Save Earth by blowing holes in the moon? Moon dust as a sunscreen for Earth

By Jo Nova

In the next great environmental cult moment, “The Science” has a plan to explode a 10-billion-kilogram dust cloud off the moon between the Earth and the Sun. Shimmery white moon dust will dim the evil solar rays and “save us from our addiction to fossil fuels” (at least until we run out of Moon). The dust will disperse every couple of weeks, so we just need to keep topping up our global sunscreen by setting the explosives off. At least it probably won’t kill many whales.

The plan involves getting man back on the moon for the first time in fifty years, setting up a moon base, and a permanent mining colony, but (guard your coffee) — it might be cost effective:

Squirting a carefully calculated stream of Moondust from a future lunar station at the right point between the Sun and Earth might be the most cost-effective, risk-free means of keeping our cool until we come to our senses and cut emissions.

PLOS Climate

But not as cost effective as spending 0.000000001% of that to check the science and blow up a few climate models instead.

Because we all enjoyed the Little Ice Age, right?

CNET — Jackson Ryan

Bromley notes the proposal would mimic the scenario that occurred during the Little Ice Age, when Louis XIV reigned over France. You’d need a lot of dust but, provided you could get it into space, it would essentially work to reduce solar radiation, blocking around 1% to 2% of the light.

What luck, God made the moon out of just the right cheese?

“Lunar dust stood out for two reasons,” said Bromley “First, it can be pretty efficient at deflecting sunlight, and second, it turns out that the most efficient grain size is the most plentiful on the moon’s surface.” This, he notes, was a fun surprise and something they didn’t know going into the project. One of the problems, though, is just how much dust is required. It would be cost prohibitive to constantly send rockets full of space dust to a platform out at L1, so the moon provides a second advantage.

Exploding bombs on the moon will either waste a continent worth of money or — if it works — make the Earth less habitable, reduce crops, increase frosts, and shrink coral reefs. But it will apparently “buy us time to mature as a society”. Put yourself in the naughty corner.

People in 100 years are going to find this very funny. Why wait? Laugh now…

Latest Mind-Blowing Suggestion For Cooling The Planet Involves Blasting The Moon

MoonScience Alert  by MIKE MCRAE

With each passing year, the effects of rising global temperatures become even more obvious, while the chances of avoiding greater catastrophes in the future retreat like every melting glacier.

Desperate to avoid worst-case scenarios, researchers have proposed various measures that could, at the very least, buy us the time we might need to mature as a society and work to undo the damage.

Blasting a steady stream of dust from the surface of the Moon is the latest suggestion to get a solid scientific appraisal, with University of Utah computational astrophysicist Ben Bromley and computer scientist Sameer Khan and Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory astrophysicist Scott Kenyon giving the idea a tentative thumbs up.

UPDATE: Think of what a nice bureaucratic model this is. NASA / ESA / NOAA gets more money to do what they want to do anyhow, and they can tweak the program to suit the weather. If the world cools they claim “success”. If the world doesn’t cool, they can point to how essential this program is to stop extreme heat. Give me your money…  Whatever happens to the weather, the climate modelers will tell us how useful the moon dust was and another international bureaucracy is born.

Science communicators have mastered the art of treating adults like 6 year olds. Logic?

The logical thing to do would be to work together to kick our nasty habit of smoking fossil fuels. Shocking as it seems, it could be faster and easier to engage in mammoth-scaled engineering projects that literally reflect a proportion of sunlight before it hits Earth and is converted into a form that’s likely to stick around as heat.

Bromley, Khan, and Kenyon have done the math on the characteristics of a 10-billion-kilogram dust cloud doing much the same job.

The idea itself has been kicked around as a less intrusive version of sulfur being suspended in Earth’s atmosphere. It has benefits over more technical space-borne projects, relying on material that doesn’t require significant manufacture, doesn’t need to be launched from our surface, and doesn’t pollute our planet.

Assessing the shadow cast by different kinds of material, the impact of gravitational forces, radiation pressure from sunlight, and the smack of the solar wind, the researchers calculated the qualities and quantities of small rocky fragments required to filter out just under 2 percent of the Sun’s rays.

