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It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility. As mentioned in the article, dust in the atmosphere is literally a natura

It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility. As mentioned in the article, dust in the atmosphere is literally a natural occurrence also. Sure, the exact impact should be researched and understood, but people are already jumping to the fashionable conclusion that human technology bad, gods and wood spirits will punish us for trying to escape from the primordial toil. Myself, I think that both this type of things and emission controls should be going on to get the situation under control. Simply because we cannot know exactly how much any of this will accomplish and the needs are big. The climate question's credibility is hurt by limiting solutions to an ideologically approved list and treating it as a vehicle for one's favorite causes. People can suspect that if the activists are so choosy about the methods, this cannot be that serious and this is not how truly desperate people act.

seydor 4y ago
we are quite primed to believe anything anthropogenic is bad, anthropogenic heating is bad, so antrhopogenic cooling is bad
DharmaPolice 4y ago
I think people are understandably cautious about large scale interventions in complex systems. It's not like we've got a test Earth ready to do a dummy run on. We're making changes directly to production here. (I do think we'll ultimately need to do something like this simply because the cost of not doing it is too high but I understand why people are scared by it, and it's not just down to belief in wood spirits).
- beowulfey 4y ago
  Yes, definitely this is part of it for me. The other reason I’m concerned (although, agree it’s probably necessary) is that I’m wary of any solution that we can’t undo if it goes awry.
- schnitzelstoat 4y ago
  Also it means we won't actually solve the core problem that is greenhouse gas emissions. Instead we'll just continually pump up some aerosols to ensure the heating doesn't get too bad. And if we ever fail to do so then we'll face incredible heating.
  - blitzar 4y ago
    We can just produce more greenhouse gasses to make the aerosols we pump into the atmosphere to undo just one of the many effects of the greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere.
  - bhargav 4y ago
    No one wants to tell us fatties to not eat farmed animals, and not drive cars okay? /s
    - mandmandam 4y ago
      Fossil fuel companies knew about climate change and deliberately spent decades obfuscating the issue and warping discourse. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-climate-change-1981-climate-denier-funding https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-cl... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/sep/19/shell-and-exxons-secret-1980s-climate-change-warnings https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62225696 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62225696 Etc, etc, etc. So, blaming people for having stupid opinions that various companies spent billions injecting into the discourse seems misguided. At best.
      - ForRealsies 4y ago
      - o_1 4y ago
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  We'd be wise to ask, "What could go wrong?" It's the question we didn't ask about burning fossil fuels. We got our answer the hard way. Have we learned from that? The cost of not doing might be high. The cost of trying to further manipulate the atmospheric "market" might be worse. Then what?
  - tormeh 4y ago
    We got the answer to that 80 years ago. It's not that we fail to imagine what could go wrong. It's that we don't act on our knowledge. If we had course-corrected when we became aware of global warming we wouldn't have a problem.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Or the cost of not doing geoengineering might be higher. You can't just look at one side of the risks.
- cgeier 4y ago
  Which makes sense, but we are already doing very large scale interventions with releasing a lot of greenhouse gases (and also other stuff).
  - arcticfox 4y ago
    Yes, I am confused how an intentional intervention is so frowned upon when unintentional interventions are done on a continuous basis: mass deforestation, mass greenhouse emissions, mass oceanic acidification, satellite deorbiting, mass air transit, massive water redistribution projects etc Maybe the key to not face the scrutiny of non-interventionists is to mask the intervention as an unrelated commercial venture, in which case it should be pretty much good to go.
    - DharmaPolice 4y ago
      Most of the things you mention (e.g. deforestation, water redistribution) are things people worry about. In fact, the people worried about large scale interventions are usually also the people most worried about emissions, deforestation, ocean acidification, etc. So I don't think there's much hypocrisy here.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > Yes, I am confused how an intentional intervention is so frowned upon when unintentional interventions are done on a continuous basis...? What's so confusing? By the nature of being intentional, an intentional intervention can be stopped before it does harm. It's weird logic to think caution should be thrown to the wind because some bad unintentional things weren't prevented.
      - DennisP 4y ago
        But a lot of people freak out about attempting geoengineering at all, even at a small scale. There's a UN treaty prohibiting it. No treaty prohibiting the emission of 36 billion tons of CO2 every year though.
- BeefWellington 4y ago
  Further to your point, our history is littered with examples of, to steal the Jurassic Park bit, being "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should". Things like moving horrible invasive ecologically devastating species around to "solve a problem" or "it looks pretty" (Cane Toads, Rabbits, and Kudzu, for example) have had dire results. Cloud seeding is definitely a well practiced thing by now, but it's unclear what the short and long term effects are if we do it at a significant (continent or hemispheric) scale. I'd love for it to work out and for humanity to actually deflect the looming impacts of climate change.
bhargav 4y ago
