Rebecca Campbell:

I cannot see how the geoengineers and their corporate and military-industrial-complex backers after so many years of telling lies are going to be able to negotiate a future "coming clean". Their way of handling the contradictions of their policies consists in telling one story to one clientele: climate change scepticism for the conservatives, and another story: climate change scare-mongering and, surreptitiously, geoengineering to the other: liberals, leftists, ecologists.


The historian and anti-nuclear activist E.P. Thompson, one of the leaders of the non-aligned European anti-nuclear movement of the nineteen eighties, promoted a satirical quasi-Marxist notion he called "exterminism", which he saw as a phenomenon underlying the nuclear arms race of the "two superpowers", the USA and the Soviet Union. He saw the Cold War as structured around an "inertial deadlock", whose objective by-product was the nuclear arms race.

I would like to argue that this same inertial deadlock has been reproduced in today’s climate controversy. The protagonists today are not the competing nuclear superpowers of the USSR and the USA but the climate activists on one hand and the climate skeptics on the other. And both sides of that controversy have their supporters, and even to some extent their origins, in the nuclear weapons laboratories of America’s side (the winning side) of the Cold War.


I see many similarities between the stance of the old-style supporters of “defensive” Soviet nuclear weapons possession and present-day climate change activists who are still unaware of the role of geoengineering in the climate change debate. They have been co-opted into defending one side of a scenario of “inertial deadlock”. When the other side, the more aggressive “sceptic” side, gains the upper hand, as occurred with the “Climategate” scandal in the runup to the December 2009 Copenhagen climate summit , they are thrown onto the defensive, and remain locked into the defensive mode. They are becoming increasingly aware that they are “not winning”.


they remain participants in the bipolar debate of mainstream politics whose aim is – precisely – to reproduce the inertial deadlock.

Rebecca Campbell’s paper on “Solar Radiation Management”, submitted to the Royal Society, is an excellent starting point for debate and a powerful exposure of the most obvious kind of deceit involved in the “dialogue” with the public that the Royal Society is now trying to initiate.[/i]