4 ms·

Ctrl+F geoengineering: 0 hits Come on, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering it entered mainstr

Ctrl+F geoengineering: 0 hits Come on, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering it entered mainstream just recently: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/climate-change-geoengineering.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/climate-change-ge... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/26/planet-earth-climate-crisis-geoengineering https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/26/planet... https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/09/615/what-is-geoengineering-and-why-should-you-care-climate-change-harvard/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/09/615/what-is-geoe... By now one question should remain: why was the very idea of geoengineering silenced for decades behind sneers and activism and bad press, when we could implement it half a century ago and avert much of the climate change?

bee_rider 4y ago
This person is assuming the problem will occur, and thinking about what their type of work will look like under those conditions. So, it is less interesting of an article if you want to hear about attempts to innovate around the whole problem.
warning26 4y ago
OP sort of addresses this in the end: > a startup isn't going to fix everything and capture all the carbon
slavboj 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dividedbyzero 4y ago
I think the general consensus is that we've proven to be complete and absolute rubbish when it comes to predicting how vast complex real-world systems that we can't read worth a damn behave when we put them under major stresses, and the vast majority of attempts to hack ecosystems have been disasters, meaning that we're just as likely to make things even worse if we try to apply our crude means and models to make planet-scale modifications to climate and biosphere.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I think that was the basis for Snowpiercer.
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  We are already putting major stress to the environment, so we might need to experiment a bit with different methods to better understand and control climate. The problem is that changing the earth’s climate can only be done at a global scale, so this is a project where every country needs to cooperate and requires incredible amounts of trust on each other… (which I don’t think will happen soon enough)
- jcoq 4y ago
  Nearly all of the disastrous things we've done to the planet were understood to have negative environmental consequences and yet we did them anyhow. Meanwhile, a great deal of our environmental interventions have been incredibly successful. So I'm totally unconvinced by this often recited and rarely supported mantra.
  - dividedbyzero 4y ago
    Some people may have understood, or rather suspected. They weren't in the majority though, or lots of misguided geoengineering wouldn't have been done the way it was. Clearing forests has been progress thing until relatively recently, draining swamps was a totally great thing until even more recently, straightening rivers into concrete beds has been considered progress up into my lifetime. All of these things have had lots of bad downstream consequences to the point that lots of places now spend huge sums to undo at least some of these developments. And come to think of it, wildfire management is another geoengineering effort that lots of very dry places totally screwed up (e.g. California, as discussed frequently on this very site) out of the very best intentions, but working with broken models. Plenty of times species have been introduced overseas to control other species, and it's always been a disaster, to the great surprise of everyone involved, time and again. Dams for hydro power are still considered ultra low ecological footprint power generation by lots of people, even though they form barriers that can completely disrupt river ecosystems to the point of leaving desolate wastelands in the riverbed downstream, disrupt riverside ecosystems downstream that depend on regular floods, allow for excessive water extraction and so on. Hunting predators to extinction is still widely popular, even though ecosystems without predators can't and don't function. I've had conversations with local people who're hellbent on exterminating the few remaining local beavers because they damage trees; but beavers are a keystone species, tons of species depend on beaver-created clearings. The list doesn't end: Dumping toxic waste into rivers has been considered harmless until toxins accumulated to levels extreme enough to severely hurt people, by which point some of the worst-polluted rivers had been pretty m much sterilized (e.g. the lower Rhine). It's hard do believe this today, but people did honestly think nature would take care of the gunk, filter it out or dilute it or whatever. We pumped lead into the environment by means of leaded gasoline, one of the craziest "accidental" geoengineering adventures to date, until whole forests started dying, and of course some people saw that one coming, but then some people saw the world end when the LHC went online, and good thing we didn't listen to those people. When I grew up, climate change was widely considered a crazy myth; some saw it coming early on, the majority had a good chuckle; yet that's the biggest geohacking fuck-up in all our history, and it took us that long to realize the fact that climate change is real. Generally speaking, with experiments like this, the true consequences tend to not become visible until way down the line, at which point cleanup may be impossible (e.g. climate change, the current mass extinction) so we need to anticipate such things and get it right the first try. Yet we've historically both failed to build non-rubbish models and then to heed those few warnings we did get. Convenience and progress and growth seem to always trump the naysayers, and often that's just fine – the world didn't end when the LHC went online and we learned a lot about the fundamentals of physics. Good thing we didn't listen to them. But all this history leaves me personally highly pessimistic when it comes to more planet-scale climate hacking, given that we don't even understand the downstream consequences of our past and current climate hacking and given that our track record of getting this sort of thing right on the first (or any) try is so grotesquely bad. We're great at problem-solving short-term, everyday issues with near-immediate feedback loops, like by mass-producing crazy good tools; we're bad when things get big, abstract, long-term, with long-ish feedback cycles e.g. when building nuclear reactors that don't malfunction in major ways, because we start making bad compromises and take shortcuts even though we should and do know better, because we socially can't help doing this; and we're sad failures at anything extremely large-scale, extremely long-term, extremely long feedback cycle-ish, like climate change or – planet-scale climate engineering. Since we are bound to get pretty desperate and since climate hacking does offer an enticingly quick way out, I'm confident we'll try it at some point. When we do, I very much hope I'll find my pessimism proven wrong. Edit: fixed formatting
