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> I'm wondering why geoengineering is not being seriously considered as a solution at this point. Because an overshoot in the other direction would be even wor
by User23 7y ago
> I'm wondering why geoengineering is not being seriously considered as a solution at this point.
Because an overshoot in the other direction would be even worse than a couple degrees of warming. Feedback loops can work both ways. We are currently in an ice age[1] and glaciation covering most of the northern hemisphere could happen in about a decade[2]. Reducing emissions is just tuning a known activity and second order effects aside is perfectly safe, but geoengineering is a giant unknown that could cause catastrophic consequences.
[1]https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/cause-ice-age/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/cause-ice-age/
[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34297/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34297/
- marmaduke 7y ago> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34297/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34297/ That was an interesting read. It suggests that really abrupt changes in warming are possible. The downside seems that only one good data source exists. Are you aware of any computational modeling of the large scale mechanisms? I'm coming from computational neuroscience and bayesian modeling and found this data pretty interesting
- User23 7y agoI don't, but the data quality really is impressive, so it would be interesting to see if anyone has tried to develop a model using it, especially since you could test it by taking other cores.
- marmaduke 7y agoI started reading a bit and found CESM but it seems like a lot of these models require supercomputers. It's not clear that simulation of many years (ie predicting what a core might look like) is feasible.