They showed the dust cloud would clear relatively quickly, depending on their size. Micron-sized grains would be pushed out of position within a week, requiring fairly regular top-ups. On the plus side, there’d be no need for adjustments to orbits should things go wrong. Just wait a few days for the fog to lift, and it’s business as usual.

REFERENCE (if you can call it that)

Bromley and friends (2023) Dust as a solar shield, PLOS Climate, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000133

Photo by Ponciano

9.8 out of 10 based on 64 ratings

88 comments to Save Earth by blowing holes in the moon? Moon dust as a sunscreen for Earth

  • #
    Ed Zuiderwijk

    As lunacies and lunatics go this is in a class of its own. No wonder the ancients associated the Moon with mental derangement.

    790

    • #
      TdeF

      If any weather event is dangerous it is cooling so that ice builds up into a runaway period of glaciation.

      So what’s the problem again? Where is it hotter by 1.5C in 250 years? And why is that a problem? The ice ages were terrible.

      I have never understood why a few degrees C up makes a difference to anyone, anywhere? Until we had thermometers, we never knew the temperature anyway and we had scales like freezing, cold, fine, warm, very warm. Why should we care any more than that? In most places outside the tropics, the temperature varies by 10C,20C to even 60C in the desert every day. Plus summer and winter.

      Why are we building windmills, shutting working power plants and banning fossil fuels? Quite apart from the fact that there is no fossil fuel CO2 in the air, I fail to see any problem they are solving by starting a new ice age.

      670

      • #
        TdeF

        Sir Isaac Newton’s scale was initially. You could multiply x3 roughly for C.

        0 the heat of air in winter at which water begins to freeze. This point may be accurately determined by pressing the thermometer into melting snow.
        0,1,2 the heats of air in winter
        2,3,4 the heats of air in spring and autumn
        4,5,6 the heat of air in summer
        6 the heat at midday about the month of July
        12 1 the greatest heat which a thermometer takes up when in contact with the human body
        14 1¼ the greatest heat of a bath which one can endure for some time when the hand is dipped in and is kept in constant movement
        17 1½ the greatest heat of a bath which one can endure for some time when the hand is dipped in and is kept still
        20 the heat of a bath in which liquid wax slowly becomes solid and assumes transparency
        24 2 the heat of a bath in which solid wax melts and is conserved in liquid state without boiling
        28 2¼ intermediate point between the boiling point of water and the melting point of wax
        34 the heat at which water boils vehemently (the temperature at which water begins to boil is given as an additional value in the description, as 33)

        According to Newton, you can check for temperature with your elbow. The need for precise temperatures only came with biochemistry and cooking. It hardly matters for most other things. And 98.4F or 36.9C for humans is a very important temperature for some processes, which is why we maintain our temperature so carefully and we have good cooling systems.

        Now some ‘scientists’ want to use all our technology to start an ice age. They must be the new geniuses who think 1C is a big deal.

        310

      • #
        iain nahearadh

        Actually, more than 250 years ago, it was hotter, more than once, compared to this “modern” age.
        For that, we can blame the Pharting Elephants or Horses, or the Vikings, or before them, the Ancient Romans, or something.

        However, at the end of the day, what we are talking about is Florida, USA or South East Queensland Weather.
        One can but wonder how they deal with all that sunshine and those more than (1.5) degree on average, warmer climates.

        Pity those that live in even Warmer climates, like North Queensland, or the Caribbean. How do they survive?
        More to the point, why is it that so many people emigrate en-masse to these locations during the summer months?

        One would think the reverse is true, and the ideal Gaia worshiping destination would be in any country blessed by being north of the Arctic Circle. Could somebody please explain this to me?

        290

        • #
          Bones

          Don’t mention SE QLD,the poor residents have been enduring a massive 38 degree heat wave.Should we declare an emergency?

          110

          • #
            Arbuthnott

            There was a time when we used to call this “summer”. Now, apparently, it’s a heat wave because no one remember what summer was or because all the migrant Poms think anything warmer than soggy Midland weather is unacceptable climate change.