kossTKR 4y ago
There's no profit incentive to geoengineer or clean up anything so nothing will get fixed - at least not if the future will be a continuation of how capitalism, industry and geopolitics have worked literally forever - probably also biological and even physical systems if we extrapolate. It's always boom then bust, everywhere in space and time. That said i still hope we'll manage in some obscure way because we have no other choice!
- paulbaumgart 4y ago
  This is probably true at the level of corporations, but not clearly the case at the level of countries. An interesting paper on the economics of geoengineering, if you’re curious: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18622 https://www.nber.org/papers/w18622
skyfaller 4y ago
I think this is a decent and brief response to why geoengineering is a bad idea: https://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/reasons-to-oppose/ https://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/reasons-to-oppose/ The most convincing argument to me is that we're already facing a vast problem that would require a great deal of geoengineering to counter. If polluters realized they could geoengineer the problem away, they would stop trying to reduce emissions, and the geoengineering problem would become even larger and more unmanageable. Due to how entropy works, it's always more efficient to simply not spill milk on the floor than to mop it up. Deciding that you should just have a milk bottle fight because you have a mop in the house is... strange? It will never be more efficient to scrub greenhouse gases from the air than to avoid emitting them in the first place.
- jcoq 4y ago
  That argument is totally unconvincing... like saying not to treat some lung cancer because the patient will just smoke more.
  - CM30 4y ago
    Agreed. It also makes me feel like some people want there to be no 'easy' solutions to problems, because they despise how society is going and wish it would be forced to change. I suspect they'd still be unhappy even if there was a magic wand you could wave that would instantly fix climate change (or make it impossible to occur).
- paulbaumgart 4y ago
  For a more balanced view, I highly recommend this talk from one of the leading minds in the field: https://hmnh.harvard.edu/file/1039929 https://hmnh.harvard.edu/file/1039929
- poulpy123 4y ago
  I agree that geoengineering is a bad idea but they use the "white men" bogeyman, that's really stupid. And also they don't really talk about to price to pay for degrowth
legutierr 4y ago
By geoengineering, you mean blocking out the light of the sun? Won't that significantly reduce the photosynthetic potential of Earth, and significantly reduce the carrying capacity of the Earth for life? There are plenty of planets and moons that are cooler because they receive less sunlight. None of them host any life that we can detect. Isn't there a real risk that geoengineering would just end up turning the Earth into something resembling Mars, irreversibly? The Earth has supported abundant life with an atmosphere with a higher concentration of C02 than it has now. Has it ever supported abundant life with the solar energy being reduced to the extent required to reduce climate change?
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  It's not an exact measurement of incoming solar energy, but the Earth has supported abundant life through a much wider range of climate variation than anything we're facing today. I don't know of any evidence that we're in a climate "sweet spot" where we'd need to worry about something like that. (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...)
marcosdumay 4y ago
Because "solar geoengineering" is a joke. Why wait all the time until global warming destabilizes every ecosystem on Earth? You can have it today, just by spraying the upper atmosphere! People do take geoengineering quite seriously. People do talk seriously about carbon capture, about ecosystem husbandry, about forced forestation, even about ocean seeding (there have been enough research about this one to conclude we are not desperate enough yet). It's only global shading that isn't serious.
realo 4y ago
Well… IMHO trying to solve our climate change issues with geoengineering seems similar to the USA trying solve their gun issues by putting even more guns in circulation. Does not fix the root causes and I don’t see how it can work long-term.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  And that's an entirely reasonable stance that as far as I can tell is the consensus among climate researchers. But it logically implies that the narrative of climate apocalypse is not true - that nature is capable of self-balancing within the parameters industrial civilization throws at it, and that our current climate trajectory is mild enough that it's not worth pursuing some potential solutions if their side effects look too serious.
jcoq 4y ago
Climate change has turned into a sort of quasi-religious moral issue that blends with other issues of our day. The thinking goes that, if only we could become pure and stop partaking in the evils of consumer capitalism, we might appease a hidden power and be saved from a myriad of bogeyman such as climate change. This mindset fails to reasonably consider the certainty and enormity of the threat. Organized civilization is likely to end. Billions will die and we might very well become extinct. The problem must be attacked with the full force of human intellect. It's so damn obvious that "wait for everyone to become super duper conscientious" is a fool's plan.
poulpy123 4y ago
Anthropic global warming is by definition geoengineering. We are not controlling it, what makes you think that we can control other geoengineerings techniques ?

