintains the ice caps, saves both the polar bear and New York City.

The Green movement seek a reduction in emissions which is also helpful.

By addressing the symptoms of the problem, we will never really solve it. By allowing for greater industrial pollution, we open the door to more imbalances. What if the calculations are wrong and an ice age is triggered? How do you test for it?

Intellectual Ventures is a large and impressive group of inventors and I applaud their wonderfully different ideas, their hurricane buffers that also cool the air by encouraging natural processes treat hurricanes as inflammation of the atmosphere and work like a steroid drug may, cooling everything down a couple of notches as the injury makes everything swell. If we invent to allow pollution to continue as a viable possibility then we need also to invent ways of transporting people, warming our homes and powering our consumption industry, deal with nuclear waste and keep the rain forests viable.

Where is the no emissions standard car for the world? Where is free electricity? Can scientists invent with a political imperative: “do no harm”? Or for general good, or do we need a sense of common destruction to do much to quell the grand hunger of our ambition?

A need to view the end of civilization expressed by the film 2012 fulfills the same basic need. We want fireworks, a big bang to go out on, the idea that Armageddon fury may rain down on our generation seems to lie behind the criminal destruction of nature.

A “its going to go, anyway” is pervasive in the subconscious direction of a human race that has doubled in size in the first forty years of my lifetime. The second 3 billion new humans were born in forty years. The first 3 billion living humans took millions of years to achieve. The third 3 billion will be achieved about 35 years later. Although the rate of growth is declining, the effect is still a problem.

All it takes is a different economic model. Japan’s has “suffered deflation” for years. It also has slowed population growth. But it’s economics are stagnant.

We only really need invent an economic model that works for human contraction, instead of growth. Uncontrolled human population growth is doomed as a survival strategy.