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Dying forests, megafires, failing crops. For all the talk of a looming crisis, it seems apparent that we're already in one. It's time to consider solar geoeng

Dying forests, megafires, failing crops. For all the talk of a looming crisis, it seems apparent that we're already in one. It's time to consider solar geoengineering or other more extreme mitigation strategies.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
If we implement a bandaid with geoengineering, do you think we'll still try to fix the root cause (burning fossil fuels)? Or will we kick the can even further?
- alexose 5y ago
  That's an important question. My thought is that it doesn't really matter in the short term. Our ecosystems out here in the west won't withstand another couple of decades of this. Any attempts to fix the root cause haven't worked fast enough, so it's time to try something else. In the long term, I hope that the economic forces of cheap renewables and energy storage might be enough to get us down to a reasonable PPM. And maybe, just maybe, we'll see advances in sequestration that get us down to where we were before. I'm not an expert, so please don't take any of my views as fact. I'm just a layman trying to find some hope in what looks like a pretty hopeless situation.
  - not_jd_salinger 5y ago
    > Our ecosystems out here in the west won't withstand another couple of decades of this. Which is unfortunate because even if we dropped emissions to zero tomorrow, we would still be in for a few more decades of escalating climate crisis. In the grand spectrum of what's already be chosen as far as climate change goes, this is just the very, very beginning. Our chance to act to prevent what we're seeing now was 30-40 years ago.
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago
  I would expect fossil fuel companies to be first on the geoengineering bandwagon. Probably the only thing that could possibly save their industry.
blamestross 5y ago
Welcome to reality. While the media and governments are talking about finally preventing global warming, it is already too late. The question is, if we mobilize the entire world economy to mitigate it, it might last only a few hundred years instead of a few thousand. Ironically, I think lying to the public and claiming to be trying to "prevent" global warming is better, people would just give up if they knew what the actual impact of our actions would be.
- alexose 5y ago
  Kind of reminds me of software engineering-- You usually only get credit for 'rescuing' a bad situation, but never for preventing that situation in the first place :)
- not_jd_salinger 5y ago
  Why is this being downvoted? I've notice a disturbing trend on HN where bad news is downvoted. It's unquestionably too late to prevent global warming, and mitigation is only possible if we seriously consider organized economic down scaling. This is stuff people have known about for decades and strangely enough took more seriously in the 70s than they do now. Carbon emissions grow every year and the rate they are growing at continues to rise as well. Fossil fuel usage continues to rise (globally, local changes are meaningless). The only time we see any serious reduction in emissions is during massive economic down turns. Many argue that people won't accept a change of lifestyle, but that change is coming either way. Since virtually no one I've chatted with will even take economic reduction seriously I'm pretty certain it is "too late" in every sense. Downvoting comments like this because you wish it wasn't true is really unfitting of a community that prides itself on being 'hackers' and understanding how the world works.
  - blamestross 5y ago
    There has been an observable conservative and libertarian culture shift in hacker news while I have been a member. This community is about startups and extraction of money. The "hacker" part has been dying by simply being outnumbered for a while now.
neom 5y ago
Not to take away from what you're saying, I agree. I presume I'm in the minority of Canadians, but when the current government announced that new combustion vehicles would be banned in 2035, the only thing I could think is I need to vote for the green party. New sale combustion vehicles should be banned by ~2025, even if that means setting up crown corporations with tax dollars to deal with the infrastructure requirements. By 2035, it should be illegal drive one on public roads, period. At this point, I will only vote for people with a fully environment first platform, even at the expense of "bad" fiscal/economic policy for the country.
- alexose 5y ago
  I'm with you. Climate is the only issue I care about anymore. My home is Southwest Oregon, so it's just a strategic choice.
- imtringued 5y ago
  >I will only vote for people with a fully environment first platform, even at the expense of "bad" fiscal/economic policy for the country. For developed countries that have high productivity growth, falling demand as the population ages and low inflation you actually have to come up with random ideas to keep the population employed. It doesn't even matter what you do. You could let them dig holes and fill them. What's important is that the money goes to people who spend it. You know. Instead of letting the government be the investor of last resort, why not just introduce a carbon tax and carbon tariff and just let the private sector do all the investments? It would revitalize the economy far more than a bunch of trump style tax cuts. Green investments for climate change? Fuck that, let's save capitalism with green investments!
