7 ms·

Climate geoengineering via stratospheric aerosol injection

25 points by kkm 4y ago

gizajob 4y ago
What could possibly go wrong!
- FrenchAmerican 4y ago
  Indeed, what could go wrong... The author wants the scientists to be involved in the coming COP27, as if they were not already. As if no technical anf scientific solutions had been provided to climate change! Plenty of solutions have been found already. We absolutely know how to resolve this issue on the technical aspects ; this doesn't mean that no research and development is needed: we can and will come up with even better solutions. But we already have the solutions. No technical challenge here, just a political challenge: decide how to share the costs. Because we are lazy and don't understand what game theory tells us about the current stand-still. This is a game where each country would benefit the most if it succeeds doing the least - as long as the others do enough. Hence the need for a political COP27: the only issue is to find a consensus and start acting promptly at the required scale (which is a big one, but much smaller than WWII for example on the economic side). Geo-engineering is a quest for the silver bullet. As if technology had ever provided a solution to a political issue... It hasn't. When it looks like it has, it's always because the policies are embbeded into the technogly: cf "code is law" for example.
HKH2 4y ago
Chemtrails are just a conspiracy theory.
- blablabla123 4y ago
  Obviously they are although I often think many modern conspiracy theories are just an extremely poor attempt of story telling actual problems. Maybe it's not even on purpose but imagining how the theory is told from person to person, with more noise, distortions and embellishments until it gets written down...
shafyy 4y ago
It’s sad that the greed and selfishness of our societies lead to these kind of dystopian attempts to stop climate change. People are ready to try the craziest things, as long as it’s not one of: curbing their consumption, stop flying or stop eating animal products. But sure, let’s blast fucking aerosols into the atmosphere. Fucking sad.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Individual purchasing habits are not the solution at scale. Why does our industry love systemic analysis of tech failure and systemic mitigation, but then blames the individually powerless masses on an individual level for our biggest problems. Your stance that individuals need to do their daily shopping better is just a way to make yourself feel good and to spread division amongst workers and the poor.
  - zahma 4y ago
    Since when did eating meat and flying concern only the working class and poor? How is collectively cutting back on carbon-intensive activities going to create these rifts? Also, and more to the point, if these sectors have such a large carbon footprint, then where did that demand come from? I don’t buy that cutting back on animal products or flying aren’t scaleable. Our global culture isn’t inexorably evolving to flying helicopters to work and eating meat 4x a day with a tall glass of milk, so why aren’t we talking about behavior change more in the West? We’ve always had a choice, and we know better now that these choices and path dependencies are destructive. Furthermore, companies that produce these products are simply providing for demand. It’s silly to lay the blame at their feet when they’ve no incentive to stop.
    - wahnfrieden 4y ago
      >Furthermore, companies that produce these products are simply providing for demand. It’s silly to lay the blame at their feet when they’ve no incentive to stop. you're not thinking systemically enough - the incentive system is also a choice there's a reason big oil were the original champions of plastics recycling as a marketable non-solution that focuses on individual/peer consumer habits over anything that would challenge their position. this neoliberal approach ultimately ensures their power remains. these replies are saying to take the solutions available to us individually, but you're promoting individual actor conscientiousness over organizing to effect systemic change at scale. I'm not saying only corps/govs have the power to fix this, I'm saying that by taking an individualist consumer solution perspective, we let corps/govs off their leash because individuals can't stand up to their level of organized power.
stirlo 4y ago
I fail to see how AI can really assist with this. Whatever model the AI is fed is going to contain an enormous number of assumptions many of which we have a very limited ability to scientifically test and validate prior to using them as inputs. If the inputs are faulty if doesn’t matter how smart the AI is it’s going to produce inaccurate results.
- kkfx 4y ago
  It's not a matter of design, such ideas, similar to "in-space shields" and so one are childish ideas by some grown but not really grown mentally, children. Can theoretically reflect Sun light? Of course yes. On scale? NO. We can't build a multi-million square km mirror in space, we can't spray gazillion of tons "powder" of any kind in the sky and so on. Oh, surely when we start to experimenting fly most people say "that's impossible, a childish dream" BUT such experiments do take scale into account. Even in the recent past with experiments like lowering the sea level in the Mediterranean or re-fertilize again central Asia (also ignoring the vast amount of salty land there) was reasoned on scale and dropped because at scale they are simply absurd. Having loss too much culture in reformed education systems to produce Ford model workers "useful idiots" in the ancient Greek language we are now unable to distinguish between "crazy but perhaps possible" and "childish dreams".
- bluenose69 4y ago
  I also fail to see how AI will be all that helpful in this problem. But I suppose it's not all that surprising to see such a message on a site that's about AI.
- IngvarLynn 4y ago
  The real reason why these topics met is that Andrew Ng is a prominent politician.
melling 4y ago
Almost 45 years after we were told not to burn all that coal, we are still burning all that coal. https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI But 45 years from now we’ll be smart enough to reverse all the damage we did for almost a century.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Lot of people have let optimism for science and technology get in the way of responsibility for risks that breakthroughs don’t come quickly enough
