3

We Really Shouldn't Have To Explain Why "Dimming The Sun" Is Not A Practical Proposal

Hey, remember that scene in every disaster movie in which the lead scientist announces that the world is on the brink of destruction, and then everyone goes on coffee break for the next few hours? No? Well, that's pretty much the situation we're in right now with global warming. We've tried nothing, we're all out of ideas, and there's nothing left for us to do except take up scuba diving.

But wait! Didn't some scientists recently suggest that we could stop global warming by dimming the sun? That sounds ... extremely stupid, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt! The heating system in our home has a thermostat, which means (according to the laws of transitive property) that our home planet must have a thermostat too. Why didn't we think of this sooner?

Possibly because it is stupid baby logic that has no basis in reality.

CNN

indy100If that doesn't work, the next step is to set the sun to black light mode. That won't solve anything, but at least climate change will look rad as fuck.

These headlines were in response to a paper by Wake Smith and Gernot Wagner in Environmental Research Letters, which examined the capabilities and costs of solar geoengineering -- basically, the idea that dumping a shitload of particles into the upper atmosphere would deflect enough sunlight to stave off Armageddon for a little bit longer. It's a concept that scientists have been kicking around since the 1970s, so Smith and Wagner weren't exactly off their meds by covering it.

If they'd read the paper, however, the media might have seen that while solar geoengineering is theoretically possible, implementing any such plan would require us to disperse those particles 4,000 times a year ... using an aircraft which, as of writing, doesn't exist ... for a total cost of $2.25 billion a year ... over the next 15 years. It's theoretically possible, yes, but so is our revolutionary theory that we could stop global warming by plugging every smokestack in the world with a comedically large banana.

Related: The 6 Most Obvious Lies People Got Famous Telling The Media

2

There Were No Sonic Attacks On The Cuban Embassy

In 2016, American embassy personnel in Havana began suffering a variety of "concussion-like" neurological conditions, possibly because they'd been attacked by sonic weaponry.

The New York Times

Gizmodo

NBC News"We've seen no indication that it gave the diplomats sonic superpowers yet, but we're still hopeful," reports the State Department.

1

The GOP Didn't Block The CDC From Using Certain Words In Its Reports

In 2017, The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had outright banned the CDC from using several words in any official reports: "diversity," "entitlement," "evidence-based," "fetus," "science-based," "transgender," and "vulnerable." Media outlets like CNN and The Guardian swung into action and called out the government -- not just for attempting to stifle discussions about these topics, but also for trying to erase the topics entirely.

The Guardian

CNNAdmittedly, an imperiled, nonconforming protohuman does sound cooler.

As Vox pointed out, though, this wasn't a blanket ban on using those terms. The "ban" only extended as far as documents relating to the agency's then-upcoming budget request. That's because the agency's budget (and sadly, the whole country) is currently in the thrall of a bunch of angry old folks who rage-urinate every time they see blue.

The sad fact of the matter is that the CDC wasn't forbidden from using those words by the Trump administration, but self-censoring those terms because Republicans would rather defund an entire federal agency than look at the word "fetus." And they weren't doing it to screw anyone who deviated from the Bible Belt Default Character Selection Tool, but to continue helping marginalized groups despite being currently governed by people who make their political decisions based on bumper stickers.

Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook, and has a newsletter dedicated to depressing history facts. It's not as heartbreakingly sad as it sounds, promise!

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