- zamalek 5y ago
  That's fantastic, and there needs to be more people like you. The problem I'm seeing is: > China isn't doing anything, so why should we? If the entire human race comes to an end, the last two gravestones will read: "the guy in the other grave is to blame."
  - neom 5y ago
ssully 5y ago
I was reading this article [1] last night and this paragraph in particular has been bouncing around my head all morning: The crisis, said Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Conservation District, can no longer be ignored. “According to Merriam-Webster, a drought is a temporary condition,” he said. What is happening, he suggested, is something more permanent and troubling. “This is aridification.” I think it's just because the framing for so long has been "drought", when it clear that what is going on is probably more severe. [1]: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-07-11/lake-mead-hoover-dam-drought-nevada-arizona-california https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-07-11/lake-m...
- arbitrary_name 5y ago
  I was recently prompted to read 'Cadillac desert' which provides a very interesting summary of the development of water in the west, and the looming challenges. TLDR: it's gonna keep getting worse. Anyway, highly recommend.
- treis 5y ago
  As much as people like to ridicule the CC deniers for pointing to unusually cold conditions the same side loves to do it when it supports them. For the Colorado River specifically, we established "normal" during an atypically wet time and now that we've gone through actual normal to a dry cycle it's a crisis. It's the normal cyclical behavior of nature and not really Climate Change that's the issue.
  - gilbetron 5y ago
    What are you talking about? Do you have some sources explaining this? This just seems like the oft-used, "previously it was an anomaly, we are returning to normal" pseudo-science that gets dragged out about everything concerning climate change. "It's not getting hotter, we were just in a cold period".
    - arrosenberg 5y ago
      The book Cadillac Desert makes that claim. When the water rights for the Colorado River were divided up, it was based on a quantity of water measured during a wetter year.
UnpossibleJim 5y ago
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/01/970670565/run-the-oil-industry-in-reverse-fighting-climate-change-by-farming-kelp#:~:text=Kelp%20Farm%20Startup%20Aims%20To%20Bury%20Carbon%20And%20Slow%20Climate%20Change%20%3A%20NPR&text=Science-,Kelp%20Farm%20Startup%20Aims%20To%20Bury%20Carbon%20And%20Slow%20Climate,the%20carbon%20away%20for%20millennia https://www.npr.org/2021/03/01/970670565/run-the-oil-industr... https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45435593 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45435593 I don't disagree with where you are going, but I think there might be easier ways to geoengineer than mirroring sun directly back out into space (unless I miss my mark at what solar geoengineering is - if so, I'm sorry). I cound't find it, there's also the "plan" to release megafauna into the midwest and pay to have them "sheparded" so they become a commodity instead of a liability, creating grasslands again. EDIT: typo
- alexose 5y ago
  The approach really should be to do _everything_. I love the idea of reforestation, sustainable agriculture, etc., but there's a ramp-up time inherent in all of these. The advantage of solar geoenegineering is that the effects would be relatively instantaneous.
GoodJokes 5y ago
All three of these things happen yearly. Climate change is real but understanding climate science on hackernews is not.
TheBill 5y ago
IMO we need to burn more out west. We're digging out of ~200+ years of mismanaging the forests: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/899422710/to-manage-wildfire-california-looks-to-what-tribes-have-known-all-along https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/899422710/to-manage-wildfire-... "Before 1800, several million acres burned every year in California due to both Indigenous burning and lightning-caused fires, far more than even the worst wildfire years today. Tribes used low-grade fires to shape the landscape, encouraging certain plants to grow both for tribal use and to attract game."
- danans 5y ago
  > IMO we need to burn more out west. This addresses only a symptom (more extreme wildfires) and not the root issue: persistent drought / aridification amplified by climate change. To be resilient to the latter, we need to become dramatically more efficient in how we use water resources, especially in the food production pipeline.
  - TheBill 5y ago
    Did you bother to read the article for 5 seconds? Native CA tribes were burning 3-5x the amount that've been burned in the last "Bad" fire seasons we've had. Burns were done to help manage water supplies in the first place.
    - danans 5y ago