The scientific community has a track record for bringing a lot of good in the world but also for being wrong quite a lot. Just think about your typical food pyramids. There’s now research that says cholesterol isn’t dictated by the food you eat. Around climate change as well, there are now talks about some of the changes we are observing being part of the natural cycle of the earth based on core samples. No doubt we’ve made things worse but maybe not as bad as we think. Isn’t Florida supposed to be under water now? Also kind of funny top of Reddits environment Reddit had two top threads recently where one was saying we are losing water around some land mass due to climate change and another saying complete opposite. They were right beside another on the feed. Scientific communities aren’t in consensus about global warming and climate change. I frankly now (being a hardcore believer in the past) am now on the fence about some aspects of it. I really don’t think we’re as advance a species as some of our ambitions might lead us to think. You can’t really test stuff like this in a small scale and it could have drastic impact on us as a single planet species. People would be right to be dubious. Finally don’t be fooled. Scientific community, just like the Engineering field, does shit for their gain. They all fudge the numbers. They all change the lenses to shed light on what they want. This is why we’ve seen some scientific inaccuracies. For example Sugar studies being quashed in the past… I guess also with the vaccines recently lol It’s condescending to think that a reasonable amount of dubiousism means people think the “wood spirits” will punish us.
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  It's remarkable how well the fossil-funded propaganda has worked.
  - bhargav 4y ago
    Actually, some of the propaganda artist died of blood clots and aids like conditions when they took the vaccine. Unfortunately, they did not take five booster shots like we did. /s
    - vimacs2 4y ago
      "Some of" meaning a tiny fraction of the total population vs those that suffered no ill effects from the vaccination at all.
oifjsidjf 4y ago
>> It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility. It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflexively ignore the potential unknown side effects that can occour when messing with a complex system. Have you ever thought that perhaps it's people like you who have it wrong? Are you capable of predicting ALL the side effects of such an extreme intervention? Are you capable of reversing unwanted side effects like a global winter due to this intervation? How can you know if you even can reverse it IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE UNWANTED SIDE EFFECTS WILL EVENT BE?
- FredPret 4y ago
  We are intervening with the complex system by injecting gases into it already. When stopping the gas injections proved nearly inposs, trying a counter-intervention seems only logical.
  - mandmandam 4y ago
    > stopping the gas injections proved nearly inposs Aka we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas :/ Seriously. To this day we're letting fossil fuel companies get away with literal murder. Acting like change is impossible is a view those companies actively promote. Don't fall for it.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - FredPret 4y ago
      Oh please, reducing emissions is super slow and painful and anyone could see that. Every car switches to electric -> this is happening, but it takes 5-10 years to phase out a car. If 100% of new car sales are electric, we’ll have to wait until 2030. But we’re not at 100% yet. So we’ll probably only get there around 2040-2050. Every house switches to non-gas water heating and climate control -> this one takes even longer, 10-20 years to phase out. It’s probably easier to get to 100% clean new sales Every industrial process switches -> I don’t know enough to even speculate but this sounds like an even longer CAPEX cycle Every plane & ship switches -> we don’t have the tech for this figured out yet. Ships are probably one of the biggest things we should switch over ASAP. Every powerplant switches to nuclear/solar/wind/hydro: another multi-decade project. I want all of the above, if only for cleaner air for health reasons, and because I’m an engineer and nuclear + electric seems more elegant. But it will take a very long time.
benburleson 4y ago
It reminds me of people that end up on a long list of prescriptions. Each next drug counteracts the negative side effects of the ones before. We all know this is not the best course.
- timmg 4y ago
  Well, I mean, I'd hope you wouldn't recommend they just take no drugs at all. I don't think anyone thinks geo-engineering is the preferred solution (in the abstract). The question is what is a practical solution to the problem? Germany, to me, is a cautionary tale. The shut down nukes and subsidized renewables. But here they are depending on a despot for energy -- with likely severe consequences this winter. And they are increasing coal energy production.
FredPret 4y ago
We need a new religion that worships civilization and condemns degrowth as a sin.
- Avicebron 4y ago
  Catch me at the alter of neo-liberal globalism next Sunday /s.
  - FredPret 4y ago
    Civilization is the meta-entity that emerged from us when we started writing and educating each other. It perpetuates itself, adapts to changing circumstances, and grows in complexity. Economic systems and religions come and go, but civilization is here for good.
    - picsao 4y ago
johnchristopher 4y ago
> People can suspect that if the activists are so choosy about the methods, this cannot be that serious and this is not how truly desperate people act. That's quite the jump you are making there.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
You'll note it's ironic we want to replace the natural albedo from the ice we are melting instead of trying not to destroy it in the first place. Espacially since said system has been proven to work and be life sustaining for millions of years. To me it's like startups creating robot bees: finding an inferior expensive potentially dangerous solution to a problem that was already solved for free since forever. But you can't make money with preserving the health of the patient. Better have it sick and sell him pills.
- techdragon 4y ago
  The making robot bees analogy is good but I think you might be overlooking an important angle on the problem. This is like inventing robot bee replacements, if bees were going extinct (which some people were worried about for a while, and some still are) … and while Bee populations may be collapsing but they don’t seem destined for extinction, just massive population losses that can in time recover like humans did from the Black Death… and it’s not even universally bad among all bee species. However unlike Bees, of one species or another, which have a very clear path to repopulation and recovery overall if we don’t keep dumping pesticides on them (or at least keep looking for ones that don’t hurt them as much which has absolutely been an active area of research) … the climate may not be able to return to normal. We’re not even sure that if we had a magic wand, and could change all human experience and industry across the whole planet so it was net carbon neutral (so neutral across co2, methane and all the other greenhouse gasses combined) starting right this very second. We might still have passed the tipping point and just be waiting for the current