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I feel like stratospheric aerosol injection would have some crazy unintended side effects. The size and complexity of the atmosphere is mind blowing. A mistake
by babblingfish 4y ago
I feel like stratospheric aerosol injection would have some crazy unintended side effects. The size and complexity of the atmosphere is mind blowing. A mistake here could literally ruin the atmosphere for the entire globe.
Reduction of Carbon Emissions is and always will be the best strategy to slow down global warming. These moon shot initiatives are necessary but should not be taken too seriously given their low probability of success.
- thomascgalvin 4y ago> I feel like stratospheric aerosol injection would have some crazy unintended side effects. Yeah, but the alternative is lower profits for entrenched corporate powers, so ... In all seriousness, though, I'm glad someone is considering all options, because the political reality of this planet is that the common-sense approach may very well be off the table, meaning a moonshot is all we'll have left.
- faangiq 4y ago> Yeah, but the alternative is lower profits for entrenched corporate powers, so ... Can’t we just pay these people enough to go away?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- arealaccount 4y agoNot really possible since the share holders will always want an ROI
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wnolens 4y agoAnd then the solution to global warming is close to just being literally money https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Cure_for_AIDS https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Cure_for_AIDS
- autoexec 4y agoThese people already have more money than they could ever spend in their lifetimes. We could never pay them enough because the problem with them is that they have no concept of "enough". Their greed is insatiable and they don't care who or how many get hurt as long as they get even a little more wealth and power.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ianai 4y agoI wish there were like a “we get it. You won at scarce resource creation/allocation. Here’s your $Buckillion award and you never have to worry about bills again.” Maybe we give them a national audience ala a state of the union address once in five years and a bill with a straight up/down.
- kortilla 4y ago> Can’t we just pay these people enough to go away? “These people” is most of the population. Look at how little people have done to reduce their own meat reduction, transportation usage, etc. People claim they care about global warming but air travel is back in full force and US citizens are throwing shit fits about petrol prices being a little closer to other western countries. There is no corporate evil cabal keeping CO2 emissions high. It’s what the population actually wants through revealed preferences despite their expressed preferences.
- woodruffw 4y agoIt’s a little bit of both: incentive structures are both established and strengthened by profit interests.
- parineum 4y agoIt's not a little bit of both. "Greedy corporations" don't create demand or consumption. Corporations want your money so they make things you want. They don't just pump CO2 into the atmosphere for fun.
- woodruffw 4y agoI didn't say "greedy." But yes, corporations do induce demand: that's the entire point of advertising, and so many other mainstays of 21st century capitalism: planned obsolescence, vendor lock-in, and so forth. Consumers do not want to buy a new phone, computer, fridge, &c. every X years; they do it because it's the local maxima between short-term purchasing power and corporate profits. Nobody pumps CO2 into the atmosphere "for fun," besides a very small group of men with illegally modified trucks. But corporations do pump CO2 into the atmosphere (taken as a general metaphor for pollution) because it's an efficient method of externalization.
- parineum 4y agoWithout advertising, how would you know the things you want exist? Why do you remove all agency and responsibility from consumers and place it on corporations? Does it have anything to do with which one you're a part of?
- pasquinelli 4y agopay off the fossil feul industry? i don't know how you intend to do that.
- tjpnz 4y agoLast I heard John Galt and Co were making plans to leave for Mars.
- darth_avocado 4y agoHow about everyone in the world consume as less per capita as some of the poorest countries on the planet instead of poisoning everyone? Any negative consequences, if any, will automatically put more burden on the poorer countries that don’t have the resources to fix things when they go wrong. All options should not be considered imho.
- theplumber 4y agoI think technology is the solution not cave living conditions. Nobody will signup for poverty.
- michaelchisari 4y agoWhy assume the only alternative to American overconsumption is a a primitive existence?
- serf 4y ago> Why assume the only alternative to American overconsumption is a a primitive existence? did I fall asleep in class when they mentioned that it was the American pollution that was particularly bad for the world? if blame-pointing is the primary concern here, doesn't China produce something like double the amount of CO2 emissions compared to the US?