bee_rider 4y ago

This person is assuming the problem will occur, and thinking about what their type of work will look like under those conditions. So, it is less interesting of an article if you want to hear about attempts to innovate around the whole problem.

warning26 4y ago

OP sort of addresses this in the end: > a startup isn't going to fix everything and capture all the carbon

slavboj 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dividedbyzero 4y ago

I think the general consensus is that we've proven to be complete and absolute rubbish when it comes to predicting how vast complex real-world systems that we can't read worth a damn behave when we put them under major stresses, and the vast majority of attempts to hack ecosystems have been disasters, meaning that we're just as likely to make things even worse if we try to apply our crude means and models to make planet-scale modifications to climate and biosphere.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I think that was the basis for Snowpiercer.
cyber_kinetist 4y ago
We are already putting major stress to the environment, so we might need to experiment a bit with different methods to better understand and control climate. The problem is that changing the earth’s climate can only be done at a global scale, so this is a project where every country needs to cooperate and requires incredible amounts of trust on each other… (which I don’t think will happen soon enough)
jcoq 4y ago
Nearly all of the disastrous things we've done to the planet were understood to have negative environmental consequences and yet we did them anyhow. Meanwhile, a great deal of our environmental interventions have been incredibly successful. So I'm totally unconvinced by this often recited and rarely supported mantra.
- dividedbyzero 4y ago
  Some people may have understood, or rather suspected. They weren't in the majority though, or lots of misguided geoengineering wouldn't have been done the way it was. Clearing forests has been progress thing until relatively recently, draining swamps was a totally great thing until even more recently, straightening rivers into concrete beds has been considered progress up into my lifetime. All of these things have had lots of bad downstream consequences to the point that lots of places now spend huge sums to undo at least some of these developments. And come to think of it, wildfire management is another geoengineering effort that lots of very dry places totally screwed up (e.g. California, as discussed frequently on this very site) out of the very best intentions, but working with broken models. Plenty of times species have been introduced overseas to control other species, and it's always been a disaster, to the great surprise of everyone involved, time and again. Dams for hydro power are still considered ultra low ecological footprint power generation by lots of people, even though they form barriers that can completely disrupt river ecosystems to the point of leaving desolate wastelands in the riverbed downstream, disrupt riverside ecosystems downstream that depend on regular floods, allow for excessive water extraction and so on. Hunting predators to extinction is still widely popular, even though ecosystems without predators can't and don't function. I've had conversations with local people who're hellbent on exterminating the few remaining local beavers because they damage trees; but beavers are a keystone species, tons of species depend on beaver-created clearings. The list doesn't end: Dumping toxic waste into rivers has been considered harmless until toxins accumulated to levels extreme enough to severely hurt people, by which point some of the worst-polluted rivers had been pretty m much sterilized (e.g. the lower Rhine). It's hard do believe this today, but people did honestly think nature would take care of the gunk, filter it out or dilute it or whatever. We pumped lead into the environment by means of leaded gasoline, one of the craziest "accidental" geoengineering adventures to date, until whole forests started dying, and of course some people saw that one coming, but then some people saw the world end when the LHC went online, and good thing we didn't listen to those people. When I grew up, climate change was widely considered a crazy myth; some saw it coming early on, the majority had a good chuckle; yet that's the biggest geohacking fuck-up in all our history, and it took us that long to realize the fact that climate change is real. Generally speaking, with experiments like this, the true consequences tend to not become visible until way down the line, at which point cleanup may be impossible (e.g. climate change, the current mass extinction) so we need to anticipate such things and get it right the first try. Yet we've historically both failed to build non-rubbish models and then to heed those few warnings we did get. Convenience and progress and growth seem to always trump the naysayers, and often that's just fine – the world didn't end when the LHC went online and we learned a lot about the fundamentals of physics. Good thing we didn't listen to them. But all this history leaves me personally highly pessimistic when it comes to more planet-scale climate hacking, given that we don't even understand the downstream consequences of our past and current climate hacking and given that our track record of getting this sort of thing right on the first (or any) try is so grotesquely bad. We're great at problem-solving short-term, everyday issues with near-immediate feedback loops, like by mass-producing crazy good tools; we're bad when things get big, abstract, long-term, with long-ish feedback cycles e.g. when building nuclear reactors that don't malfunction in major ways, because we start making bad compromises and take shortcuts even though we should and do know better, because we socially can't help doing this; and we're sad failures at anything extremely large-scale, extremely long-term, extremely long feedback cycle-ish, like climate change or – planet-scale climate engineering. Since we are bound to get pretty desperate and since climate hacking does offer an enticingly quick way out, I'm confident we'll try it at some point. When we do, I very much hope I'll find my pessimism proven wrong. Edit: fixed formatting

kossTKR 4y ago

There's no profit incentive to geoengineer or clean up anything so nothing will get fixed - at least not if the future will be a continuation of how capitalism, industry and geopolitics have worked literally forever - probably also biological and even physical systems if we extrapolate. It's always boom then bust, everywhere in space and time. That said i still hope we'll manage in some obscure way because we have no other choice!