warmer climate based on current co2 levels to melt enough permafrost that we expose unaccounted for clathrates or deeply buried rotting bogs that will start putting out methane and continue the slide into all the predicted outcomes of uncontrolled climate change. This system is so big and complex that we’re frantically trying to analyse it while simultaneously trying to frantically map the scope of the known unknowns meanwhile there are all the unknown unknowns that exist across the planet and every single major study acknowledges whenever they talk about the uncertainty in their measurements or their models or their survey data. It’s one thing to invent something useless. It’s another thing to not have a plan B. Inventing robot bees is a plan B to help prevent mass starvation if bees were to go extinct, not very likely and even if they did not all crops need bees, plenty of other insects pollinate plants as well, which is why the robot bees is a little silly in practice but not in principle. Studying geo-engineering is the Plan B for if we can’t turn back the clock due to either collective failure to change our ways enough, or fast enough, or soon enough… and when soon enough may have been yesterday and we may not even know it was yesterday until years from now when something else happens we didn’t fully understand or predict… it’s just stupid to not have been researching some plans B, C, and D. We shouldn’t necessarily give any of these more money than the current effort to actually fix the problem at its root cause but we should still be starting the research now before it’s too late for any possible plan to help. As to how much money, that’s a political issue thats too complicated for a simple HN comment that’s already getting quite long.
formvoltron 4y ago
Problem is that the only reason we don't push ahead with renewables is that governments would rather use existing infrastructure. They want to amortize sunk construction costs. They don't want to upgrade the grid. Solar panels now cost just 20 cents a Watt and can convert sun into electricity with about 6 times the efficiency of photosynthesis. If we make it cheap to punt, then the consequences could truly be dire.
- civilized 4y ago
  The cost to "punt" is zero, and it is what we are doing today. It is what we will continue doing until there is a perfect magical technology solution with no side effects and very low costs. Something like a 100kW power plant that runs 24/7, creates no emissions, requires no fuel or maintenance, and can be set up in your backyard for $99. There is no crisis coming that will be severe enough (in the developed world) to change this. Politicians don't care, because people don't care. Climate change doesn't even make the top 10 priorities of most US voters. Not even the people in Florida whose houses will be going underwater care. I wonder how long we will be waiting for easy button-press perfection with no downsides? I wonder how dire the consequences of our waiting will be?
  - mistermann 4y ago
    > Politicians don't care, because people don't care. Maybe(!) it's for a similar reason to why most of these people also don't do calculus, or juggle, etc: they do not know how to, because they were never taught how to.
    - civilized 4y ago
      I'm not sure what effort to teach about climate change has been spared in the past couple decades. One big problem is that half the country has also been taught climate change is a hoax concocted for partisan political gain. I doubt that most of them even believe this, but it's illustrative of... some deeper issue, for sure.
      - 4y ago
jongjong 4y ago
Because humans are apes. Would you trust a bunch of monkeys to tamper with one of the most complex and critical systems in existence? No. Humans are not smart enough and too corrupt to be tampering with such complex and critical systems. The elites can spray as many aerosols into their homes as they like, they can inject whatever substance they want into their bodies and plug their brains into whatever infernal machine they want but don't subject me to these experiments.
- usrusr 4y ago
  But those apes already did tamper. For centuries. Even the worst hobby surgeon should better be allowed to finish the job than leaving the wound open if there isn't someone better qualified at hand.
  - jongjong 4y ago
    Yes, and the result of this tampering doesn't inspire much confidence. I doubt humans understand what's actually going on. How can they come up with a solution when they don't even fully understand the problem? The problem of climate change is insanely complex with billions of variables. Also, how can they possibly understand all the side effects of spraying aerosols into the atmosphere of a massive, highly complex planet which supports an incalculable number of living organisms? They didn't know that burning fossil fuels would lead to climate change when they started doing it, who is to say that spraying massive amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere will not lead to something else which they did not anticipate? This proposed solution is akin flawed scientific practices of earlier times such as blood-letting or whacking people over the head with a stick to chase out daemons. At every point in history, people with fancy academic certificates have always been certain that they knew what they were doing and they've been proven wrong over and over.
    - o_1 4y ago
      Yeah tampering with the atmosphere is literally insane.
j-bos 4y ago
My reflex is to consider edge cases. For example, what happens if this is launched, works, and then a Krakatoa 2.0 goes off. What's the game plan in that scenario? Sincere question, these systems are well beyond me.
- kortex 4y ago
  Then we stop increasing albedo for a bit. Basically PWM-ing the Earth's solar flux. As long as the decay time of the albedo modification is known, it's quite unlikely that we could induce a snowball earth.
  - Wildgoose 4y ago
    Sounds like a Hell of a risk when playing with a complex system that is not yet fully understood.
    - inkblotuniverse 4y ago
      Don't worry- Russia has a vested interest in warming the earth a bit, so they'll put out CO2 to counteract the cooling.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Practically, the planet is very big and injecting reflective material into the stratosphere would be a ridiculously expensive proposition, with little or no immediate economic reward for those carrying it out. Now, when Pinatubo blew in the early 1990s, it produced about a decade-long cooling effect relative to what otherwise would have happened, but that effect faded. So, you'd have to have a plan to inject a Pinatubo-scale amount of material into the atmosphere at least once a decade, and underneath that, the fossil CO2 and CH4 emissions would steadily be increasing in the atmosphere, so if the project was ever paused, you'd have a rapid heating period which would probably be worse in immediate effect than if you'd just allow the warming to progress more steadily. Those are the practical reasons I think it's a nonsensical proposal, along the lines of parking a sunshade in space (getting that much material out to Lagrange 1 would be so costly as to be unimaginable). It's far cheaper just to replace, say, 1-3% of fossil fuel production per year with equivalent wind/solar/storage.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > Those are the practical reasons I think it's a nonsensical proposal, along the lines of parking a sunshade in space (getting that much material out to Lagrange 1 would be so costly as to be unimaginable). But it's sci-fi nonsense, so full speed ahead because I believe in science!
