4 ms·

What do potential geoengineering efforts mean for homeowners and businesses with installed solar power generation?

yarrel 10y ago
My first thought was agriculture...
wlesieutre 10y ago
Relatively minor, nobody's talking about blocking 50% of the sunlight, more like 1-2%. Pretty straightforward for direct photovoltaic generation, but the wider consequences on the (very complicated) Earth system are hard to say. Would it affect wind patterns (and wind power generation as a result)? What about plants/animals/agriculture?
- diggernet 10y ago
  And how do we undo it when we discover we don't like the side effects?
  - wlesieutre 10y ago
    More geoengineering! On the other hand, anthropogenic climate change is already going to screw all those things up, so it's not like avoiding geoengineering is necessarily the right choice either. Just need to understand the potential risks and benefits as well as possible before considering it.
    - diggernet 10y ago
      As someone who grew up hearing stories about the unintended environmental damage caused by many well-intended Corps of Engineers projects, geoengineering makes me cringe. Edit: I probably should have found a way to use "hubris" in that sentence...
      - ScottBurson 10y ago
        It's a reasonable concern, but whether to modify the biosphere is not a choice we have any longer. We are modifying it -- that's what all that CO2 that we are already putting into the atmosphere amounts to. Geoengineering is about looking for ways that we can modify it intentionally along with the unintentional modifications we are already making. Caution is certainly warranted, and there is some danger of hubris, but running screaming from the room is not a productive response either.
        diggernet 10y ago
        Yeah, but I'm not running screaming. Just asking that anyone submitting a proposal for geoengineering please include plans of equal or better feasibility and speed for an undo button, should the need arise.
  - aetherson 10y ago
    I mean, you have to ask yourself what you actually believe about the climate. Do you think that climate change is somewhere between "unbounded costs ranging in the hundreds of trillions of dollars over the course of 2050-2150," and "the death of humanity and/or all multicellular life on Earth"? Because if so, the side effects of geoengineering probably aren't that bad, and even if they are, they're apparently only as bad as what you think the costs of doing nothing are. On the other hand, do you think that climate change is either non-existent or some kind of relatively mild thing that will cause $100 Trillion dollars or less over the course of a century? Then probably geoengineering is not for you -- but that also means that you're somewhere outside the orthodoxy on climate change. If you believe that climate change is a real big problem (ie, hundreds of trillions of dollars or much more in damages over a century timeline) AND that it is stoppable by being really persistent in asking people to use solar and wind power, then I don't think that you're being very realistic.
    - diggernet 10y ago
      So the alternatives you propose are (in reverse order): > I don't think that you're being very realistic. > you're somewhere outside the orthodoxy on climate change. > the side effects of geoengineering probably aren't that bad Hubris.
      - aetherson 10y ago
        I don't think that you understood my comment very well. So, look, if you don't believe that climate change will be disastrous, then you're perfectly within reason to say that geoengineering is a really bad idea. The beef that people have with you will not be that you're wrong to be opposed to geoengineering, their beef will be that you're wrong to think that climate change is no big deal. I'm not here to fight that fight. If that's your position, fine. If you DO think that climate change is a big deal (and by big deal, I mean you think it's somewhere between "likely to stall all economic growth worldwide for centuries" and "likely to kill all of humanity"), then it's kind of hard to imagine what worse consequences geoengineering could possibly have. And particularly, if you do think that climate change is a big deal (as described above), there aren't a lot of very realistic options besides geoengineering. It may be that even if we stopped ALL carbon emissions RIGHT NOW, we'd still have really bad climate change. And obviously, realistically, we just won't stop all carbon emissions now. We won't stop all carbon emissions in a decade, or two decades, or three. I am prepared to argue with you if you imagine that we can stop all carbon emissions now. The only fourth way I can imagine is that someone might somewhat reasonably believe that in the near future, technological advance will get us out of this. That we'll discover some way to do massive carbon-less power generation at very low cost and/or that we'll discover an obviously unproblematic way to do carbon sequestration on enormous scale. I will say that if you assign a high probability of disastrous climate change, I don't see how you'd assign a similarly high probability of those exact technological advances. In fact, I might call such precise foresight... hubris.
  - ScottBurson 10y ago
    The half-life of sulfur aerosols in the stratosphere is on the order of a few months. So if there turns out to be some overwhelmingly undesirable side effect, we can just stop putting the sulfur up there and the effects will dissipate relatively quickly. Nature does this experiment for us every so often: large volcanic eruptions, such as the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption, put massive amounts of sulfur into the stratosphere, much larger than the amount we'd need to use. So it's pretty likely we would have noticed the negative effects if there were any (beyond the fact that we got much more cooling than we wanted for a couple of years).