      The scales of water management that Native CA tribes were doing with their burns is not going to fix our water issues, since we use orders of magnitude more water than they ever did, both per capita and as a civilization. At this point, prescribed burns are only a fuel management technique to minimize massive wildfires. They are not a realistic way to mitigate climate change driven aridification. It's not really clear that we can mitigate it - we just need to adapt to use water more efficiently.
- genericone 5y ago
  I agree as well, we're creating a literal powder keg of a situation with the amount of dry brush that is left lying in unmanaged areas. I get that we have to protect the towns and cities, but we can't just keep pushing this situation out into the future. But I can also see that the larger and more mismanaged the eventual fire is, the more changes you can dictate to combat climate change, so I'm not sure if the wildfire problem is politically tenable.
cannabis_sam 5y ago
The saddest part is that we could still limit the damage to the future of our civilization by actually doing something, instead of like , perfomatively banning plastic, while leaving cars and oil/gas power plants alone. I mean, how many thousands of years of plastic utensil avoidence equals an oil well operation over a year? It’s not really fun to conclude that it would be more humane to not have them, than to bring children into a world completely consumed by its egotistical inhabitant’s desperate desire to please Moloch at absolutely any cost.
- qqqwerty 5y ago
  Do you really think that local municipalities focus on single use plastic is the reason we haven't solved climate change yet? Climate change and plastic pollution are two separate issues, but I would be willing to bet that the folks who support plastic pollution legislation are also some of the more fervent supporters of climate change legislation. And at the municipal level, for every plastic ordinance there are probably dozens of ordinances focused on climate change. But solving climate change will likely require global cooperation on a level that the world has never seen before. So you are essentially cherry picking a topic to accuse their supporters of being "performative" just because they haven't yet solved one of the biggest challenges the world has ever faced.
  - cannabis_sam 5y ago
    >Do you really think that local municipalities focus on single use plastic is the reason we haven't solved climate change yet? No, and I wasn’t trying to say that. > Climate change and plastic pollution are two separate issues, but I would be willing to bet that the folks who support plastic pollution legislation are also some of the more fervent supporters of climate change legislation. I agree, but in democratic societies (at least in western europe where I have experience), policy tends to be decided by compromise between different interests, and plastic bans and more impactful climate change occupy the same lane of general support for environmentalism. So we get into a situation where green parties want to reduce plastics and want to reduce petrol/gas use, and our (Western European) compromise becomes a ban on plastic and little done to reduce petrol/gas usage.
yongjik 5y ago
All this talk of geoengineering solutions seem to miss one crucial detail: who's paying for it? We can't even make people agree on carbon tax. With any money available, we can build solar/wind farm, which is a proven method of fighting AGW (and it even pays for itself these days!) and we can't even do that fast enough.
- ep103 5y ago
  Historically, when a democratic government meets an existential problem that it can't convince or use its richest members to pay for, then that democratic government is, either slowly or quickly, replaced by a more authoritarian government that will then do one of two things: 1 - Forcibly use the wealth of the country to solve the problem, over the objection of those prevented that use of wealth previously. or 2 - Forcibly silence the people who are experiencing hardship as a result of the problem, so the society can go back to believing (realistically or not) that there is no such problem worth solving. This happens by degrees, as a very rough response to the degree of hardship presented by the problem, at first, but is the expected result if the society can't democratically answer the "who will pay for it, not I" question.
swader999 5y ago
Earth is getting greener every decade with more C02. Can't let weather events push extreme solutions to this.
- alexose 5y ago
  Overall green-ness doesn't coincide with the needs of civilization, unfortunately.
  - swader999 5y ago
    Is sea level rising at 1-3mm a year really a problem?
munificent 5y ago
I live in the Pacific Northwest. It took only two years to go from: "Breaking news: Record-setting forest fires in California will send smoke up to Washington." to: "It's wildfire season again, here's our favorite air filters for 2021." Humanity's ability to go from "oh, shit" to "this is fine" and just not realize how much worse things have gotten is incredible. I assume in 2025 we'll all just scroll past the boring article about which ten metropolitan cities in Florida washed into the Gulf today so that we can get to some funny comics.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

