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I've had the thought for a while now that it might be a good idea to start changing the climate change narrative to a problem of planetary heat engineering, not
by anonporridge 5y ago
I've had the thought for a while now that it might be a good idea to start changing the climate change narrative to a problem of planetary heat engineering, not simply a problem of GHG reduction.
The current narrative is largely defeatist and regressive. It's largely about rolling back growth and the amount of energy civilization has harnessed.
But if the narrative was altered to be a heat engineering problem, then it fundamentally changes how we think about it. Removing CO2 (insulation) is one option, but so are projects like solar reflection or some other forms of heat dissipation or heat sinking.
- rland 5y agoI think there are other effects of increased CO2 concentration that are not well understood and could be catastrophic. Like ocean acidification. That actually scares me far more than the heat aspect.
- anonporridge 5y agoI think we're deep into the territory of "literally anything we choose to do or not do is going to create a never ending game of whack-a-mole unintended consequences". We own the fate of our civilization and the environment it relies on. It's time to take ownership and stop cowering in the cave.
- erosenbe0 5y agoIt's also a bit more difficult to diffuse out of classrooms and such with 400+ ppm background vs 300ppm. At what threshold it affects alertness, cognition, or motivation is disputed.
- ben_w 5y ago“Threshold” implies an on-off response, the various research papers I’ve seen indicated it has a continuous response.
- labster 5y ago> not well understood and could be catastrophic. Like ocean acidification Look up carbonate compensation depth, your mind will be blown. Yes, researchers understand the effects of climate change because they have been looking at it for 40+ years. Being extra worried about climate change is a lot like climate denial, in that it doesn’t show trust in our scientists. There is no need to invent trouble — the challenges we know we will face are hard enough.
- andi999 5y agoFrom 1000ppm ppl get dumb.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoThe current narrative is intentionally defeatist because it's promoted by fossil fuel interests to serve their short term interests. People who aren't interested in prolonging our use of fossil fuels are instead excited about the cheapest energy in history that renewables provide.
- Joeri 5y agoAlright, I’ll try to pitch the counter argument. The current green movement narrative is the same it has always been: living within our means. The current fossil fuel driven economy is objectively unsustainable. Yes, you can geo-engineer your way out of the heat problem, but that doesn’t solve all the other problems resulting from unsustainable growth, and who knows what fresh problems this will create. What the green movement wants and has always wanted is a conservative growth model, where the growth is not based on the depletion of finite resources. It is mostly the promoters of unsustainable growth that twist this into an anti-growth narrative. Now, techno-optimists say we can solve the problems created by unsustainable growth with more technology, and this may be true. But it is asking everyone to take a pretty large gamble on technology that does not exist yet. The conservative strategy is sustainability, and that goes much wider than just solving climate change.
- pards 5y agoWatch "Don't look up"
- NavinF 5y agohttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up?utm_source=url https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look...
- popcube 5y agoyes, until now, scientists always can save us. but they just need one time...
- hedora 5y agoScientists have done more than enough. The issue now is entrenched interests blocking progress. We had all the technology we needed to go carbon neutral back in the 1980's. Back then, even the American Petroleum Institute (yes, the planet burners) were raising alarms over CO2 and global warming. We have many technological doublings ahead of us before technology fails to provide opportunities for growth. That's not the problem. The problem is that our economic system is terrible at pricing in externalities. Edit: Come to think of it, the American Petroleum Institute scientists said the exact same thing back then. Skip to the last page: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3483045-AQ-9-Task-Force-Meeting-1980.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3483045-AQ-9-Task-Fo...
- wongarsu 5y agoThere are certainly cases where a more holistic view is very important. For example a plan to plant trees in the Sahara desert, irrigated by desalination plants powered by solar, at first glance seems like a "reasonable" plan to sequester carbon. But once you account for the fact that the desert reflects a lot more light then trees do it actually looks like it would accelerate global warming. The plan gets kind of "saved" once you consider the effects of the new forest on weather patterns: the trees cause more clouds to form which are quite reflective and bring the plan back into the green, but not enough to be useful. So not a great plan, but a great example of how some of the solutions can be a lot more complex than just "remove CO2". At the same time any plan that cools without removing CO2 (e.g. planetary sunshades[1]) have the downside that they don't solve ocean acidification. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade
- genewitch 5y agodon't the rainforests depend on that desert being windswept, in that the dust contains several hundred thousand tons of phosphorus...