            100

          • #
            Hivemind

            38 isn’t massive. It frequently goes over 40 in the Australian summer. But never let facts get in the way of yet another pointless scare.

            120

    • #
      Leo G

      PLOS has lost the plot over lunar plosives.

      80

    • #
      ivan

      Very true Ed. The thing they have forgotten is how to remove the screen before the earth becomes an ice ball and all humanity is killed off.

      140

      • #
        Sean

        But how can they think that this will work? Surely it’s Revealed Truth™ among the AGC community that variations in the sun’s flux, and therefore the insolation that the Earth receives, have absolutely no effect on the climate, and that it’s all due to the miniscule concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere — at least, judging from the deprecation of any attempt to bring up changes in solar emissions due to the sunspot cycles and the Little Ice Age — so this plan can’t possibly have any effect.

        230

        • #
          Lawrie

          You are correct Sean. For years realists and skeptics have been saying that the sun causes changes by orientation, activity and so on but the models cannot mimic the effects of the sun so it is written out of the equation. Now it seems the sun plays a big part and the Earth should be shaded. One of these conclusions must be wrong so what is it? Ask Al or Michael or even Tim for the proper answer.

          160

      • #
        BrianTheEngineer

        Invent the really big space hoover first just in case!

        00

    • #
      Hivemind

      We only have one planet. It takes a unique kind of crazy to want to mess it up so much it’s virtually uninhabitable.

      Can’t they wait a thousand years or so, for the next glacial period to come on.

      90

  • #
    robert rosicka

    The worst part about this totally loopy plan is that someone in the IPCC will take it seriously and it’s all downhill from there !

    370

    • #
      TdeF

      Can it go downhill? Haven’t we reached maximum loopy yet? Science has nothing to do with Climate Extinction, Climate Crisis, Global Warming, Climate Change. It’s not even a good religion but at least the High Priests are very well paid.

      400

      • #
        robert rosicka

        Please TdeF don’t challenge them to be more loopy !

        100

        • #

          Think of what a nice bureaucratic model this is. NASA / ESA / NOAA gets more money to do what they want to do anyhow, and they can tweak the program to suit the weather. If the world cools they claim “success”. If the world doesn’t cool, they can point to how essential this program is to stop extreme heat. Give me your money…

          210

          • #
            BrianTheEngineer

            If the world cools and the CO2 has gone up that would be hard for them to explain.
            Why hasn’t anyone asked for a predicted target temperature – CO2 concentration that would prove the models are wrong.
            Something they can’t back away from.

            00

      • #
        Annie

        Loopy, like stupid, is infinite.

        150

      • #
        Lawrie

        Nope. Maximum loopy is depriving Australia of much needed income and 800 families of a decent income just to punish one man whom Plibersek does not like. Equally loopy is Albanese’s promise that Australia could feed Asia in the same week he cancelled two irrigation dams.

        240

  • #
    David Maddison

    This idea is sufficiently crazy and anti-scientific that you can expect most Western Governments (including Australia’s) to throw trillions of taxpayer dollars at it.

    All it needs is the nod from Herr Kommandant Klaus Schwab and associated subsidy harvesters, including the Green Billionaires.

    He will then be able to establish his Transhuman 1000 year Fourth Industrial Revolution. And he’ll probably set up a moon base as well.

    340

    • #
      David Maddison

      I’m sure a certain Green Billionaire is looking for more insane projects now his 5,000km extension cord project between Australia and Singapore is defunct.

      340

    • #
      Alexander Menzies

      David, I think you’ll find “Herr Kommandant” rather prefers Herr “Fuhrer” which is more in line with his self-appointed and totalitarian dreams.

      170

    • #
      Hivemind

      Shouldn’t he build a secret volcano base?

      60

  • #

    There isn’t any Climate Crisis, I haven’t noticed anything unusual in my area that would meet the idea heck the climate in my area is the SAME in 1964 as it is now thus this moonbat idea is another waste of $$$, time and resources.

    Better to concentrate on real environmental concerns such as overfishing the oceans, habitat destruction, toxic contamination of the soil and so on.