If we implement a bandaid with geoengineering, do you think we'll still try to fix the root cause (burning fossil fuels)? Or will we kick the can even further?

alexose 5y ago
That's an important question. My thought is that it doesn't really matter in the short term. Our ecosystems out here in the west won't withstand another couple of decades of this. Any attempts to fix the root cause haven't worked fast enough, so it's time to try something else. In the long term, I hope that the economic forces of cheap renewables and energy storage might be enough to get us down to a reasonable PPM. And maybe, just maybe, we'll see advances in sequestration that get us down to where we were before. I'm not an expert, so please don't take any of my views as fact. I'm just a layman trying to find some hope in what looks like a pretty hopeless situation.
- not_jd_salinger 5y ago
  > Our ecosystems out here in the west won't withstand another couple of decades of this. Which is unfortunate because even if we dropped emissions to zero tomorrow, we would still be in for a few more decades of escalating climate crisis. In the grand spectrum of what's already be chosen as far as climate change goes, this is just the very, very beginning. Our chance to act to prevent what we're seeing now was 30-40 years ago.
Pokepokalypse 5y ago
I would expect fossil fuel companies to be first on the geoengineering bandwagon. Probably the only thing that could possibly save their industry.

blamestross 5y ago

Welcome to reality. While the media and governments are talking about finally preventing global warming, it is already too late. The question is, if we mobilize the entire world economy to mitigate it, it might last only a few hundred years instead of a few thousand. Ironically, I think lying to the public and claiming to be trying to "prevent" global warming is better, people would just give up if they knew what the actual impact of our actions would be.

alexose 5y ago
Kind of reminds me of software engineering-- You usually only get credit for 'rescuing' a bad situation, but never for preventing that situation in the first place :)
not_jd_salinger 5y ago
Why is this being downvoted? I've notice a disturbing trend on HN where bad news is downvoted. It's unquestionably too late to prevent global warming, and mitigation is only possible if we seriously consider organized economic down scaling. This is stuff people have known about for decades and strangely enough took more seriously in the 70s than they do now. Carbon emissions grow every year and the rate they are growing at continues to rise as well. Fossil fuel usage continues to rise (globally, local changes are meaningless). The only time we see any serious reduction in emissions is during massive economic down turns. Many argue that people won't accept a change of lifestyle, but that change is coming either way. Since virtually no one I've chatted with will even take economic reduction seriously I'm pretty certain it is "too late" in every sense. Downvoting comments like this because you wish it wasn't true is really unfitting of a community that prides itself on being 'hackers' and understanding how the world works.
- blamestross 5y ago
  There has been an observable conservative and libertarian culture shift in hacker news while I have been a member. This community is about startups and extraction of money. The "hacker" part has been dying by simply being outnumbered for a while now.

neom 5y ago

Not to take away from what you're saying, I agree. I presume I'm in the minority of Canadians, but when the current government announced that new combustion vehicles would be banned in 2035, the only thing I could think is I need to vote for the green party. New sale combustion vehicles should be banned by ~2025, even if that means setting up crown corporations with tax dollars to deal with the infrastructure requirements. By 2035, it should be illegal drive one on public roads, period. At this point, I will only vote for people with a fully environment first platform, even at the expense of "bad" fiscal/economic policy for the country.

alexose 5y ago
I'm with you. Climate is the only issue I care about anymore. My home is Southwest Oregon, so it's just a strategic choice.
imtringued 5y ago
>I will only vote for people with a fully environment first platform, even at the expense of "bad" fiscal/economic policy for the country. For developed countries that have high productivity growth, falling demand as the population ages and low inflation you actually have to come up with random ideas to keep the population employed. It doesn't even matter what you do. You could let them dig holes and fill them. What's important is that the money goes to people who spend it. You know. Instead of letting the government be the investor of last resort, why not just introduce a carbon tax and carbon tariff and just let the private sector do all the investments? It would revitalize the economy far more than a bunch of trump style tax cuts. Green investments for climate change? Fuck that, let's save capitalism with green investments!
zamalek 5y ago
That's fantastic, and there needs to be more people like you. The problem I'm seeing is: > China isn't doing anything, so why should we? If the entire human race comes to an end, the last two gravestones will read: "the guy in the other grave is to blame."
- neom 5y ago

