4 ms·

Can Geoengineering Fix Climate Change?

43 points by dr_dshiv 5y ago

Waterluvian 5y ago
Silly hypothetical: Once we’ve stopped GHG emissions, say we Mr. Burns block out the Sun. But from space and just a portion of it. The idea being that you just reduce the total insolation by a bit and let orbital mechanics and atmospheric effects even it out across the whole planet. If the blocker reflects all insolation, how large does it need to be today to get us back to 1990 levels? I also kind of love the ridiculous idea of this regular artificial eclipse that creeps around the planet’s surface and becomes part of our normal lives.
- benbristow 5y ago
  Sounds a bit dystopian to me. Want to shut down protests? Just block out the sun - no daylight for you! The word 'dystopian' rings a bell quite often when it comes to so-called 'climate change' saving methods...
  - dinkleberg 5y ago
    It sounds even more dystopian if we do nothing at all.
    - abakker 5y ago
      I agree. Shutting down protests by making it dark doesn't even work? OTOH, letting most of the people on the planet starve to death seems actually bad.
    - titzer 5y ago
      Look at the current political leaders and ask yourself is something--anything--is going to happen. It isn't going to happen.
    - chmsky00 5y ago
      Actually, humans doing nothing would be the best thing for the environment Industrial energy consumption feedback loops will occur in any system we attempt to build to curb the issue Any machines, chemicals, processes, vehicles, etc, that need producing to “improve things” will all come along with chewing up resources at scale to provide the industrial pipeline The only scientifically acceptable path is LESS industrial scale economic activity: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210312-covid-19-paused-climate-emissions-but-theyre-rising-again https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210312-covid-19-paused-...
      - wongarsu 5y ago
        I'm not sure what "doing nothing" would look like if we don't mean "continue on our current path". The entire set of Western values as cemented by the Cold War seems incompatible with "less economic activity". And even if we somehow shake consumerism, modern agriculture is essential to feeding more than 1B humans and requires a significant amount of industrial scale economic activity. The majority of the time "buy/make this thing to reduce climate change" is a mere distraction. But there are a lot of resources that we can afford to spend, some of which are near-limitless if you consider predictable advances like asteroid mining. If we find ways to spend those resources to get us at least part way out of this mess, or to buy us time for societal change, then those are paths worth pursuing.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Blocking the sun enough to black out a protest for any length of time kills us all. Most of the proposals are talking like, 1% of the sun. The whole sun for a few hours is way too much, and would do all kinds of bad things. Besides, they already tear gas and mass arrest protests if the cops don’t like the protestors, that’s already pretty dystopian.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- greesil 5y ago
  Supposedly this will have a negative impact on crop yields. They are photosynthesis machines after all.
  - silisili 5y ago
    Why not over say, mid ocean or mid-desert, in a fixed spot?
    - gpm 5y ago
      Orbital mechanics. The efficient (and probably only viable) way to do this is a solar shade at lagrange point 1 (directly between the sun and earth). There's an unstable equillibrium point there were things can sit permanently with some (but minimal) station keeping. But you don't get to pick which part you're shading, you're always directly between the earth and the sun (or really the center of the earth-moon systems gravity, and the sun).
      - silisili 5y ago
        I see, thanks. I guess I was thinking of something that 'moved' with the earth, but that probably isn't realistic. Could something be placed at such a point that then only blocked sun on the far north/south of the planet, near the poles?
        gpm 5y ago
        Not directly. You could place something in an orbit where it only ever blocked sun at the poles I think, but it would spend the vast majority of its time not blocking sun at all.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    There are always trade offs. This issue will NOT be solved without substantial costs.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  If we settle at about double the preindustrial CO2 level, we would need to block about 8% of the solar radiation [0]. You could do that eg with floating structures of ultra-thin translucent sheets that reduce light intensity in their shadow. To maximize effectiveness you can put them in a sun-synchronous orbit, so it casts it shadow always at high noon [1]. However this solves only the warming itself, it does nothing about things like ocean acidification. 0: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11993-solar-shield-could-be-quick-fix-for-global-warming/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11993-solar-shield-co... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
