Tackling global warming by blocking out the sun. UK conservatives flocking to church, appalling the liberal state church. And India is outlawing conversion & jailing missionaries.
Tackling Global Warming by Blocking Out the Sun
Lots of people are very worried about global warming. And despite growth in “clean energy,” international treaties, and rigorous regulations against carbon emissions, the amount of heat-retaining “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere continues to rise.
So some environmentalists are looking for a plan B: “solar geoengineering” that would use technology to artificially lower the planet’s temperature. Various possibilities have been raised, but they have been mostly theoretical, and concerns about unintended consequences on the planet’s weather and food supplies have kept it that way.
But that may have changed, with an Israeli-U.S. startup company called Stardust developing a technology and raising enough money–$75 million–to give it a try. Karl Mathiesen and Corbin Hiar of Politico tell about it in their article The Strange and Totally Real Plan to Blot Out the Sun and Reverse Global Warming.
Here is how they describe Stardust’s plans: “The company had developed a special reflective particle and the technology to release millions of tons of it high into the atmosphere. The intended effect: to dim the light of the sun across the world and throw global warming into reverse.”
Here is how it would work:
Stardust claims to have developed a system that can replicate and maintain the global cooling effects of a volcanic eruption, without all the lava and sulfur. The mechanics would be quite simple. Stardust envisages a fleet of around 100 planes — to begin with — flying into the stratosphere to deliver payloads of their particles, landing to reload, then immediately taking off again to repeat, continuously, every flight a tiny volcanic cough. Researchers, including Visioni, found last year that the most efficient way to achieve a steady, uniform decline in the global temperature would be to spread the particles from the regions just north and south of the tropics. That means launching from at least two places, for example Florida and southern Brazil. The particles would then spread around the globe producing a gradual, uniform decline in the global temperature, before eventually dropping out of the sky after around a year, according to Stardust, and needing to be replaced. The particles would reflect a very small proportion of sunlight back into space, but enough to cool the Earth.
We know this would work because volcanic eruptions have blocked the sun and brought down the Earth’s temperature. The article tells about an eruption in Iceland in 1783 that lasted eight months and sent 122 million metric tons of sulfur into the stratosphere. It dimmed the sun worldwide. Of course, it also threw off the world’s weather. Egypt and China suffered drought and famine. In Europe and America, it caused a brutally cold winter. The Mississippi River froze all the way to New Orleans. The tropical Gulf of Mexico (as it was then called) had ice floes.
Stardust doesn’t seem to be considering those side effects of blotting out the sun.
There are no international laws or regulations that would govern such schemes. Stardust has reportedly hired lobbyists to change that. The company operates in such secrecy and has so many fervent investors that some observers are concerned that Stardust might just try to save the planet by putting out the sun.
UK Conservatives Flocking to Church, Appalling the Liberal State Church
The UK anti-immigration activist Tommy Robinson became a Christian while in prison for his protest activities. So he is urging his legions of supporters to also return to church.
So they are. But the Church of England, which is strongly pro-immigration, doesn’t want them!
BBC News has put out an article by Aleem Maqbool and Catherine Wyatt entitled Tommy Robinson supporters are turning to Christianity, leaving the Church in a dilemma. After profiling one of the new conservative church attenders and describing one of Robinson’s rallies with as many as 150,000 attendees criticizing the influence of radical Islamists in contemporary Britain, the journalists say,
All this has left the Church of England, an institution steeped in national history and culture, but which has undergone decades of declining attendance at its services, grappling with fundamental questions.
How does it challenge what some see as misrepresentations of Christian values, while welcoming potential new churchgoers?
And how does it reconcile engaging those on one side of the debate like Gareth , with continuing its long-standing interfaith work to foster understanding between Christians, Muslims and people of other faiths and support asylum seekers?
Maqbool and Wyatt continue: “This debate has left some prominent Christians feeling deeply uncomfortable. In September, a group of Church of England bishops joined leaders from other Christian denominations to condemn what they called the ‘co-opting of the cross’ at Robinson’s rally as a means of causing division and ‘excluding others.'”
India Is Outlawing Conversion & Jailing Missionaries
India is currently ruled by a Hindu nationalist party, which believes that India must be a distinctly Hindu country.. Ten of India’s 28 states have anti-conversion laws.
For the first time, two Christian missionaries have been charged under the law for evangelizing and baptizing Hindus who have converted to Christianity.
India’s English language newspaper The Hindu reports in a story referring to the state entitled First case registered against Christian missionaries under Rajasthan’s new anti-conversion law. The deck sums it up: “The police have issued notices to the two pastors – Chandy Varghese from New Delhi and Arun John from Kota – while claiming that they promoted conversion and baptised several people during the programme.”
Notice that the two “missionaries” are not foreign evangelists but Indian ministers who are being labeled as missionaries. The evidence was a video of a service in which “Some youths allegedly announced from the stage that they had been baptised and had accepted Jesus Christ as their saviour, while calling upon others to adopt Christianity.”
The law specifically targets those who bring about conversions “through fraud, allurement or coercion.”
Penalties can include life imprisonment, fines, confiscation of property, and demolition of churches.
Interestingly, those who return to their “ancestral religion” are exempt from the law. So Hindus are exempt from attempting to convert Indian Christians from Hindu backgrounds. So are Muslims from attempting to convert Christians from an Islamic background. Christians would presumably be exempt if they converted someone whose family had been Christian.
The law is being challenged in India’s Supreme Court.
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