- mrpf1ster 4y ago
  Kurzgesagt covered this in one of their videos, it is not as hard as you make it out to be: https://youtu.be/dSu5sXmsur4 https://youtu.be/dSu5sXmsur4
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  I imagine the "inject a Pinatubo-scale amount of material" idea gets many folks excited around the possibility of bringing back Project Plowshare.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Cheaper, and insufficient. We've got less than 30 years to reduce our emissions to zero. Replace a little more than 3% of fossil plants annually and you decarbonize the grid in that time, but there's also transportation. You'll need way more electricity for electric cars, and then there's ships and airplanes, for which we'll need some kind of carbon-neutral liquid fuel. We have to replace all the steel plants, and figure out some kind of carbon-neutral cement, and somehow stop all the emissions from agriculture, and do something about all the high-temperature industrial processes that burn their own fossil. Meanwhile, our energy usage is increasing by a couple percent a year, which is why with all the wind/solar/storage we've built so far, we haven't made a dent in decreasing emissions.
exabrial 4y ago
It’s not a trained reflex; it’s being humble enough to recognize one’s own ignorance when confronted with the complexity of the system at end. Undoubtedly there would be disaster with unintended consequences.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  and undoubtably we are undergoing disasters with wholly unintended consequences. When the house is on fire, you don't worry about water damage.
  - exabrial 4y ago
    More aptly: if your house is on fire, you don't remove all of the oxygen from the planet.
    - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
      That's more like, what's happening now with polluters indiscriminately emitting whatever into the atmosphere without any effective rules. But I guess that's ok somehow? And trying literally anything to reverse it is met with horror and hyperbolic rhetoric like 'remove all the oxygen from the planet'.
schwartzworld 4y ago
> It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility. It's good to have skepticism about anything additive, as these decisions affect everybody and can have unexpected outcomes, for example using detergent to break up oil spills can make the effects worse on coral https://www.livescience.com/4567-bad-worse-oil-spills-cleaned-deadly-detergent.html https://www.livescience.com/4567-bad-worse-oil-spills-cleane... I'm not saying the proposed solution is good or bad, but trying new things on a big scale can have unexpected outcomes, and it's good to be wary.
tablespoon 4y ago
> It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility. Yeah, massively ambitious whiz-bang technology has never had unintended consequences. /s
krolden 4y ago
I reflex against this because its going to be a ton of money going into research/deployment of this, meanwhile theres still massive pollution and single use plastic production going on. Maybe spend the money to fix that first. Meanwhile farmers in Brazil are torching one of the planets lungs and no one seems to be doing anything about it.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Single-use plastic is a serious problem, but it's insignificant compared to crossing the tipping point on climate.
aeroman 4y ago
I understand where you are coming from and agree that we need to know more about this to do it properly if required. However, I think some of this reflex is jusified by the known side-effects (not even the potential unintended consequences). Greenhouse gases heat the surface and the atmosphere, but solar radiation management (SRM) mostly cools the surface. If you use SRM to get the surface temperature 'right' that atmoshpere is still warmer that it would have been. This means you get less rain. Many places care more about rain than temperature. This is a well understood consequence, but the specifics are where it gets very tricky. There is a non-zero chance that using SRM to cool the planet may also kill the Amazon rainforest by reducing rainfall. This obviously makes things a whole lot worse and no longer buys us time. [0] This is not even an unknown unintendend consquence, it is pretty clear already. Obviously this doesn't mean we shouldn't look into it, but we already know the consequences of geoengineering are ... not good. [0] - https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/12/10887/2012/acp-12-10887-2012.pdf https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/12/10887/2012/acp-12-108...
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
This is great because this is actually a practical solution over "lower all fuel emissions and stop eating beef" which may actually have zero effect over flooding and wildfires which are supposedly due to climate change but no one can say for sure.
TrevorJ 4y ago
Erring on the side of skepticism around deploying irreversible global changes is rational. Humans have a track record of deploying techniques and technologies well before the consequences are well understood, so it makes sense to actively attempt to counterbalance that tendency when the consequences of getting it wrong are extreme.
thenoblesunfish 4y ago
I was interested to see the relevant term in the IPCC report. If I was reading correctly (not assured) that's a human caused effect which is mitigating climate change.
leobg 4y ago
It would also reduce the power output from solar installations worldwide. It’s like retroactively taxing those who invested in sustainable energy generation - and without permission, too.
more_corn 4y ago
Climate systems are chaotic. They display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Changing those conditions will have literally incalculable results. I understand how people might be a bit shy to trust geo engineering since scientists will tell us we can’t precisely predict the results. That being said, we’re currently conducting an uncontrolled climate experiment with the warming gasses we’re releasing. Reversing some of that is probably safe and sane.