ssully 5y ago

I was reading this article [1] last night and this paragraph in particular has been bouncing around my head all morning: The crisis, said Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Conservation District, can no longer be ignored. “According to Merriam-Webster, a drought is a temporary condition,” he said. What is happening, he suggested, is something more permanent and troubling. “This is aridification.” I think it's just because the framing for so long has been "drought", when it clear that what is going on is probably more severe. [1]: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-07-11/lake-mead-hoover-dam-drought-nevada-arizona-california https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-07-11/lake-m...

arbitrary_name 5y ago
I was recently prompted to read 'Cadillac desert' which provides a very interesting summary of the development of water in the west, and the looming challenges. TLDR: it's gonna keep getting worse. Anyway, highly recommend.
treis 5y ago
As much as people like to ridicule the CC deniers for pointing to unusually cold conditions the same side loves to do it when it supports them. For the Colorado River specifically, we established "normal" during an atypically wet time and now that we've gone through actual normal to a dry cycle it's a crisis. It's the normal cyclical behavior of nature and not really Climate Change that's the issue.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  What are you talking about? Do you have some sources explaining this? This just seems like the oft-used, "previously it was an anomaly, we are returning to normal" pseudo-science that gets dragged out about everything concerning climate change. "It's not getting hotter, we were just in a cold period".
  - arrosenberg 5y ago
    The book Cadillac Desert makes that claim. When the water rights for the Colorado River were divided up, it was based on a quantity of water measured during a wetter year.

UnpossibleJim 5y ago

https://www.npr.org/2021/03/01/970670565/run-the-oil-industry-in-reverse-fighting-climate-change-by-farming-kelp#:~:text=Kelp%20Farm%20Startup%20Aims%20To%20Bury%20Carbon%20And%20Slow%20Climate%20Change%20%3A%20NPR&text=Science-,Kelp%20Farm%20Startup%20Aims%20To%20Bury%20Carbon%20And%20Slow%20Climate,the%20carbon%20away%20for%20millennia https://www.npr.org/2021/03/01/970670565/run-the-oil-industr... https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45435593 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45435593 I don't disagree with where you are going, but I think there might be easier ways to geoengineer than mirroring sun directly back out into space (unless I miss my mark at what solar geoengineering is - if so, I'm sorry). I cound't find it, there's also the "plan" to release megafauna into the midwest and pay to have them "sheparded" so they become a commodity instead of a liability, creating grasslands again. EDIT: typo

alexose 5y ago
The approach really should be to do _everything_. I love the idea of reforestation, sustainable agriculture, etc., but there's a ramp-up time inherent in all of these. The advantage of solar geoenegineering is that the effects would be relatively instantaneous.

GoodJokes 5y ago

All three of these things happen yearly. Climate change is real but understanding climate science on hackernews is not.

TheBill 5y ago

IMO we need to burn more out west. We're digging out of ~200+ years of mismanaging the forests: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/899422710/to-manage-wildfire-california-looks-to-what-tribes-have-known-all-along https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/899422710/to-manage-wildfire-... "Before 1800, several million acres burned every year in California due to both Indigenous burning and lightning-caused fires, far more than even the worst wildfire years today. Tribes used low-grade fires to shape the landscape, encouraging certain plants to grow both for tribal use and to attract game."