- gpm 5y ago
  This paper discusses the concept: https://www.pnas.org/content/103/46/17184 https://www.pnas.org/content/103/46/17184 I think they were targetting "stop warming" more than "1990 levels", but they estimated 20 million tons/a few million square kilometers.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  The "right" way to do it, is to put something big at the L1 Lagrange Point. That is permanently between Earth and the sun, and you'd see it as a black dot at the center of the Sun. Downside is it needs to be real big. 2000 km, according to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade
karaterobot 5y ago
> Lest you dismiss me, I founded Carbon Engineering, one of the most visible companies developing technology to capture carbon... The company’s interests could be hurt if geoengineering were seen as an acceptable option... > ... Cooling the planet to reduce human suffering in this century will require carbon removal or solar geoengineering or both... It's good that he discloses this in the article, but I guess I'd prefer if he had no financial interest whatsoever. It complicates his position, which I happen to fully agree with. What he's really saying, the cynical media consumer who has metastasized in me says, is that you should continue investing in his industry, and also invest in a related industry that will raise the tide he's floating on.
- asah 5y ago
  It's impractical to demand both domain expertise and total impartiality - even academic researchers have strong proclivities. There are no neutral parties, and this is clearly labeled as one person's opinion.
  - karaterobot 5y ago
    Granting the premise that there are no absolutely neutral parties, we can still agree that there are parties which are less neutral than others. Having a direct financial interest is a pretty hard line: for example, if the author was heavily invested in geoengineering companies, or had even been paid by geoengineering companies to write the article, I hope everyone would agree that his opinion was suspect. In this case, the author does not have a direct financial interest, but he has (I suppose) an indirect one, which is why I say I appreciate the article, but would prefer the same argument from coming another source, if I had the choice.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  The pure expert is someone who devotes their life to expertise, but never gets paid to do work in that field. These people tend to not exist.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  Carbon capture schemes are over sold and so-far under deliver to such an extent that these schemes serve almost no purpose whatsoever other than green-washing the polluters it enables to continue to pollute. Most of these schemes have good old coal, gas, or oil companies backing them. Their only agenda: delay the shutdown of their planet destroying activity for as long as possible. They spend billions lobbying for that. It's actually way more than what they spend on actual carbon capture. Planting a few trees here and there and going to ridiculous lengths to put a few tonnes of actual captured CO2 in the ground while they continue to release CO2 by the mega tonnes. The total amount of captured carbon (since people started doing that) is measured in tiny fractions of a percent of what we dump in the atmosphere every year. The best form of carbon capture is leaving it in the ground and not removing it from there to begin with. It would be cheaper to pay these companies to simply shut down their business than to allow them to keep making things worse and then funding the cleanup of their mess. Before we start hacking our planet, we need to pull the plug on doing the things that are actively making things worse to a far larger extent than we can feasibly clean things up. Why spent billions re-capturing a fraction of what we actually still put out every year? Much cheaper to stop doing that. That's carbon we won't have to put back into the ground. Even better: instead of spending money on that, we could simply stop spending public money on enabling the active adding of carbon to our atmosphere. I'm talking about the collective tax benefits, subsidies, government sponsored 'research', the odd bit of war fare in the middle east, etc. that the oil and gas industry continues to benefit from. That adds up to being way more than we're spending on renewable energy or indeed carbon capture. The amounts are measured in trillions.
yosito 5y ago
Carbon sequestration is one thing, but a lot of geoengineering ideas genuinely scare me. The side effects of clever attempts to cool the planet could easily be catastrophic. Yeah, the global climate "machine" is slowly heating up which could have irreversible effects over the next several centuries, but throwing wrenches into that machine to try to cool it down without the ability to precisely control it will likely have negative side effects much sooner.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  What's the argument against researching it? Especially marine cloud brightening. I could imagine something where containerships were mandated to have devices that would loft salt aerosols in their exhaust. Investment in R&D seems wise. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