    241

    • #
      Geoff Sherrington

      Tom,
      Please give an example or two of “toxic contamination of the soil” that has not been fixed already and that is big enough and dangerous enough to represent a threat worth a national mention.
      I thought that we were over that phase of scaremongering, as shown by the lack of human bodies with a post mortem tag on the toe diagnosing “Poisoned”. Geoff S

      240

    • #
      Lawrie

      You haven’t noticed the climate going to hell but the BoM has. It turned a very benign (temperature wise) year into the second hottest EVAR. Jennifer Marohasy is gritty enough to eventually get the temperature records she wants to prove how corrupt that psuedo scientific organisation is.

      240

  • #
    max

    Please hurry up with the revolution

    150

  • #
    David Maddison

    Apart from solar output (the sun is a variable star), the main driver of climate is cloud cover, the formation of which is influenced by cosmic rays from various sources with both long term and short term cycle lengths.

    Here is a presentation on the topic by Australian Dr Robert Holmes

    Well worth watching, plenty of data.

    https://youtu.be/qkcYgEmC8fU

    160

  • #
    Simon Thompson ᵐᵇ ᵇˢ

    Mr Squiggle is shaking in terror, Blackboard is still grump and Miss Jane is patiently lapping up the nonsense.

    151

  • #
    Penguinite

    Fly me to the moon and let me blow among the stars let me know that lunacy is only for idiots in cars. EVs of course!

    241

  • #

    I recall being taught that the moon has a balancing function with respect to the earth, such that it mitigates the potential for massive storms. We were also told that the depiction of the moon in antiquity as being much nearer was because it was nearer, and is very slowly moving away from the earth, such that the weather mitigation function would slowly diminish, and engineers will have to work out how to nudge it back into place.
    Just a bit. Not too much.
    That of course may all be bunk, but it was back in the days when students were taught how to think not what to think. At least it encouraged some to become engineers, such as Benjamin Baker.

    140

  • #

    The 1955 film “Rebel Without a Cause” with James Dean had in German speaking countries the title “Denn sie wissen nicht, was sie tun”, what translated means “For they know not what they do”.
    That’s what comes to my mind reading the BS about moon dust.

    250

  • #
    Graham Richards

    Mr Bromley must consult a dietician, urgently. There are certain foods, medications, drinks,
    not to mention cigarette’s, that cause hallucinations, bad dreams & even involuntary movement.

    What ever he is imbibing will certainly have devastating effects on him & the rest of humanity, particularly if there are more people of influence with a similar dietary imbalances!

    110

  • #
    John B

    Science fiction to me. And, if we had a Tambora like eruption (1815) or worse? Would this plunge us into an ice age worse than the LIA? I did not see this possibility discussed in their paper.

    180

  • #
    ExWarmist

    If you can’t predict the future state of a system, you can’t engineer it.

    200

  • #
    Neville

    AGAIN the question is…. “what is wrong with our climate over the last 50 or 100 or 200 + years”?
    So one billion humans 210 years ago and life expectancy under 40 years.
    Two billion Humans by 1927 and life expectancy UNDER 45 years.
    3.7 billion Humans by 1970 and life expectancy about 56.6 years.
    Today 8 billion Humans and life expectancy 73 years. AGAIN that’s 5.3 billion more Humans since 1970. So what’s their problem?
    AGAIN the 1.4 + billion Africans today have a higher life expectancy than the global average in 1970.
    Just look up the UN data and THINK.
    AGAIN please prove where I’m wrong when I quote their UN DATA and also used by Dr Rosling for his 120,000 data points video on the BBC.

    200

  • #
    TdeF

    Are you sure this isn’t from the WEF?

    Their Malthusian idea is that the earth can only hold 800 million people and so 7.2Billion will have to go. Creating a new ice age should do it.

    In the meantime they are working hard on cancelling the use of fertilizer which should wipe out half the untermenschen. ( a word Klaus Schwab should know well from the Nazi youth)

    270

  • #
    John Michelmore

    But, the dust might reduce the efficiency of the solar panels now that they along with the wind are providing cheap, efficient reliable power! (Sarc)

    210

    • #
      el+gordo

      Theoretically the winds should pick up to compensate.