seydor 4y ago

we are quite primed to believe anything anthropogenic is bad, anthropogenic heating is bad, so antrhopogenic cooling is bad

DharmaPolice 4y ago

I think people are understandably cautious about large scale interventions in complex systems. It's not like we've got a test Earth ready to do a dummy run on. We're making changes directly to production here. (I do think we'll ultimately need to do something like this simply because the cost of not doing it is too high but I understand why people are scared by it, and it's not just down to belief in wood spirits).

beowulfey 4y ago
Yes, definitely this is part of it for me. The other reason I’m concerned (although, agree it’s probably necessary) is that I’m wary of any solution that we can’t undo if it goes awry.
schnitzelstoat 4y ago
Also it means we won't actually solve the core problem that is greenhouse gas emissions. Instead we'll just continually pump up some aerosols to ensure the heating doesn't get too bad. And if we ever fail to do so then we'll face incredible heating.
- blitzar 4y ago
  We can just produce more greenhouse gasses to make the aerosols we pump into the atmosphere to undo just one of the many effects of the greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere.
- bhargav 4y ago
  No one wants to tell us fatties to not eat farmed animals, and not drive cars okay? /s
  - mandmandam 4y ago
    Fossil fuel companies knew about climate change and deliberately spent decades obfuscating the issue and warping discourse. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-climate-change-1981-climate-denier-funding https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-cl... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/sep/19/shell-and-exxons-secret-1980s-climate-change-warnings https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62225696 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62225696 Etc, etc, etc. So, blaming people for having stupid opinions that various companies spent billions injecting into the discourse seems misguided. At best.
    - ForRealsies 4y ago
    - o_1 4y ago
chiefalchemist 4y ago
We'd be wise to ask, "What could go wrong?" It's the question we didn't ask about burning fossil fuels. We got our answer the hard way. Have we learned from that? The cost of not doing might be high. The cost of trying to further manipulate the atmospheric "market" might be worse. Then what?
- tormeh 4y ago
  We got the answer to that 80 years ago. It's not that we fail to imagine what could go wrong. It's that we don't act on our knowledge. If we had course-corrected when we became aware of global warming we wouldn't have a problem.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Or the cost of not doing geoengineering might be higher. You can't just look at one side of the risks.
cgeier 4y ago
Which makes sense, but we are already doing very large scale interventions with releasing a lot of greenhouse gases (and also other stuff).
- arcticfox 4y ago
  Yes, I am confused how an intentional intervention is so frowned upon when unintentional interventions are done on a continuous basis: mass deforestation, mass greenhouse emissions, mass oceanic acidification, satellite deorbiting, mass air transit, massive water redistribution projects etc Maybe the key to not face the scrutiny of non-interventionists is to mask the intervention as an unrelated commercial venture, in which case it should be pretty much good to go.
  - DharmaPolice 4y ago
    Most of the things you mention (e.g. deforestation, water redistribution) are things people worry about. In fact, the people worried about large scale interventions are usually also the people most worried about emissions, deforestation, ocean acidification, etc. So I don't think there's much hypocrisy here.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > Yes, I am confused how an intentional intervention is so frowned upon when unintentional interventions are done on a continuous basis...? What's so confusing? By the nature of being intentional, an intentional intervention can be stopped before it does harm. It's weird logic to think caution should be thrown to the wind because some bad unintentional things weren't prevented.
    - DennisP 4y ago
      But a lot of people freak out about attempting geoengineering at all, even at a small scale. There's a UN treaty prohibiting it. No treaty prohibiting the emission of 36 billion tons of CO2 every year though.
BeefWellington 4y ago
Further to your point, our history is littered with examples of, to steal the Jurassic Park bit, being "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should". Things like moving horrible invasive ecologically devastating species around to "solve a problem" or "it looks pretty" (Cane Toads, Rabbits, and Kudzu, for example) have had dire results. Cloud seeding is definitely a well practiced thing by now, but it's unclear what the short and long term effects are if we do it at a significant (continent or hemispheric) scale. I'd love for it to work out and for humanity to actually deflect the looming impacts of climate change.

bhargav 4y ago

The scientific community has a track record for bringing a lot of good in the world but also for being wrong quite a lot. Just think about your typical food pyramids. There’s now research that says cholesterol isn’t dictated by the food you eat. Around climate change as well, there are now talks about some of the changes we are observing being part of the natural cycle of the earth based on core samples. No doubt we’ve made things worse but maybe not as bad as we think. Isn’t Florida supposed to be under water now? Also kind of funny top of Reddits environment Reddit had two top threads recently where one was saying we are losing water around some land mass due to climate change and another saying complete opposite. They were right beside another on the feed. Scientific communities aren’t in consensus about global warming and climate change. I frankly now (being a hardcore believer in the past) am now on the fence about some aspects of it. I really don’t think we’re as advance a species as some of our ambitions might lead us to think. You can’t really test stuff like this in a small scale and it could have drastic impact on us as a single planet species. People would be right to be dubious. Finally don’t be fooled. Scientific community, just like the Engineering field, does shit for their gain. They all fudge the numbers. They all change the lenses to shed light on what they want. This is why we’ve seen some scientific inaccuracies. For example Sugar studies being quashed in the past… I guess also with the vaccines recently lol It’s condescending to think that a reasonable amount of dubiousism means people think the “wood spirits” will punish us.

