Unsurprisingly, the smoke from the fires out west is visible from the ISS and weather satellites. Behold:

In Photos: The 2018 California Wildfires as Seen from Space

This one is quite enlightening;

It would not surprise me if that much smoke has had a noticeable effect on the local climate. I know that my air conditioner usage has dropped precipitously in the last several days… the temperature outside might not have dropped much, but the sun beats down less horrendously.

A second thought occurs looking at that photo. The news lately has been filled with dire warnings of environmental DOOOOM, that we are at or perhaps beyond the tipping point for “Hothouse Earth,” that the environmentalists long con to deprive mankind of nuclear power has succeeded, and the four extra decades of reliance upon carbon emitting fossil fuels has doomed mankind to extinction: the environmentalist goals all along, seemingly. If this is in fact the case, that the planet is going to see substantial temperature increases and climatological nightmares, then it’s time to start geoengineering in earnest. With new projections of up to two hundred feet in sea level rise, Doing Something About That would seem to become just about National Priority Number One. OK, so what to do? Look at that photo above again. The California fire smoke covers a good fraction of the western US, and it’s a bit brighter than the ground below. The smoke almost certainly reflects more sunlight back out into space than the ground below would have with clear skies. So at least in the short term, the smoke is working to reverse global warming. Of course the emitted CO2 isn’t helping. But it need not be smoke from burning forests. Imagine if, instead, that was *water* being injected into the atmosphere. Massive nuclear reactors attached to massive pumps along the coast. Bring in solar power: use huge banks of solar reflectors to boil vast quantities of water to steam, and shoot that steam far into the sky from atop mountain peaks and the like. Create large banks of artificial clouds to reflect sunlight out into space. As a bonus, the clouds will probably not stay airborne too long and will come back down as rain. Look at that photo again: the region covered by those smoke clouds could *really* benefit from increased rainfall.

Bernie Sanders wants to spend $36 trillion over ten years to provide free medicaid to people who should be providing for their own healthcare. Imagine what $36 trillion could do to really aid “the common welfare” if spent on massive civil engineering projects. Heck, marry the two together: projects like this, along with projects to build vast water transfer systems to take floodwaters from the Mississippi River to drought zones like Montana and the Ogalala Aquifer region, would require a *lot* of workers over a generation or two. So if you want free Medicare… sign up for the Project. Provides good pay, good food, decent housing and free health care to all those who drive bulldozers, swing pickaxes, perform calculations, design pipelines and pumps.