  - lm28469 5y ago
    > What's the argument against researching it? It's a diversion. They're all stopgap measures with no real long term application. You can paint all the road white and add artificial clouds, if you continue to live like resources are unlimited and pollution isn't an issue you'll sooner or later hit another problem. If we don't take care of the root cause we're bound to fail. Unlimited growth and exponential energy usage isn't possible in a closed system. All these new "green" economy, "green" growth, &c. are perpetuating the idea that we're going down the right path and simply have to tweak a few variables to go from "catastrophic failure" to "idyllic paradise" I don't think people truly understand how fucked we are and how deep the problem runs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA
    - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
      There’s a kinda fundamental tension between “we’re fucked” and “we shouldn’t investigate this strategy because it doesn’t handle the root cause”. If it’s such a big issue, don’t we need to throw the kitchen sink at it?
Bombthecat 5y ago
We need to, no way around it. Or we accept the death of millions or worse, even billions.
leesec 5y ago
It'll have too.
endisneigh 5y ago
Due to the rampant worldwide inequality in income, resources, etc. there's no solution. The answer is an unequivocal "no."
perfunctory 5y ago
Warming is not the only negative effect of the excess GHG emissions. Ocean acidification for example is another one. Blocking the sunlight will not solve that.
- lokar 5y ago
  He pretty clearly argues we need to stop emitting, remove/store the excess AND geo engineer.
hotz 5y ago
The lefty/liberal god complex of wanting to control everything, even the planet is getting really boring. You guys need to get hobbies and stop making life miserable for people who think differently.
beckman466 5y ago
"Philanthrocapitalists are driving massively profitable schemes dressed up as eco-friendly, pro-poor solutions to climate disaster. [...] Geoengineering comprises of large-scale controversial schemes to intervene in the earth’s oceans, soils, and atmosphere in attempts to manage the effects of climate change. Many of these schemes are extraordinary—such as blocking the sun to stop temperature increases, increasing the whiteness of clouds to reflect sunlight back into space, and sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere with industrial-scale fans. In order to have any impact on the climate, they would have to be done on a planetary scale so the potential risks are many: they range from destabilizing weather patterns, creating droughts and floods in Africa and South America, and acidifying the ocean, to polluting the atmosphere and locking the world into unstoppable management of the atmosphere. Many proposals for removing CO2 from the skies require huge amounts of energy, chemicals, infrastructure, and land in size equivalent to several countries. Yet crazy, inequitable, and dangerous as geoengineering may seem, it is currently been embraced by polluting industries and increasingly some governments as a supposed “solution” to an off-kilter warming world. [...] Gates’ approach to climate change is to champion the technofixes that will enable the fossil fuel machine to continue pumping more oil. He is after all personally invested in the infrastructure that relies on their success. It is also unsurprising given the pervasive technophilia of our time, that even influential personalities like Trevor Noah whom many look to for critical analysis on global issues, would so willingly engage with Gates, offering him a platform for his climate solutionism. It would do well for us to remember that Gates is not a scientist, or a public health expert. He is a mega-billionaire who made his fortune avoiding government regulations and dominating competitors with monopolistic practices. His money is now being channeled toward a wide range of projects that are deeply unpopular among many in the global South. Beyond climate technologies, Gates is investing in controversial “extinction” technologies of gene drives, a biotechnology tool to re-engineer natural populations. This is ostensibly being developed for malaria prevention, but is being vehemently resisted by social movements in West Africa where a Gates funded project wants to test out their tools. He has also been the principal funder of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, an agricultural program started in 2006 which claims to be working for small-scale farmers but, in fact, promotes high-tech market-based industrial agriculture in Africa. A report in 2020 revealed that the program had failed in a number of ways. Rather than improving farmer’s livelihoods, many went into debt in order to pay for the high costs of commercial seeds and synthetic fertilizer. [...] Mainstream media has been all too willing to uncritically engage Bill Gates’ preferred image as a well-meaning nerdy philanthropist in a cuddly sweater—offering him countless opportunities to share his “expertise” and promote his technofixes. It’s time to look beyond the rhetoric of this billionaire philanthrocapitalist and listen to those who realize that climate change will only be “solved” when we begin by identifying its primary cause: capitalism." [1] [1] Bill Gates and his technofix dream for the planet, https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-technofix-dream-for-the-planet https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-techn...