- bigfudge 4y ago>doesn't China produce something like double the amount of CO2 emissions compared to the US? Certainly not per capita. And China and other developing countries have been emitting large amounts of co2 for only a very short period relatively speaking. We have gained the benefits of industrialisation but other poorer nations are beating the costs. This is why American and European pollution is different and must be addressed as a priority.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
- dilap 4y agoIt's hard for me to see a scenario where we reduce carbon emissions by any meaningful amount, TBH. That said, I'd rather just take my chances with the warming than engage in some mad-scientist cooling plans... Tangential, but I really enjoyed this podcast with a climate modeler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYCrDuxal6k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYCrDuxal6k
- autoexec 4y ago> I'd rather just take my chances with the warming At a certain point humanity's chances with the warming are zero. Just depends on how many dominoes start to fall and how fast. We could conceivably wipe out just about all life on the planet. If our only hope is to buy ourselves a few more years by geoengineering I'm all for it, but I do wish we'd start with things that didn't involve poisoning our atmosphere or risking upsetting our already screwed up weather system. It seems like we've done basically nothing so far so jumping straight to the most extreme potential solutions (none of which have a ton of evidence supporting their effectiveness) feels premature. I guess if I were in the fossil fuel industry and wanted to continue making money hand over fist by destroying the planet these kinds of options must seem pretty tempting though. They certainly wouldn't lose any sleep poisoning the sky if it means they can continue doing business as usual.
- helloworld11 4y ago>At a certain point humanity's chances with the warming are zero. Just depends on how many dominoes start to fall and how fast. We could conceivably wipe out just about all life on the planet. The hyperbole in your claim is laughable and completely unhelpful for anyone who's on the fence about climate change and climate change measures. Even the worst evidence-based predictions of the UN and the IPCC come nowhere near the extinction of all life or anything remotely in the same ballpark. What you're saying seems to be part of a doom and gloom fetishism that has always been innate to humanity (see centuries of apocalyptic predictions under any number of pretexts you can conceive) and has nothing to do with real science, real risks and real, possible solutions. Today, for many, this fetishism happens to have latched onto climate change, and steals some of its apparent legitimacy from the fact that the underlying problem is a real one, though not a genuine doom scenario. The Earth has warmed drastically at many times in its past, and it will survive along with life, without problems despite even our worst human-caused warming. Even with our predicted warming trends, humanity will be a long ways from being in danger of extinction as the climate changes to a warmer one because of our economic activities. As we've already done many times in our past, we will simply adapt.
- xigency 4y ago> Reduction of Carbon Emissions is and always will be the best strategy to slow down global warming. This isn’t sufficient on its own. Reduction of emissions, carbon recapture and carbon sequestration are all needed.
- BurningFrog 4y agoWhat the side effects are, and how you can reverse various techniques if they doesn't work as intended seems like good topics for this proposed research to focus on.
- DennisP 4y agoSince volcanoes do the same thing, we know from observation that the aerosols fall out of the atmosphere in a year or two.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoHow could aerosols ruin the atmosphere? And how do you calculate the probability of success here? And the probability of success of reducing carbon emissions?
- halfjoking 4y agoTelling nations to abstain from carbon emissions is like asking teenagers to be celibate. The natural way to remove carbon is weathering rocks over millions of years, and it's not hard to accelerate that process so it only takes decades: https://vesta.earth https://vesta.earth Why wouldn't that be the best strategy? Just like contraception is the best strategy for teenagers, I think natural methods of geoengineering are the best strategy for climate change. (I'm not saying aerosols are natural, that one is a horrible idea)
- matthewdgreen 4y agoMany advanced nations have already seen pretty significant emissions declines, and this is robust even when you factor in offshoring manufacturing. Many of the huge declines in renewable energy production prices haven’t kicked in yet, so we’re likely to see lots more. Getting to net zero isn’t impossible. The problem is that we may get there when it’s too late.
- noogle 4y agoThen the GP suggestion seems to have a role again - if net zero emissions is not enough, carbon capturing is needed to mitigate previous emissions. The two are not mutually exclusive.
- matthewdgreen 4y agoAll of these things are part of net zero (and beyond). The problem is that we may already have kicked off a warming/methane/cloud feedback loop (there are several) and so getting carbon emissions down in the future isn’t going to be enough to fix it. These geoengineering solutions scare the life out of me, but they may (soon) be our only option for surviving this.
- phs318u 4y agoAccording to Vesta's own website, even at their projections of "global scale" i.e. 100's of millions of tons CO2 captured, that's still around 1% of the annual fossil fuel driven emissions (tens of billions of tons).