dontlaugh 4y ago
It's remarkable how well the fossil-funded propaganda has worked.
- bhargav 4y ago
  Actually, some of the propaganda artist died of blood clots and aids like conditions when they took the vaccine. Unfortunately, they did not take five booster shots like we did. /s
  - vimacs2 4y ago
    "Some of" meaning a tiny fraction of the total population vs those that suffered no ill effects from the vaccination at all.

oifjsidjf 4y ago

>> It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility. It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflexively ignore the potential unknown side effects that can occour when messing with a complex system. Have you ever thought that perhaps it's people like you who have it wrong? Are you capable of predicting ALL the side effects of such an extreme intervention? Are you capable of reversing unwanted side effects like a global winter due to this intervation? How can you know if you even can reverse it IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE UNWANTED SIDE EFFECTS WILL EVENT BE?

FredPret 4y ago
We are intervening with the complex system by injecting gases into it already. When stopping the gas injections proved nearly inposs, trying a counter-intervention seems only logical.
- mandmandam 4y ago
  > stopping the gas injections proved nearly inposs Aka we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas :/ Seriously. To this day we're letting fossil fuel companies get away with literal murder. Acting like change is impossible is a view those companies actively promote. Don't fall for it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - FredPret 4y ago
    Oh please, reducing emissions is super slow and painful and anyone could see that. Every car switches to electric -> this is happening, but it takes 5-10 years to phase out a car. If 100% of new car sales are electric, we’ll have to wait until 2030. But we’re not at 100% yet. So we’ll probably only get there around 2040-2050. Every house switches to non-gas water heating and climate control -> this one takes even longer, 10-20 years to phase out. It’s probably easier to get to 100% clean new sales Every industrial process switches -> I don’t know enough to even speculate but this sounds like an even longer CAPEX cycle Every plane & ship switches -> we don’t have the tech for this figured out yet. Ships are probably one of the biggest things we should switch over ASAP. Every powerplant switches to nuclear/solar/wind/hydro: another multi-decade project. I want all of the above, if only for cleaner air for health reasons, and because I’m an engineer and nuclear + electric seems more elegant. But it will take a very long time.

benburleson 4y ago

It reminds me of people that end up on a long list of prescriptions. Each next drug counteracts the negative side effects of the ones before. We all know this is not the best course.

timmg 4y ago
Well, I mean, I'd hope you wouldn't recommend they just take no drugs at all. I don't think anyone thinks geo-engineering is the preferred solution (in the abstract). The question is what is a practical solution to the problem? Germany, to me, is a cautionary tale. The shut down nukes and subsidized renewables. But here they are depending on a despot for energy -- with likely severe consequences this winter. And they are increasing coal energy production.

FredPret 4y ago

We need a new religion that worships civilization and condemns degrowth as a sin.

Avicebron 4y ago
Catch me at the alter of neo-liberal globalism next Sunday /s.
- FredPret 4y ago
  Civilization is the meta-entity that emerged from us when we started writing and educating each other. It perpetuates itself, adapts to changing circumstances, and grows in complexity. Economic systems and religions come and go, but civilization is here for good.
  - picsao 4y ago

johnchristopher 4y ago

> People can suspect that if the activists are so choosy about the methods, this cannot be that serious and this is not how truly desperate people act. That's quite the jump you are making there.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

You'll note it's ironic we want to replace the natural albedo from the ice we are melting instead of trying not to destroy it in the first place. Espacially since said system has been proven to work and be life sustaining for millions of years. To me it's like startups creating robot bees: finding an inferior expensive potentially dangerous solution to a problem that was already solved for free since forever. But you can't make money with preserving the health of the patient. Better have it sick and sell him pills.

techdragon 4y ago
The making robot bees analogy is good but I think you might be overlooking an important angle on the problem. This is like inventing robot bee replacements, if bees were going extinct (which some people were worried about for a while, and some still are) … and while Bee populations may be collapsing but they don’t seem destined for extinction, just massive population losses that can in time recover like humans did from the Black Death… and it’s not even universally bad among all bee species. However unlike Bees, of one species or another, which have a very clear path to repopulation and recovery overall if we don’t keep dumping pesticides on them (or at least keep looking for ones that don’t hurt them as much which has absolutely been an active area of research) … the climate may not be able to return to normal. We’re not even sure that if we had a magic wand, and could change all human experience and industry across the whole planet so it was net carbon neutral (so neutral across co2, methane and all the other greenhouse gasses combined) starting right this very second. We might still have passed the tipping point and just be waiting for the current warmer climate based on current co2 levels to melt enough permafrost that we expose unaccounted for clathrates or deeply buried rotting bogs that will start putting out methane and continue the slide into all the predicted outcomes of uncontrolled climate change. This system is so big and complex that we’re frantically trying to analyse it while simultaneously trying to frantically map the scope of the known unknowns meanwhile there are all the unknown unknowns that exist across the planet and every single major study acknowledges whenever they talk about the uncertainty in their measurements or their models or their survey data. It’s one thing to invent something useless. It’s another thing to not have a plan B. Inventing robot bees is a plan B to help prevent mass starvation if bees were to go extinct, not very likely and even if they did not all crops need bees, plenty of other insects pollinate plants as well, which is why the robot bees is a little silly in practice but not in principle. Studying geo-engineering is the Plan B for if we can’t turn back the clock due to either collective failure to change our ways enough, or fast enough, or soon enough… and when soon enough may have been yesterday and we may not even know it was yesterday until years from now when something else happens we didn’t fully understand or predict… it’s just stupid to not have been researching some plans B, C, and D. We shouldn’t necessarily give any of these more money than the current effort to actually fix the problem at its root cause but we should still be starting the research now before it’s too late for any possible plan to help. As to how much money, that’s a political issue thats too complicated for a simple HN comment that’s already getting quite long.