      61

      • #
        Gob

        Ay yes, the inarguable existence of a conservation law for renewable energy; maybe related to Albo’s electioneering spiel about charging the electric vehicle overnight with our solar panels.

        50

  • #
    Ross

    Trofim Lysenko,was probably the world’s most dangerous scientist. Those dastardly scientists in the Bond movies had nothing on old Tro. His doctrine led to many millions of deaths from malnutrition in Soviet Russia during the 1930’s, due to terrible farm practices. The nutter scientists who want to put aerosols in the air to sunscreen the earth to avoid global warming are in the Lysenko club. The nutters who want to blow up the moon for the same effect would have had the backing of old Joe Stalin. Talk about instant ice age and apocalypse.

    190

  • #
    bobby b

    Should anyone try such an idea at huge scale – this or the earth-bound version of it – they would be placing the entire future of mankind at risk. I would rank this as bad as playing with bio-weapons in an insecure environment.

    I would be amenable to violence as a way to stop this.

    161

    • #
      Leo G

      Notice how people amenable to violence appear to be those most insanely eager to try these “Let’s put the future of mankind at risk” ideas?

      50

    • #
      el+gordo

      No need to get upset over this fantasy, the Royal Society don’t even mention it.

      21

  • #
    Tarquin+Wombat-Carruthers

    Silly me! I thought April 1st was almost seven weeks away. Clearly, the fools from the other 364-and-a-quarter days are desperate to make up for lost opportunities. Give each of this trio a pic, a shovel and a bucket, and send them to the Sahara, Kalahari, Gobi or other Earth desert, to bring back samples of the appropriate size to support their “science”!

    110

  • #
    Honk R Smith

    I get confused about which is the good anthropogenic and which is the bad anthropogenic.

    110

  • #
    David Maddison

    If they did this could we start burning fossil fuels again?

    110

  • #
    STJOHNOFGRAFTON

    Who’da thunk cheese would be good as a sunscreen. What SPF will it have and will it block UVA and UVB?

    120

  • #

    If moon dust should cool the wrong places,
    The elites would have egg on their faces,
    And despised as the curse,
    That made climate worse,
    They flee to their underground bases.

    190

  • #
    John Connor II

    But not as cost effective as spending 0.000000001% of that to check the science and blow up a few climate models instead.

    A heretic! Burn her!
    Promotes the use of explosives. Arrest her as a terrorist!
    Denies proven science. A conspiracy theorist!

    Yes, I am a rabid lefty. How did you know? 🤣
    /dry humour

    Seriously though, the lizard people would not allow us to steal their dust. 😁

    80

    • #
      another ian

      Wouldn’t removing dust and rock from the moon be a bigger transgression than removing sand from White Sands National Park?

      40

  • #
    Pauly B

    Can we ask Pfizer for a vaccine against stupid?

    110

  • #
    Greg in NZ

    Shoot the moon! Didn’t NASA fire a rocket into the Moon a few years back – a ‘probe’ of some sort? I remember some great cartoons depicting the ‘attack’, referencing HG Wells sci-fi flicks from the error era.

    The only thing which “become[s] even more obvious”, apart from the lack of any so-called ‘runaway vormink’, is the insane are running the asylum: some things never change.

    80

  • #
    Geoffrey Williams

    PLOS Climate must be a bunch of (moon dust lunis) reading too much scifi from Arthur C Clarke . .

    40

    • #
      bobby b

      Read Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock. Basically the same thing but on Earth.

      40

    • #
      czechlist

      I recently saw a Dick Cavett re-run from the early 70s. Clarke was a guest. He commented that the Brits could not watch US TV programming because the UK line frequency was 50 Hz.

      00

  • #
    barkerjim

    Besides being a crazy idea, wouldn’t all that dust just get pulled back to the earth by gravity? Other than whatever escaped into the solar wind. A fine mess.

    40

    • #

      I gather the solar wind and whatnot would disperse that moon bits towards the Great Black Abyss of Space, and the bad thing was that they had to keep reapplying sunscreen, but the good thing was that if they screwed up, the screw-up would clean itself up.