EcoMonkey 5y ago
We'll definitely need carbon removal of some kind. As the article states, we could shut emissions off today, but still deal with the effects of the cumulative emissions for centuries to come. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot that I personally can do other than to perhaps invest in some of these technologies. The most important thing for the climate right now that most of us can do anything about is for anyone with Democratic senators to call their senators and express to them how important it is that climate provisions in budget reconciliation aren't watered down. https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm Yes, I know the Democratic party is struggling to get its act together. But we have to make sure that come what may, the deal that gets struck is serious about addressing climate change. It may be a long while before the next time the US political system is even slightly in a state to develop meaningful climate policy.
pfdietz 5y ago
I think we're going to see equatorial countries doing geoengineering on their own if things get bad enough. Stratospheric aerosols, for example.
NelsonMinar 5y ago
I'm in favor of doing geoengineering research. We already are geoengineering, we've got 1.2C to show for it. We're just doing it very badly and with little understanding of what we're doing. The climate crisis is real and severe and it may be necessary to do something as terrible as spraying sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere for awhile. The interesting thing about aerosols is they aren't particularly expensive. Estimates are $2B-$8B a year. Not pocket change, but not a major expense for a wealthy country. Also there's no technical need for global consensus. It seems quite possible to me that a country, say China, will decide to just go do it. That's terrible politically, and could be dangerous. But it may happen. Here's a good book on the state of geoengineering, at least as of 2015: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26189312-the-planet-remade https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26189312-the-planet-rema...
- beckman466 5y ago
  > Also there's no technical need for global consensus. It seems quite possible to me that a country, say China, will decide to just go do it. That's terrible politically, and could be dangerous. But it may happen. it's not Chinese billionaires who are pushing their scary technofixes on talk shows. https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-technofix-dream-for-the-planet https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-techn...
  - thatguy0900 5y ago
    Well a Chinese billionaire who did would be disappeared
- willis936 5y ago
  I've been beating this exact drum this past year. I recently had a discussion with a friend who is doing a dissertation on atmospheric chemistry soon. They agreed that solar geoengineering is an important thing to consider but informed me that injecting aerosols is a black sheep topic. It's highly controversial due to military cloud seeding operations, is banned internarionally, and mentioning it to the scientific field will get you shut down (it isn't funded). This isn't a surprising reality, but the game theory is that isn't just our decision. There are players that won't ask for consent when faced with an existential threat. We should be sitting up in our seats and making sure that if it's to be done then we have a bulletproof blueprint of doing it right.
jaybrendansmith 5y ago
This is a fantastic, well-reasoned article that I agree with. The danger of methane release, particularly methane hydrates, is beyond scary. We must use whatever tools we have in our toolbox to contain this, and geo-engineering is by far the fastest and possibly the simplest. I think what holds us back on this front is fear, fear that we don't understand the impact as dropping sulphur or salt into clouds is the mother of all environmental impact statements. But holding off one degree of warming? That's some insane impacts right there, which include the catastrophic danger of methane release, the raising of sea levels by 2-7 meters, and other unknowns such as the halting of the gulf stream, ocean acidification, coral reefs and god knows what else. These considerations must be included in COP26 and similar summits for serious consideration, starting now.
bob229 5y ago
No, we’re an incredibly stupid species and we will destroy ourselves by the end of the century. Enjoy the ride