- YawningAngel 5y agoAll the geoengineering we might do is totally unproven and untested. If the alternative is a calamity then yes, of course we'll do it. As things stand, it seems like we should be putting as much effort as we can into the thing we know works (reducing greenhouse gas emissions).
- gumby 5y ago> GHG reduction The fixation on GHG reduction is, as a friend of mine puts it, a suicide pact, simply reducing the second derivative. Unfortunately it's easy to understand and discuss, so that's where all the attention goes. The issue of climate repair (and long term curation, unfortunately) seems to frighten lots of people. There are people working on it, but they are a small community.
- germinalphrase 5y agoKeywords for learning more about ‘climate repair’?
- gumby 5y agoLiterally “climate repair” and “climate restoration”. Some NGOs to check out include the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge and Foundation for Climate restoration.
- germinalphrase 5y agoThank you.
- maxerickson 5y agoInsolation is on the order of 100 petawatts. Human energy utilization is on the order of 20 terawatts, 0.02% of the power the sunlight that hits the atmosphere. Our energy utilization doesn't matter a lot.
- philipswood 5y agoI personally like the idea of a satellite swarm that can tweak (in a controlled manner) 2% of incoming solar radiation. An artificial ring system for earth made out of reflective satellites.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y agoHigh CO2 concentrations have other effects too, including ocean acidification and cognitive impairment.
- goda90 5y agoAnd crop nutrient depletion
- genewitch 5y agoplants are 99.9999% carbon from carbon dioxide, though... what? edit: i mean of the things in a plant that contain carbon and don't, 99... whatever percent of a plant is atmospheric carbon. all the soil amendments added are to replace stuff like fungus that normally forms a relationship with nearby plants and gives nutrients that plants use to modulate energy production and transpiration (or whatever), similar to how we need all of the "salts" to have a functioning brain. N-P-K lets plants more efficiently turn atmospheric carbon into food than without. Couple this with the fact that humans use nearly all of a plant now, to make cooking oil, fuel oil, and animal feed, there's nothing left after we harvest for the fungus to eat. I normally would have launched into a diatribe against bayer/monsanto as a reply about stuff like this, but as it stands, i'm fine with careful and scientifically sound application of N-P-K for huge farms. I do, however, have a problem with pesticides and their "inactive" ingredients, not the least of which due to drinking water from an untreated well, myself. Also i know it's not 99.9999%.
- smolder 5y agoStudies show higher atmospheric carbon means the crops grow faster and have lower micronutrient density than crops grown in lower co2 environments. Our crops grow faster but aren't as healthy for us.
- genewitch 5y agoI would like to read those, should you happen to know which ones. It seems counter-intuitive. soil amendments only including N-P-K don't seem like they'd help much with micronutrients anyhow, so ideally "functional local farming" should be considered an imperative, at least for supplementing mass-farmed foods. Like sure, canned and frozen vegetables for 6 meals a week, but one meal should have locally sourced something that hasn't been frozen or otherwise treated. A properly managed and grown acre of land can provide a quarter ton to a ton of food in a year, but you can't use tractors or anything, it all has to be managed by hand or small machines.
- NumberWangMan 5y agoI agree, there is a big defeatist and regressive narrative. But some of us do focus on the positive -- we can fix this, and fix a lot of other problems at the same time, and it's not even that costly if we do it right, gradually switching our energy sources over time and gradually changing our living habits where we're willing. People always talk about a carbon tax, because it's a really, really good idea: it is very economically efficient, is targeted like a laser at the real problem, and will have huge benefits even just in terms of reducing premature deaths from particulate pollution. The reason I think stopping use of fossil fuels is really the only reasonable solution, or is at least a necessary part of any solution, is that anything else is like trying to fix your car accelerating out of control by just driving around with one foot on the brake. Trying to balance the increased greenhouse effect by blocking sunlight might work a bit, but there are all sorts of ways it can go wrong -- it creates a moral hazard where everyone will have less incentive to stop using fossil fuels and thus continue making the root cause of the problem worse, and we have to keep doing it forever -- stopping means a sudden massive amount of climate change that people won't have time to adjust to. There are so many really easy ways that we can cut our emissions massively, with technology we have available today, with virtually no impact on our living standards. The rest will take some time and technological improvements, but it's all doable! And I've not heard of any sort of heat dissipation geo-engineering ideas -- the only feasible way I know of to get the earth's heat dissipation back to normal is to take off this extra blanket of greenhouse gases we've put on it. Any sort of heat dissipation would have to transfer heat to the upper atmosphere without being absorbed by CO2, and I don't think there's any way we could do that at the scale required to have a noticeable effect.