      The other good thing is that this is a temporary solution that threatens no actual bureaucrats which a permanent solution might.

      100

  • #
    winston

    Not that long ago I read a pretty bad (but hightly rated) science fiction story, by a popular author, that centered around the moon blowing up as a cause of runaway global warming.

    As bad as it was, that story was better fiction than these three (Bromely, Kahn, Kenyon) have dreamed up. Three more cases demonstrating the effectiveness of diversity admissions and idealogical hiring.

    40

    • #
      KP

      For Christmas my son bought me Ixion, a computer sim where you are the Head Administrator of the first sub-space interstellar spaceship. You finish the assembly of the ship in Earth orbit, move it to the moon and press the big red button…

      Flash graphics aside, you don’t go to a star, you blow up the moon and you sterilise all life on Earth. Now you have to fix the engines, find a new star and start the human race all over again…

      I didn’t think it was a blueprint though.

      40

  • #
    KP

    ..and didn’t anyone tell these clowns that the moon orbits the earth, so 3/4 of the time their cloud of dust sitting by the moon will not be between us and the sun!

    If the light pressure is strong enough to overcome the local gravity the dust will get pushed out in a vast spiral and left behind the solar system. Anyway, we should get some good sunsets, this plan is right up there with poisoning the oceans using millions of tons of iron to help the plankton, spraying clouds of metal dust into the stratosphere to increase the albedo and other insane schemes to cool the planet.

    100

  • #
    Robber

    Why go to the moon? The ices of Greenland and Antarctica bear the fingerprints of a monster: a gigantic volcanic eruption in 539 or 540 A.D. that killed tens of thousands and helped trigger one of the worst periods of global cooling in the last 2,000 years.
    I’m sure some mad scientists could trigger another massive volcano with a nuclear bomb or two and stop global warming.

    60

  • #
    HB

    Let the moonbats think they can fix the climate with this lunatic idea. They just might give up on the current electrify every thing, ban all fossil fuels and bring in world communism effort.
    A moon base and a few nukes would be cheap compared to the current crap and would give a distraction from the current fear mongering.
    It will be put off until the climate gets too hot which it never will.
    The world communist govt and rip of the public crowd will have to dream up new scam.

    50

  • #
    Hivemind

    Give me your money

    I think you mean “Give me more money”

    60

  • #
    rms

    Lots of integrals in the paper … they must be the smartest scientists in the room and their results must be right.

    20

  • #
    Gerry, England

    It is the 11th of February isn’t it?? I am just checking that I haven’t fallen asleep for weeks on end and it is now the start of April.

    20

  • #
    feral_nerd

    “On the plus side, there’d be no need for adjustments to orbits should things go wrong.” [emphasis added]

    The thing I have noticed about climate worriers is that they generally have a really poor grasp of scale. They seriously fail to get the gargantuan scales of time, space, and mass involved when you consider planetary processes.

    Accordingly, it’s no big deal to transform the entire planet’s climate by blowing a few trillions of pounds of moon dust into interstellar space. Piece of cake. And if we overdo it we won’t even have to re-adjust the orbit of the planet.

    That’s like something a Bond Villain would come up with. Or Klaus Schwab. Same thing.

    50

  • #
    Graeme+P.

    Who would have thought Space 1999 could become reality

    00

  • #

    This must be the most lunatic suggestion ever made by anyone in the history of mankind. Destroying part of the Solar System, based solely on the beliefs of a fringe cult of idiots in the name of ‘Saving the Planet’ deserves a Special Prize all of its own.

    50

  • #
    Bruce

    A “dust screen” in the upper atmosphere?

    These “people are DEATH CULTISTS.

    1883: Krakatau. Impressive, but a tiddler by serious volcano standards.It ejected many cubic Kilometres of very fine dust into the upper atmosphere, in a very short time. it thus provided endless inspiration to English water-colourists on the other side of the planet, for MONTHS.