- kortilla 4y ago> Reduction of Carbon Emissions is and always will be the best strategy to slow down global warming. A strategy that has consistently failed across multiple countries for the last 30 years is not a good strategy.
- RugnirViking 4y agoincorrect. https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/total-greenhouse-gas-emission-trends https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/total-greenhouse-gas-emission-... The entire EU which consists of multiple countries, has reduced in emissions consistently since about 1970. Even the US has been going down in absolute numbers since 2005, and per capita for longer. It would be okay if this trend would be true across the world, but the issue is china primary and India secondly are growing in emissions exponentially, and their increase is more than the decrease in developed nations.
- kortilla 4y agoYou just admitted it’s a failing strategy in the last half of your “incorrect” retort. A solution to global CO2 emissions has to be effective globally or it has failed. The only thing it has accomplished is a slight slowing of the global increase. That is complete, abject failure.
- willnonya 4y agoPerhaps, until we have practical solutions or the will to embrace the existing solutions lowering carbon solutions is itself a "moon shot" with the potential for unintended consequences of its own along with many known but serious consequences we choose to ignore.
- tgflynn 4y agoStuff has been injected into the atmosphere by both humans and non-human processes since the beginning. I don't think this is likely to cause irreparable damage. What man has broken man can fix. The anti-human ideology of environmentalism needs to end or mankind probably will. The massive carbon reductions being called for won't happen once people realize the massive toll in human suffering they would cause. A pre-industrial Earth couldn't support anywhere near 8 billion humans.
- soulofmischief 4y ago> What man has broken man can fix. Citation needed, please.
- llukas 4y agohttps://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220321-what-happened-to-the-worlds-ozone-hole https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220321-what-happened-to...
- tb_technical 4y agoBeat me to it lol
- tb_technical 4y agoThe hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica? There's an example.
- yongjik 4y agoThat's a bold example to use, considering that humanity learned that CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) created the ozone hole, so we agreed to stop use them, and then the nature recovered, without causing any noticeable hardship or economic damage. Now consider that in the context of global warming.
- soulofmischief 4y agoDo you understand that one instance of this being true does absolutely nothing to validate any other instance? You need to present a large body of empirical data.
- vital_beach 4y agoI don't know how the science side of it works out in the real world, but the Snowpiercer take on this is pretty terrifying
- simonbarker87 4y agoBut it made for a pretty great TV show and a not bad film though! Joking aside this is a really fascinating, it’s just a shame we have to experiment in it with an N of 1
- blitzar 4y agoThis is the sort of thing you are meant to learn at school... Introducing an exotic species for pest control can work, but sometimes it just makes everything much, much worse. https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2018/05/top-10-invasive-species-when-pest-control-goes-wrong/ https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2018/05/top-10-inv...
- EdwardDiego 4y agoDisappointed that the article didn't mention the sad litany of New Zealand. 1) Hey, let's introduce rabbits for hunting! 2) Shit, they're eating all the grass that we want our sheep to eat 3) Let's introduce ferrets, stoats, and weasels, to eat all the rabbits! 4) Shit, they're just eating all the endemic birds 5) Uh.... We're still wrestling with Step #6 - our native beech forests (not Northern Hemisphere beech, as their Latin name makes clear - Nothofagus "false beech") will have a mass seeding event (a "mast") every few years. And when that happens, rodent populations explode, and then so too do the stoat and weasel populations. But when the mustelids run out of rats and mice, then they move onto the birds. So, we have to poison, like crazy, as well as trap, to try to protect the birds most vulnerable to them.
- kristiandupont 4y agoI am reminded of this brilliant solution from the Simpsons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY
- EdwardDiego 4y agoAt one point, after having introduced the brushtail possum from Australia, which is now a massive pest that kills forests and spreads bovine tuberculosis, someone suggested introducing dingos and/or tree snakes to control the possums. Luckily, that didn't get much traction.
- simondotau 4y agoShe swallowed the snake to catch the possum. She swallowed the possum to catch the spider. She swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I don’t know why she swallowed the fly. Perhaps she’ll die.
- nakedrobot2 4y agono more than a volcanic eruption. and like a volcanic eruption, the dust goes away in a few years. stop the hysteria.
- pif 4y agoReduction of Carbon Emissions is also a sure way to show down the economy. And slowing down the economy is not acceptable: people want to get rid of global warming in order to live better; if the price to pay is to live worse, it's not worth it.