43 points by dr_dshiv 5y ago

Silly hypothetical: Once we’ve stopped GHG emissions, say we Mr. Burns block out the Sun. But from space and just a portion of it. The idea being that you just reduce the total insolation by a bit and let orbital mechanics and atmospheric effects even it out across the whole planet. If the blocker reflects all insolation, how large does it need to be today to get us back to 1990 levels? I also kind of love the ridiculous idea of this regular artificial eclipse that creeps around the planet’s surface and becomes part of our normal lives.

benbristow 5y ago
Sounds a bit dystopian to me. Want to shut down protests? Just block out the sun - no daylight for you! The word 'dystopian' rings a bell quite often when it comes to so-called 'climate change' saving methods...
- dinkleberg 5y ago
  It sounds even more dystopian if we do nothing at all.
  - abakker 5y ago
    I agree. Shutting down protests by making it dark doesn't even work? OTOH, letting most of the people on the planet starve to death seems actually bad.
  - titzer 5y ago
    Look at the current political leaders and ask yourself is something--anything--is going to happen. It isn't going to happen.
  - chmsky00 5y ago
    Actually, humans doing nothing would be the best thing for the environment Industrial energy consumption feedback loops will occur in any system we attempt to build to curb the issue Any machines, chemicals, processes, vehicles, etc, that need producing to “improve things” will all come along with chewing up resources at scale to provide the industrial pipeline The only scientifically acceptable path is LESS industrial scale economic activity: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210312-covid-19-paused-climate-emissions-but-theyre-rising-again https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210312-covid-19-paused-...
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      I'm not sure what "doing nothing" would look like if we don't mean "continue on our current path". The entire set of Western values as cemented by the Cold War seems incompatible with "less economic activity". And even if we somehow shake consumerism, modern agriculture is essential to feeding more than 1B humans and requires a significant amount of industrial scale economic activity. The majority of the time "buy/make this thing to reduce climate change" is a mere distraction. But there are a lot of resources that we can afford to spend, some of which are near-limitless if you consider predictable advances like asteroid mining. If we find ways to spend those resources to get us at least part way out of this mess, or to buy us time for societal change, then those are paths worth pursuing.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Blocking the sun enough to black out a protest for any length of time kills us all. Most of the proposals are talking like, 1% of the sun. The whole sun for a few hours is way too much, and would do all kinds of bad things. Besides, they already tear gas and mass arrest protests if the cops don’t like the protestors, that’s already pretty dystopian.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
greesil 5y ago
Supposedly this will have a negative impact on crop yields. They are photosynthesis machines after all.
- silisili 5y ago
  Why not over say, mid ocean or mid-desert, in a fixed spot?
  - gpm 5y ago
    Orbital mechanics. The efficient (and probably only viable) way to do this is a solar shade at lagrange point 1 (directly between the sun and earth). There's an unstable equillibrium point there were things can sit permanently with some (but minimal) station keeping. But you don't get to pick which part you're shading, you're always directly between the earth and the sun (or really the center of the earth-moon systems gravity, and the sun).
    - silisili 5y ago
      I see, thanks. I guess I was thinking of something that 'moved' with the earth, but that probably isn't realistic. Could something be placed at such a point that then only blocked sun on the far north/south of the planet, near the poles?
      - gpm 5y ago
        Not directly. You could place something in an orbit where it only ever blocked sun at the poles I think, but it would spend the vast majority of its time not blocking sun at all.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  There are always trade offs. This issue will NOT be solved without substantial costs.
wongarsu 5y ago
If we settle at about double the preindustrial CO2 level, we would need to block about 8% of the solar radiation [0]. You could do that eg with floating structures of ultra-thin translucent sheets that reduce light intensity in their shadow. To maximize effectiveness you can put them in a sun-synchronous orbit, so it casts it shadow always at high noon [1]. However this solves only the warming itself, it does nothing about things like ocean acidification. 0: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11993-solar-shield-could-be-quick-fix-for-global-warming/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11993-solar-shield-co... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
gpm 5y ago
This paper discusses the concept: https://www.pnas.org/content/103/46/17184 https://www.pnas.org/content/103/46/17184 I think they were targetting "stop warming" more than "1990 levels", but they estimated 20 million tons/a few million square kilometers.
BurningFrog 5y ago
The "right" way to do it, is to put something big at the L1 Lagrange Point. That is permanently between Earth and the sun, and you'd see it as a black dot at the center of the Sun. Downside is it needs to be real big. 2000 km, according to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade

