Tempest Horribilis

[Wouter van Dieren | Inis Vitrin]

Article

 

July 5, 2025

 

 

Tempest Horribilis

 

 

At several Climate Conferences in recent days, we have heard the same objections against the cooling technologies, which could stop Global Warming.

Repeated in the media, and defined as Controversial.

From New York to New Delhi, from Ghana to Manilla we receive reports about extreme heat, starving people, and call for help. Despair is everywhere.

Not yet formally published is an analysis by Leon Simons, still to be reviewed by Jim Hansen, comparing 5 forecast-data from Berkley, NASA and others, which concludes that we are heading for ≠4˚C by 2084.

If true, then this is the final verdict.

End of life for 3 - 5 billion people.

Call it the Apocalypse, or Tempest Horribilis.

In the razing tempests of these days, several 10,000 miles of low coastal land will be flooded. The ocean acidity increases, which ends the life of all calcium-containing sea-organisms. And with that the food chain.

In the Southern Ocean the increasing salinity catalyses Polar ice melting. The Gulfstream’s speed will slow down. This disturbs the moderate weather conditions of Western Europe that shall turn much colder, not as a solely relief against warming, but as permanent shockwaves, cold and heat oscillating over the seasons. Melting glaciers and melting permafrost, floods and droughts, the winds blowing at 12 Beaufort; this is the Tempest Horribilis.

 

Now, please give this a closer look. The Netherlands are called Nether or Low, because the larger part of the country lies below North Sea level. We must survive by means of our dikes and reclaimed land.

In the late Middle Ages, we suffered several very large storms and collapsing infrastructures. Altogether hundred thousand people drowned. And so did their cattle.

Lessons were not learned well, and the disasters kept returning, the latest in 1916 and 1953, with 1800 casualties.

There were Cassandras, but their warnings got not heard.

By 1970, the greater Delta Repair Plan was concluded, a system of a few hundred dams, dikes and locks, and eventually we restored the biodiversity.

The engineers did a tremendous job. A modern Tempest Horribilis can and has to be stopped again by these engineers. Nature is not only a blessing, but also a danger. Mankind has defended itself against it since the beginning. Much of it to create wealth and simultaneously destruction. But interventions were the rule.

 

We distinguish some 25 different cooling technologies, which will take a century to construct. Not to replace the phasing out of fossil fuel-emissions, but to save us time. We all know that the different time-lapses of Mitigation, Adaptation and Economics are overlapping and mutually competing. We cannot wait until this is all well governed, in particular because the world is in such disorder.

However, climate engineers are not welcome. Their works are positioned as Controversial.

The reproach is that these interventions may cause disturbed rainfall, food losses, so all the essentials of the Tempest Horribilis.

Please take good notice of this absurdity.

 

The Tempest is here NOW. If we invite the engineers to stop it, then their works may cause the Tempest. What? Uh?

 

The word Controversial keeps returning. We should be reminded of the controversial character of the environmental tasks we have deployed since e.g. Earth Day 1970 or Stockholm 1972.

Fierce opposition and attacks against the new enviromena and its proponents were the order of the day. Including a statement at a conference of the American Association of Economists in 1973, that ‘It is not economic to save the Planet’. And financial economists, who claimed that the future economy could well do without any resources, because the financial economy was to become the superior worldwide ordnance. 

A few years later Hazel Henderson called it The Funny Money Game.

 

I shall never forget those incidents when we were called terrorists, full face, or in anonymous phone-calls, threatening also my family.

Telling the story of The Club of Rome - Limits to Growth -, became my lifetime meaningful challenge, but the sacrifices were severe. Controversies and dissidence can be rewarding, there were several awards and prizes, but also numerous dangers on the road.

 

Climate activists should realise that controversies were and are the centrifugal dynamics of change since times immemorial.

The heroes of change walked the Deserts of the Bible, the Marches of Gandhi and Martin Luther King; the Revolt of Petra Kelly, the courageous founder of the German Greens.

 

2084 is only 60 years from now (and 100 years after 1984 (George Orwell), but long before we have to mobilise the Coalition of the Controversials, not excluding anyone. NGOs, Science, Politics, Financials, Business.

Controversial are those who do stand up. Those who know, have a duty to act.

Wouter van Dieren

(+31) 065 336 0102