paulbaumgart 4y ago
This is probably true at the level of corporations, but not clearly the case at the level of countries. An interesting paper on the economics of geoengineering, if you’re curious: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18622 https://www.nber.org/papers/w18622

skyfaller 4y ago

I think this is a decent and brief response to why geoengineering is a bad idea: https://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/reasons-to-oppose/ https://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/reasons-to-oppose/ The most convincing argument to me is that we're already facing a vast problem that would require a great deal of geoengineering to counter. If polluters realized they could geoengineer the problem away, they would stop trying to reduce emissions, and the geoengineering problem would become even larger and more unmanageable. Due to how entropy works, it's always more efficient to simply not spill milk on the floor than to mop it up. Deciding that you should just have a milk bottle fight because you have a mop in the house is... strange? It will never be more efficient to scrub greenhouse gases from the air than to avoid emitting them in the first place.

jcoq 4y ago
That argument is totally unconvincing... like saying not to treat some lung cancer because the patient will just smoke more.
- CM30 4y ago
  Agreed. It also makes me feel like some people want there to be no 'easy' solutions to problems, because they despise how society is going and wish it would be forced to change. I suspect they'd still be unhappy even if there was a magic wand you could wave that would instantly fix climate change (or make it impossible to occur).
paulbaumgart 4y ago
For a more balanced view, I highly recommend this talk from one of the leading minds in the field: https://hmnh.harvard.edu/file/1039929 https://hmnh.harvard.edu/file/1039929
poulpy123 4y ago
I agree that geoengineering is a bad idea but they use the "white men" bogeyman, that's really stupid. And also they don't really talk about to price to pay for degrowth

legutierr 4y ago

By geoengineering, you mean blocking out the light of the sun? Won't that significantly reduce the photosynthetic potential of Earth, and significantly reduce the carrying capacity of the Earth for life? There are plenty of planets and moons that are cooler because they receive less sunlight. None of them host any life that we can detect. Isn't there a real risk that geoengineering would just end up turning the Earth into something resembling Mars, irreversibly? The Earth has supported abundant life with an atmosphere with a higher concentration of C02 than it has now. Has it ever supported abundant life with the solar energy being reduced to the extent required to reduce climate change?

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
It's not an exact measurement of incoming solar energy, but the Earth has supported abundant life through a much wider range of climate variation than anything we're facing today. I don't know of any evidence that we're in a climate "sweet spot" where we'd need to worry about something like that. (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...)

marcosdumay 4y ago

Because "solar geoengineering" is a joke. Why wait all the time until global warming destabilizes every ecosystem on Earth? You can have it today, just by spraying the upper atmosphere! People do take geoengineering quite seriously. People do talk seriously about carbon capture, about ecosystem husbandry, about forced forestation, even about ocean seeding (there have been enough research about this one to conclude we are not desperate enough yet). It's only global shading that isn't serious.

realo 4y ago

Well… IMHO trying to solve our climate change issues with geoengineering seems similar to the USA trying solve their gun issues by putting even more guns in circulation. Does not fix the root causes and I don’t see how it can work long-term.

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
And that's an entirely reasonable stance that as far as I can tell is the consensus among climate researchers. But it logically implies that the narrative of climate apocalypse is not true - that nature is capable of self-balancing within the parameters industrial civilization throws at it, and that our current climate trajectory is mild enough that it's not worth pursuing some potential solutions if their side effects look too serious.

jcoq 4y ago

Climate change has turned into a sort of quasi-religious moral issue that blends with other issues of our day. The thinking goes that, if only we could become pure and stop partaking in the evils of consumer capitalism, we might appease a hidden power and be saved from a myriad of bogeyman such as climate change. This mindset fails to reasonably consider the certainty and enormity of the threat. Organized civilization is likely to end. Billions will die and we might very well become extinct. The problem must be attacked with the full force of human intellect. It's so damn obvious that "wait for everyone to become super duper conscientious" is a fool's plan.

poulpy123 4y ago

Anthropic global warming is by definition geoengineering. We are not controlling it, what makes you think that we can control other geoengineerings techniques ?