karaterobot 5y ago

> Lest you dismiss me, I founded Carbon Engineering, one of the most visible companies developing technology to capture carbon... The company’s interests could be hurt if geoengineering were seen as an acceptable option... > ... Cooling the planet to reduce human suffering in this century will require carbon removal or solar geoengineering or both... It's good that he discloses this in the article, but I guess I'd prefer if he had no financial interest whatsoever. It complicates his position, which I happen to fully agree with. What he's really saying, the cynical media consumer who has metastasized in me says, is that you should continue investing in his industry, and also invest in a related industry that will raise the tide he's floating on.

asah 5y ago
It's impractical to demand both domain expertise and total impartiality - even academic researchers have strong proclivities. There are no neutral parties, and this is clearly labeled as one person's opinion.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  Granting the premise that there are no absolutely neutral parties, we can still agree that there are parties which are less neutral than others. Having a direct financial interest is a pretty hard line: for example, if the author was heavily invested in geoengineering companies, or had even been paid by geoengineering companies to write the article, I hope everyone would agree that his opinion was suspect. In this case, the author does not have a direct financial interest, but he has (I suppose) an indirect one, which is why I say I appreciate the article, but would prefer the same argument from coming another source, if I had the choice.
BurningFrog 5y ago
The pure expert is someone who devotes their life to expertise, but never gets paid to do work in that field. These people tend to not exist.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Carbon capture schemes are over sold and so-far under deliver to such an extent that these schemes serve almost no purpose whatsoever other than green-washing the polluters it enables to continue to pollute. Most of these schemes have good old coal, gas, or oil companies backing them. Their only agenda: delay the shutdown of their planet destroying activity for as long as possible. They spend billions lobbying for that. It's actually way more than what they spend on actual carbon capture. Planting a few trees here and there and going to ridiculous lengths to put a few tonnes of actual captured CO2 in the ground while they continue to release CO2 by the mega tonnes. The total amount of captured carbon (since people started doing that) is measured in tiny fractions of a percent of what we dump in the atmosphere every year. The best form of carbon capture is leaving it in the ground and not removing it from there to begin with. It would be cheaper to pay these companies to simply shut down their business than to allow them to keep making things worse and then funding the cleanup of their mess. Before we start hacking our planet, we need to pull the plug on doing the things that are actively making things worse to a far larger extent than we can feasibly clean things up. Why spent billions re-capturing a fraction of what we actually still put out every year? Much cheaper to stop doing that. That's carbon we won't have to put back into the ground. Even better: instead of spending money on that, we could simply stop spending public money on enabling the active adding of carbon to our atmosphere. I'm talking about the collective tax benefits, subsidies, government sponsored 'research', the odd bit of war fare in the middle east, etc. that the oil and gas industry continues to benefit from. That adds up to being way more than we're spending on renewable energy or indeed carbon capture. The amounts are measured in trillions.

yosito 5y ago

Carbon sequestration is one thing, but a lot of geoengineering ideas genuinely scare me. The side effects of clever attempts to cool the planet could easily be catastrophic. Yeah, the global climate "machine" is slowly heating up which could have irreversible effects over the next several centuries, but throwing wrenches into that machine to try to cool it down without the ability to precisely control it will likely have negative side effects much sooner.