formvoltron 4y ago

Problem is that the only reason we don't push ahead with renewables is that governments would rather use existing infrastructure. They want to amortize sunk construction costs. They don't want to upgrade the grid. Solar panels now cost just 20 cents a Watt and can convert sun into electricity with about 6 times the efficiency of photosynthesis. If we make it cheap to punt, then the consequences could truly be dire.

civilized 4y ago
The cost to "punt" is zero, and it is what we are doing today. It is what we will continue doing until there is a perfect magical technology solution with no side effects and very low costs. Something like a 100kW power plant that runs 24/7, creates no emissions, requires no fuel or maintenance, and can be set up in your backyard for $99. There is no crisis coming that will be severe enough (in the developed world) to change this. Politicians don't care, because people don't care. Climate change doesn't even make the top 10 priorities of most US voters. Not even the people in Florida whose houses will be going underwater care. I wonder how long we will be waiting for easy button-press perfection with no downsides? I wonder how dire the consequences of our waiting will be?
- mistermann 4y ago
  > Politicians don't care, because people don't care. Maybe(!) it's for a similar reason to why most of these people also don't do calculus, or juggle, etc: they do not know how to, because they were never taught how to.
  - civilized 4y ago
    I'm not sure what effort to teach about climate change has been spared in the past couple decades. One big problem is that half the country has also been taught climate change is a hoax concocted for partisan political gain. I doubt that most of them even believe this, but it's illustrative of... some deeper issue, for sure.
    - 4y ago

jongjong 4y ago

Because humans are apes. Would you trust a bunch of monkeys to tamper with one of the most complex and critical systems in existence? No. Humans are not smart enough and too corrupt to be tampering with such complex and critical systems. The elites can spray as many aerosols into their homes as they like, they can inject whatever substance they want into their bodies and plug their brains into whatever infernal machine they want but don't subject me to these experiments.

usrusr 4y ago
But those apes already did tamper. For centuries. Even the worst hobby surgeon should better be allowed to finish the job than leaving the wound open if there isn't someone better qualified at hand.
- jongjong 4y ago
  Yes, and the result of this tampering doesn't inspire much confidence. I doubt humans understand what's actually going on. How can they come up with a solution when they don't even fully understand the problem? The problem of climate change is insanely complex with billions of variables. Also, how can they possibly understand all the side effects of spraying aerosols into the atmosphere of a massive, highly complex planet which supports an incalculable number of living organisms? They didn't know that burning fossil fuels would lead to climate change when they started doing it, who is to say that spraying massive amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere will not lead to something else which they did not anticipate? This proposed solution is akin flawed scientific practices of earlier times such as blood-letting or whacking people over the head with a stick to chase out daemons. At every point in history, people with fancy academic certificates have always been certain that they knew what they were doing and they've been proven wrong over and over.
  - o_1 4y ago
    Yeah tampering with the atmosphere is literally insane.

j-bos 4y ago

My reflex is to consider edge cases. For example, what happens if this is launched, works, and then a Krakatoa 2.0 goes off. What's the game plan in that scenario? Sincere question, these systems are well beyond me.

kortex 4y ago
Then we stop increasing albedo for a bit. Basically PWM-ing the Earth's solar flux. As long as the decay time of the albedo modification is known, it's quite unlikely that we could induce a snowball earth.
- Wildgoose 4y ago
  Sounds like a Hell of a risk when playing with a complex system that is not yet fully understood.
  - inkblotuniverse 4y ago
    Don't worry- Russia has a vested interest in warming the earth a bit, so they'll put out CO2 to counteract the cooling.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Practically, the planet is very big and injecting reflective material into the stratosphere would be a ridiculously expensive proposition, with little or no immediate economic reward for those carrying it out. Now, when Pinatubo blew in the early 1990s, it produced about a decade-long cooling effect relative to what otherwise would have happened, but that effect faded. So, you'd have to have a plan to inject a Pinatubo-scale amount of material into the atmosphere at least once a decade, and underneath that, the fossil CO2 and CH4 emissions would steadily be increasing in the atmosphere, so if the project was ever paused, you'd have a rapid heating period which would probably be worse in immediate effect than if you'd just allow the warming to progress more steadily. Those are the practical reasons I think it's a nonsensical proposal, along the lines of parking a sunshade in space (getting that much material out to Lagrange 1 would be so costly as to be unimaginable). It's far cheaper just to replace, say, 1-3% of fossil fuel production per year with equivalent wind/solar/storage.