danans 5y ago
> IMO we need to burn more out west. This addresses only a symptom (more extreme wildfires) and not the root issue: persistent drought / aridification amplified by climate change. To be resilient to the latter, we need to become dramatically more efficient in how we use water resources, especially in the food production pipeline.
- TheBill 5y ago
  Did you bother to read the article for 5 seconds? Native CA tribes were burning 3-5x the amount that've been burned in the last "Bad" fire seasons we've had. Burns were done to help manage water supplies in the first place.
  - danans 5y ago
    The scales of water management that Native CA tribes were doing with their burns is not going to fix our water issues, since we use orders of magnitude more water than they ever did, both per capita and as a civilization. At this point, prescribed burns are only a fuel management technique to minimize massive wildfires. They are not a realistic way to mitigate climate change driven aridification. It's not really clear that we can mitigate it - we just need to adapt to use water more efficiently.
genericone 5y ago
I agree as well, we're creating a literal powder keg of a situation with the amount of dry brush that is left lying in unmanaged areas. I get that we have to protect the towns and cities, but we can't just keep pushing this situation out into the future. But I can also see that the larger and more mismanaged the eventual fire is, the more changes you can dictate to combat climate change, so I'm not sure if the wildfire problem is politically tenable.

cannabis_sam 5y ago

The saddest part is that we could still limit the damage to the future of our civilization by actually doing something, instead of like , perfomatively banning plastic, while leaving cars and oil/gas power plants alone. I mean, how many thousands of years of plastic utensil avoidence equals an oil well operation over a year? It’s not really fun to conclude that it would be more humane to not have them, than to bring children into a world completely consumed by its egotistical inhabitant’s desperate desire to please Moloch at absolutely any cost.

qqqwerty 5y ago
Do you really think that local municipalities focus on single use plastic is the reason we haven't solved climate change yet? Climate change and plastic pollution are two separate issues, but I would be willing to bet that the folks who support plastic pollution legislation are also some of the more fervent supporters of climate change legislation. And at the municipal level, for every plastic ordinance there are probably dozens of ordinances focused on climate change. But solving climate change will likely require global cooperation on a level that the world has never seen before. So you are essentially cherry picking a topic to accuse their supporters of being "performative" just because they haven't yet solved one of the biggest challenges the world has ever faced.
- cannabis_sam 5y ago
  >Do you really think that local municipalities focus on single use plastic is the reason we haven't solved climate change yet? No, and I wasn’t trying to say that. > Climate change and plastic pollution are two separate issues, but I would be willing to bet that the folks who support plastic pollution legislation are also some of the more fervent supporters of climate change legislation. I agree, but in democratic societies (at least in western europe where I have experience), policy tends to be decided by compromise between different interests, and plastic bans and more impactful climate change occupy the same lane of general support for environmentalism. So we get into a situation where green parties want to reduce plastics and want to reduce petrol/gas use, and our (Western European) compromise becomes a ban on plastic and little done to reduce petrol/gas usage.

yongjik 5y ago

All this talk of geoengineering solutions seem to miss one crucial detail: who's paying for it? We can't even make people agree on carbon tax. With any money available, we can build solar/wind farm, which is a proven method of fighting AGW (and it even pays for itself these days!) and we can't even do that fast enough.

ep103 5y ago
Historically, when a democratic government meets an existential problem that it can't convince or use its richest members to pay for, then that democratic government is, either slowly or quickly, replaced by a more authoritarian government that will then do one of two things: 1 - Forcibly use the wealth of the country to solve the problem, over the objection of those prevented that use of wealth previously. or 2 - Forcibly silence the people who are experiencing hardship as a result of the problem, so the society can go back to believing (realistically or not) that there is no such problem worth solving. This happens by degrees, as a very rough response to the degree of hardship presented by the problem, at first, but is the expected result if the society can't democratically answer the "who will pay for it, not I" question.

swader999 5y ago

Earth is getting greener every decade with more C02. Can't let weather events push extreme solutions to this.

alexose 5y ago
Overall green-ness doesn't coincide with the needs of civilization, unfortunately.
- swader999 5y ago
  Is sea level rising at 1-3mm a year really a problem?

munificent 5y ago

I live in the Pacific Northwest. It took only two years to go from: "Breaking news: Record-setting forest fires in California will send smoke up to Washington." to: "It's wildfire season again, here's our favorite air filters for 2021." Humanity's ability to go from "oh, shit" to "this is fine" and just not realize how much worse things have gotten is incredible. I assume in 2025 we'll all just scroll past the boring article about which ten metropolitan cities in Florida washed into the Gulf today so that we can get to some funny comics.