dr_dshiv 5y ago
What's the argument against researching it? Especially marine cloud brightening. I could imagine something where containerships were mandated to have devices that would loft salt aerosols in their exhaust. Investment in R&D seems wise. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
- lm28469 5y ago
  > What's the argument against researching it? It's a diversion. They're all stopgap measures with no real long term application. You can paint all the road white and add artificial clouds, if you continue to live like resources are unlimited and pollution isn't an issue you'll sooner or later hit another problem. If we don't take care of the root cause we're bound to fail. Unlimited growth and exponential energy usage isn't possible in a closed system. All these new "green" economy, "green" growth, &c. are perpetuating the idea that we're going down the right path and simply have to tweak a few variables to go from "catastrophic failure" to "idyllic paradise" I don't think people truly understand how fucked we are and how deep the problem runs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    There’s a kinda fundamental tension between “we’re fucked” and “we shouldn’t investigate this strategy because it doesn’t handle the root cause”. If it’s such a big issue, don’t we need to throw the kitchen sink at it?

Bombthecat 5y ago

We need to, no way around it. Or we accept the death of millions or worse, even billions.

leesec 5y ago

It'll have too.

endisneigh 5y ago

Due to the rampant worldwide inequality in income, resources, etc. there's no solution. The answer is an unequivocal "no."

perfunctory 5y ago

Warming is not the only negative effect of the excess GHG emissions. Ocean acidification for example is another one. Blocking the sunlight will not solve that.

lokar 5y ago
He pretty clearly argues we need to stop emitting, remove/store the excess AND geo engineer.

hotz 5y ago

The lefty/liberal god complex of wanting to control everything, even the planet is getting really boring. You guys need to get hobbies and stop making life miserable for people who think differently.

beckman466 5y ago

"Philanthrocapitalists are driving massively profitable schemes dressed up as eco-friendly, pro-poor solutions to climate disaster. [...] Geoengineering comprises of large-scale controversial schemes to intervene in the earth’s oceans, soils, and atmosphere in attempts to manage the effects of climate change. Many of these schemes are extraordinary—such as blocking the sun to stop temperature increases, increasing the whiteness of clouds to reflect sunlight back into space, and sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere with industrial-scale fans. In order to have any impact on the climate, they would have to be done on a planetary scale so the potential risks are many: they range from destabilizing weather patterns, creating droughts and floods in Africa and South America, and acidifying the ocean, to polluting the atmosphere and locking the world into unstoppable management of the atmosphere. Many proposals for removing CO2 from the skies require huge amounts of energy, chemicals, infrastructure, and land in size equivalent to several countries. Yet crazy, inequitable, and dangerous as geoengineering may seem, it is currently been embraced by polluting industries and increasingly some governments as a supposed “solution” to an off-kilter warming world. [...] Gates’ approach to climate change is to champion the technofixes that will enable the fossil fuel machine to continue pumping more oil. He is after all personally invested in the infrastructure that relies on their success. It is also unsurprising given the pervasive technophilia of our time, that even influential personalities like Trevor Noah whom many look to for critical analysis on global issues, would so willingly engage with Gates, offering him a platform for his climate solutionism. It would do well for us to remember that Gates is not a scientist, or a public health expert. He is a mega-billionaire who made his fortune avoiding government regulations and dominating competitors with monopolistic practices. His money is now being channeled toward a wide range of projects that are deeply unpopular among many in the global South. Beyond climate technologies, Gates is investing in controversial “extinction” technologies of gene drives, a biotechnology tool to re-engineer natural populations. This is ostensibly being developed for malaria prevention, but is being vehemently resisted by social movements in West Africa where a Gates funded project wants to test out their tools. He has also been the principal funder of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, an agricultural program started in 2006 which claims to be working for small-scale farmers but, in fact, promotes high-tech market-based industrial agriculture in Africa. A report in 2020 revealed that the program had failed in a number of ways. Rather than improving farmer’s livelihoods, many went into debt in order to pay for the high costs of commercial seeds and synthetic fertilizer. [...] Mainstream media has been all too willing to uncritically engage Bill Gates’ preferred image as a well-meaning nerdy philanthropist in a cuddly sweater—offering him countless opportunities to share his “expertise” and promote his technofixes. It’s time to look beyond the rhetoric of this billionaire philanthrocapitalist and listen to those who realize that climate change will only be “solved” when we begin by identifying its primary cause: capitalism." [1] [1] Bill Gates and his technofix dream for the planet, https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-technofix-dream-for-the-planet https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-techn...

