Great column in NYT today about geoengineering. I’ve heard of carbon capture before, but not the other idea they introduce – solar radiation management. And more importantly, I never thought about the problem in the terms he raises. Basically, the idea of treating excess CO2 as an unavoidable by-product of human activity and finding a way to treat it to restore it the planet to a more stable condition. Many global warming advocates want human activity to slow or change so that there is no excess carbon problem to fix. They object philosophically to humans affecting the planet to such a degree that it requires remediation measures on such a scale as geoengineering would required. Which made me think of poop…If we applied this sort of ‘no treatment’ logic to human pee and poop, we would be buried under mountains of effluent that would have destroyed the planet. Are people proposing that we pee and poop less? Or that we are no longer going to treat human waste because it is philosophically objectionable? Quite often on the beach here, we get piles of brownish sea foam. More so than I’ve generally seen on other beaches. You especially see this on days when it is stormy or windy and the sea is churning. I’ve always wondered what caused it and today, I randomly happened upon the answer: it comes from organic matter that is floating in the sea. When the sea gets particularly churned up, the organic matter forms the foam. This makes sense since I know the water here is chock full of organic matter that is washing out of the inland rivers and marshes. Even on a good day, the water here is very cloudly and you can always see bits of stuff floating in the water.