tablespoon 4y ago
> Those are the practical reasons I think it's a nonsensical proposal, along the lines of parking a sunshade in space (getting that much material out to Lagrange 1 would be so costly as to be unimaginable). But it's sci-fi nonsense, so full speed ahead because I believe in science!
mrpf1ster 4y ago
Kurzgesagt covered this in one of their videos, it is not as hard as you make it out to be: https://youtu.be/dSu5sXmsur4 https://youtu.be/dSu5sXmsur4
sidewndr46 4y ago
I imagine the "inject a Pinatubo-scale amount of material" idea gets many folks excited around the possibility of bringing back Project Plowshare.
DennisP 4y ago
Cheaper, and insufficient. We've got less than 30 years to reduce our emissions to zero. Replace a little more than 3% of fossil plants annually and you decarbonize the grid in that time, but there's also transportation. You'll need way more electricity for electric cars, and then there's ships and airplanes, for which we'll need some kind of carbon-neutral liquid fuel. We have to replace all the steel plants, and figure out some kind of carbon-neutral cement, and somehow stop all the emissions from agriculture, and do something about all the high-temperature industrial processes that burn their own fossil. Meanwhile, our energy usage is increasing by a couple percent a year, which is why with all the wind/solar/storage we've built so far, we haven't made a dent in decreasing emissions.

exabrial 4y ago

It’s not a trained reflex; it’s being humble enough to recognize one’s own ignorance when confronted with the complexity of the system at end. Undoubtedly there would be disaster with unintended consequences.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
and undoubtably we are undergoing disasters with wholly unintended consequences. When the house is on fire, you don't worry about water damage.
- exabrial 4y ago
  More aptly: if your house is on fire, you don't remove all of the oxygen from the planet.
  - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    That's more like, what's happening now with polluters indiscriminately emitting whatever into the atmosphere without any effective rules. But I guess that's ok somehow? And trying literally anything to reverse it is met with horror and hyperbolic rhetoric like 'remove all the oxygen from the planet'.

schwartzworld 4y ago

> It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility. It's good to have skepticism about anything additive, as these decisions affect everybody and can have unexpected outcomes, for example using detergent to break up oil spills can make the effects worse on coral https://www.livescience.com/4567-bad-worse-oil-spills-cleaned-deadly-detergent.html https://www.livescience.com/4567-bad-worse-oil-spills-cleane... I'm not saying the proposed solution is good or bad, but trying new things on a big scale can have unexpected outcomes, and it's good to be wary.

tablespoon 4y ago

> It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility. Yeah, massively ambitious whiz-bang technology has never had unintended consequences. /s

krolden 4y ago

I reflex against this because its going to be a ton of money going into research/deployment of this, meanwhile theres still massive pollution and single use plastic production going on. Maybe spend the money to fix that first. Meanwhile farmers in Brazil are torching one of the planets lungs and no one seems to be doing anything about it.

DennisP 4y ago
Single-use plastic is a serious problem, but it's insignificant compared to crossing the tipping point on climate.

aeroman 4y ago

I understand where you are coming from and agree that we need to know more about this to do it properly if required. However, I think some of this reflex is jusified by the known side-effects (not even the potential unintended consequences). Greenhouse gases heat the surface and the atmosphere, but solar radiation management (SRM) mostly cools the surface. If you use SRM to get the surface temperature 'right' that atmoshpere is still warmer that it would have been. This means you get less rain. Many places care more about rain than temperature. This is a well understood consequence, but the specifics are where it gets very tricky. There is a non-zero chance that using SRM to cool the planet may also kill the Amazon rainforest by reducing rainfall. This obviously makes things a whole lot worse and no longer buys us time. [0] This is not even an unknown unintendend consquence, it is pretty clear already. Obviously this doesn't mean we shouldn't look into it, but we already know the consequences of geoengineering are ... not good. [0] - https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/12/10887/2012/acp-12-10887-2012.pdf https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/12/10887/2012/acp-12-108...

TurkishPoptart 4y ago

This is great because this is actually a practical solution over "lower all fuel emissions and stop eating beef" which may actually have zero effect over flooding and wildfires which are supposedly due to climate change but no one can say for sure.

TrevorJ 4y ago

Erring on the side of skepticism around deploying irreversible global changes is rational. Humans have a track record of deploying techniques and technologies well before the consequences are well understood, so it makes sense to actively attempt to counterbalance that tendency when the consequences of getting it wrong are extreme.

thenoblesunfish 4y ago

I was interested to see the relevant term in the IPCC report. If I was reading correctly (not assured) that's a human caused effect which is mitigating climate change.

leobg 4y ago

It would also reduce the power output from solar installations worldwide. It’s like retroactively taxing those who invested in sustainable energy generation - and without permission, too.

more_corn 4y ago

Climate systems are chaotic. They display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Changing those conditions will have literally incalculable results. I understand how people might be a bit shy to trust geo engineering since scientists will tell us we can’t precisely predict the results. That being said, we’re currently conducting an uncontrolled climate experiment with the warming gasses we’re releasing. Reversing some of that is probably safe and sane.