    Earlier that Century, in 1816, there was the “Year without Summer”, brought about by the eruption of Tambora, also in the Indonesian Archipelago. Fancy sunsets and widespread crop failures, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere. And several Millennia earlier, there was the eruption of Toba, on Sumatra. There are deep beds of ash from that one over near Madagascar.

    Ice Ages are DRY times. Ocean evaporation is significantly reduced; thus, a widespread reduction in rain and snow, GLOBALLY.

    Plants die, animals and people die.

    SERIOUS ice Ages see the OCEANS at the poles freezing and sending large chunks of ice towards the equator. In the south, this results in lots of ice-bergs. However, at the “polar opposite”, there is LOTS of land in the way. So, continental-scale ice sheets emerge from the Polar SEA and go “-country”, scraping the land back to bedrock under a huge moving plate of ice, several Kilometers thick. Pretty harsh on the “flora and fauna”. Sea levels FALL spectacularly.

    Then, there is “continental drift” Australia is invading Southern Asia / India VERY, but measurably, slowly. Consider the “start-point” that gave South-East Queensland the Northern-most Antarctic Beech (Nothofagus) forest on the planet. (There is another bit of this along the West side of South America).

    The planet is a fairly complex bit of machinery and the rantings of politically-driven “Chicken-Little” types serve only to distract people and, in an unsurprising coincidence, separate the punters from their cash, livelihoods and, if the loonies REALLY get going, their very lives.

    DEATH CULTISTS.

    30

  • #
    John Hultquist

    At #30, KP wrote “the moon orbits the earth, so 3/4 of the time

    About 97.97 % of the time, a drawing of Earth & Moon will show a circle of the latter going around the former. However, look at the diagram here:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_phase#/media/File:Moon_phases_en.jpg

    Ignore the dotted red lines. They are there to help explain the “phases” in the lower part.
    Copy and print this image.
    Draw a smooth line through the center of the many moons,
    9 of them.
    That’s Moons’s path.
    Here is a mental strategy:
    Imagine a 3-lane highway with a blue car in the center lane with a White car approaching from behind, but in the left-most of the three lanes. The White car moves to the center lane (catching up) and goes on into the right lane and overtakes the Blue car. White then pulls ahead and goes into the center and then the left lane. It slows a bit and Blue moves ahead, then White drifts back behind Blue. Next, White slides into the right lane, speeds up and pulls ahead of Blue, until crossing in front of and to the left. The White car never makes what appears to be a circle – its path is a smooth continues progression – forward.
    Described mathematically this is nearly a circle, and this is the usual drawing.
    From a position above our solar system, one would not observe a circle.

    Complicating all this is the issue of Lunar nodes – points at which the orbit of the Moon intersects the ecliptic. The ascending (or north) node is where the Moon moves into the northern ecliptic hemisphere, while the descending (or south) node is where the Moon enters the southern ecliptic hemisphere.
    In other words, Mr. Moon is seldom in line with the Earth and the Sun.

    It is way beyond my pay-grade to know what this would do to the shadow of the dust cloud.

    10

  • #
    Phil O'Sophical

    In one of his non-fiction books, Asimov suggested that life on Earth may have developed only because of the moon. It’s tidal pull shaping continents and change, and stirring the primordial soup that chanced to kick-start self-replicating molecules.

    These mad schemes for obscuring sunlight seem to forget that it has been done. Tambora caused the year without summer and global mass famines. But knowing it is the same people suggesting this that wish to depopulate the planet, I believe they see Tambora not as a warning but a template.

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    Gordon

    This plan comes from the Boo Hoo Bible, by Art Kleps, chief boo hoo of the neo-american church! There’s a picture of the rocket aimed at the moon on the cover.
    I forget why they wanted to nuke the moon, but they did a lot of acid and dmt and the like. I think Hunter Thompson wrote about him.
    I guess we have to blow up the moon, to see if it really is green cheese after all.

    10

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    Jeff Id

    That seems kinda stupid.

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    Doonhamer

    Time to start building the B-Ark to carry the dust stormers to the Moon.
    Then tell the Greenies that because of expected high demand for berths places on the Ark will be decided by lottery.
    They will be fighting to get on board.

    00