EcoMonkey 5y ago

We'll definitely need carbon removal of some kind. As the article states, we could shut emissions off today, but still deal with the effects of the cumulative emissions for centuries to come. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot that I personally can do other than to perhaps invest in some of these technologies. The most important thing for the climate right now that most of us can do anything about is for anyone with Democratic senators to call their senators and express to them how important it is that climate provisions in budget reconciliation aren't watered down. https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm Yes, I know the Democratic party is struggling to get its act together. But we have to make sure that come what may, the deal that gets struck is serious about addressing climate change. It may be a long while before the next time the US political system is even slightly in a state to develop meaningful climate policy.

pfdietz 5y ago

I think we're going to see equatorial countries doing geoengineering on their own if things get bad enough. Stratospheric aerosols, for example.

NelsonMinar 5y ago

I'm in favor of doing geoengineering research. We already are geoengineering, we've got 1.2C to show for it. We're just doing it very badly and with little understanding of what we're doing. The climate crisis is real and severe and it may be necessary to do something as terrible as spraying sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere for awhile. The interesting thing about aerosols is they aren't particularly expensive. Estimates are $2B-$8B a year. Not pocket change, but not a major expense for a wealthy country. Also there's no technical need for global consensus. It seems quite possible to me that a country, say China, will decide to just go do it. That's terrible politically, and could be dangerous. But it may happen. Here's a good book on the state of geoengineering, at least as of 2015: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26189312-the-planet-remade https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26189312-the-planet-rema...

beckman466 5y ago
> Also there's no technical need for global consensus. It seems quite possible to me that a country, say China, will decide to just go do it. That's terrible politically, and could be dangerous. But it may happen. it's not Chinese billionaires who are pushing their scary technofixes on talk shows. https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-technofix-dream-for-the-planet https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-techn...
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  Well a Chinese billionaire who did would be disappeared
willis936 5y ago
I've been beating this exact drum this past year. I recently had a discussion with a friend who is doing a dissertation on atmospheric chemistry soon. They agreed that solar geoengineering is an important thing to consider but informed me that injecting aerosols is a black sheep topic. It's highly controversial due to military cloud seeding operations, is banned internarionally, and mentioning it to the scientific field will get you shut down (it isn't funded). This isn't a surprising reality, but the game theory is that isn't just our decision. There are players that won't ask for consent when faced with an existential threat. We should be sitting up in our seats and making sure that if it's to be done then we have a bulletproof blueprint of doing it right.

jaybrendansmith 5y ago

This is a fantastic, well-reasoned article that I agree with. The danger of methane release, particularly methane hydrates, is beyond scary. We must use whatever tools we have in our toolbox to contain this, and geo-engineering is by far the fastest and possibly the simplest. I think what holds us back on this front is fear, fear that we don't understand the impact as dropping sulphur or salt into clouds is the mother of all environmental impact statements. But holding off one degree of warming? That's some insane impacts right there, which include the catastrophic danger of methane release, the raising of sea levels by 2-7 meters, and other unknowns such as the halting of the gulf stream, ocean acidification, coral reefs and god knows what else. These considerations must be included in COP26 and similar summits for serious consideration, starting now.

bob229 5y ago

No, we’re an incredibly stupid species and we will destroy ourselves by the end of the century. Enjoy the ride