My first thought was agriculture...

Relatively minor, nobody's talking about blocking 50% of the sunlight, more like 1-2%. Pretty straightforward for direct photovoltaic generation, but the wider consequences on the (very complicated) Earth system are hard to say. Would it affect wind patterns (and wind power generation as a result)? What about plants/animals/agriculture?

diggernet 10y ago
And how do we undo it when we discover we don't like the side effects?
- wlesieutre 10y ago
  More geoengineering! On the other hand, anthropogenic climate change is already going to screw all those things up, so it's not like avoiding geoengineering is necessarily the right choice either. Just need to understand the potential risks and benefits as well as possible before considering it.
  - diggernet 10y ago
    As someone who grew up hearing stories about the unintended environmental damage caused by many well-intended Corps of Engineers projects, geoengineering makes me cringe. Edit: I probably should have found a way to use "hubris" in that sentence...
    - ScottBurson 10y ago
      It's a reasonable concern, but whether to modify the biosphere is not a choice we have any longer. We are modifying it -- that's what all that CO2 that we are already putting into the atmosphere amounts to. Geoengineering is about looking for ways that we can modify it intentionally along with the unintentional modifications we are already making. Caution is certainly warranted, and there is some danger of hubris, but running screaming from the room is not a productive response either.
      - diggernet 10y ago
        Yeah, but I'm not running screaming. Just asking that anyone submitting a proposal for geoengineering please include plans of equal or better feasibility and speed for an undo button, should the need arise.
- aetherson 10y ago
  I mean, you have to ask yourself what you actually believe about the climate. Do you think that climate change is somewhere between "unbounded costs ranging in the hundreds of trillions of dollars over the course of 2050-2150," and "the death of humanity and/or all multicellular life on Earth"? Because if so, the side effects of geoengineering probably aren't that bad, and even if they are, they're apparently only as bad as what you think the costs of doing nothing are. On the other hand, do you think that climate change is either non-existent or some kind of relatively mild thing that will cause $100 Trillion dollars or less over the course of a century? Then probably geoengineering is not for you -- but that also means that you're somewhere outside the orthodoxy on climate change. If you believe that climate change is a real big problem (ie, hundreds of trillions of dollars or much more in damages over a century timeline) AND that it is stoppable by being really persistent in asking people to use solar and wind power, then I don't think that you're being very realistic.
  - diggernet 10y ago
    So the alternatives you propose are (in reverse order): > I don't think that you're being very realistic. > you're somewhere outside the orthodoxy on climate change. > the side effects of geoengineering probably aren't that bad Hubris.
    - aetherson 10y ago
      I don't think that you understood my comment very well. So, look, if you don't believe that climate change will be disastrous, then you're perfectly within reason to say that geoengineering is a really bad idea. The beef that people have with you will not be that you're wrong to be opposed to geoengineering, their beef will be that you're wrong to think that climate change is no big deal. I'm not here to fight that fight. If that's your position, fine. If you DO think that climate change is a big deal (and by big deal, I mean you think it's somewhere between "likely to stall all economic growth worldwide for centuries" and "likely to kill all of humanity"), then it's kind of hard to imagine what worse consequences geoengineering could possibly have. And particularly, if you do think that climate change is a big deal (as described above), there aren't a lot of very realistic options besides geoengineering. It may be that even if we stopped ALL carbon emissions RIGHT NOW, we'd still have really bad climate change. And obviously, realistically, we just won't stop all carbon emissions now. We won't stop all carbon emissions in a decade, or two decades, or three. I am prepared to argue with you if you imagine that we can stop all carbon emissions now. The only fourth way I can imagine is that someone might somewhat reasonably believe that in the near future, technological advance will get us out of this. That we'll discover some way to do massive carbon-less power generation at very low cost and/or that we'll discover an obviously unproblematic way to do carbon sequestration on enormous scale. I will say that if you assign a high probability of disastrous climate change, I don't see how you'd assign a similarly high probability of those exact technological advances. In fact, I might call such precise foresight... hubris.
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  The half-life of sulfur aerosols in the stratosphere is on the order of a few months. So if there turns out to be some overwhelmingly undesirable side effect, we can just stop putting the sulfur up there and the effects will dissipate relatively quickly. Nature does this experiment for us every so often: large volcanic eruptions, such as the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption, put massive amounts of sulfur into the stratosphere, much larger than the amount we'd need to use. So it's pretty likely we would have noticed the negative effects if there were any (beyond the fact that we got much more cooling than we wanted for a couple of years).