- is_true 4y ago
  It's a hard problem, it's similar to what happens when developed countries ask those underdeveloped to not exploit it's natural resources the way they did to get where they are now.
mherrmann 4y ago
Does anybody see a way something like this can actually be avoided? Fighting climate change is expensive. And while the costs of a climate catastrophe are even higher, they only need to be paid long after today's politicians have left office. Policy makers who want to get re-elected tomorrow have very little incentive to do what's right. What's more, it's a global problem where individual countries can benefit by defecting and letting others do the hard work. They can blame each other to justify inaction. It's a wonder that any measures get taken at all. Direct air capture is not looking promising. I bet there will be so little action that shit will hit the fan and we will need some kind of geoengineering. An eternally dark sky like in the Matrix? Hopefully not. But perhaps targeted control of the weather to prevent the worst droughts and storms. And a massive, forceful change to the planet to offset the additional warming. Please someone convince me I'm wrong?
- Retric 4y ago
  The possibility for improvement without massive government intervention exists. The rate of increase in CO2 emissions has seemingly slowed down dramatically. Emissions increased ~5% over the last decade while the decade before that was 32%. On the surface increasing emissions is still terrible, but as oil, coal, and natural gas are only getting more expensive and the alternatives get cheaper. Many of the worst estimates are no longer relevant and people in 2070+ might not need dramatic measures to deal with climate change.
  - mort96 4y ago
    The rate of increase in CO2 emissions has slowed down dramatically in large part because of massive government intervention though, no?
    - Retric 4y ago
      Depends on what you mean by massive. US’s net renewable subsides over fossil fuels work out to something like 0.1% of the budget in that time period. On one had that’s serious money on the other hand it’s not enough for tax payers to notice the expense.
jaggs 4y ago
Yet another stupid attempt to push this flawed proposal. There are so many things wrong with the idea it's almost ludicrous. For one thing, who gets the right to determine how this goes planetwide? For example, who will guarantee that releasing sulphuric acid into the sky won't trash the monsoon and kill billions of people? The number of unintended consequences we could suffer as a result of this moronic idea boggles the mind.
- beachy 4y ago
  Yep. Why even consider geoengineering while we're still pouring fucking CO2 into the air? If we can't stop increasing the damage, we don't deserve to continue as a species.
  - true_religion 4y ago
    > If we can't stop increasing the damage, we don't deserve to continue as a species. This sounds like back in the 90s, when abstinence only advocates said if you can’t stop having sex then you deserve to die of AIDS, so we should stop wasting money on cures and better treatments. People deserve a chance to live, no matter what their lifestyle.
    - beachy 4y ago
      > People deserve a chance to live, no matter what their lifestyle. I disagree, though I'm aware it's perhaps an unusual position to take and I would selfishly fight tooth and nail if my family were threatened. There will never be a human invention as wonderful as the natural world that we are vigorously destroying. To me, we don't deserve to be here if we continue to destroy it. We are not special, just one species amongst millions.
- parkingrift 4y ago
  If you think it’s ludicrous go ahead and show us the realistic path to avoiding the known and even more catastrophic outcomes of climate change. Not some comically pie in the sky eco idealism. A path that has a chance of actually happening in the real world. The real world where Russia thinks global warming will be good for them. We’re a decade or more away from peak emissions with best efforts, and that date will be pushed deeper into the future if there is a global recession. Stratospheric aerosol injection needs more research as it is one of the only viable ways we have to stave off global catastrophe.
boringg 4y ago
This is and will always be a terrible way to solve the problem. Should be in the same category as nuclear weapons. Abjectly terrible idea. All the people pushing this idea truly dont understand the implications, think they are smarter than they are, and think this is the easy and obvious solution.
- timmg 4y ago
  Can you explain why?
  - boringg 4y ago
    As humans we like to think that we can control effectively however it's clearly not the case. Something like geo-engineering while certainly possible to study certainly wouldn't be able to understand the ripple effects. Its tantamount to releasing a a non-native species into the wild to control another species will creating another whole host of problems. Geo-engineering is just that on a larger and potentially more deleterious scale.
- lumost 4y ago
  This seems overly dismissive of a solution to a rapidly approaching crises effecting billions of people. Geoengineering can be studied like anything else. If applied, it will have negative externalities like everything else. The few millions spent is a small bet on something that could have a big impact.
- luma 4y ago
  Nobody has said this is an easy solution, just that it might be a possible solution. If this one is as bad as you claim, what is the better solution you had in mind? Is that solution actually feasible? If your plan was "massive cut in emmissions", my response is how do you plan on making that feasible when it hasn't been tus far? Or was your plan just to shoot down every solution proposed and to do nothing at all instead?
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  This might be the only solution. At any point in the near future we may learn that our previously-emitted GHGs have locked us into a climate feedback loop that ends with unsurvivable temperature increases (at least, unsurvivable for global civilization.) At that point what's the alternative? (And yes: it is catastrophic that we've put ourselves in a situation where this might be our only hope of surviving, happy to discuss the allocation of blame for that mistake.)
henearkr 4y ago
I understand the push for stratospheric aerosols, but the alleged need for deeplearning is poorly justified. All the points listed in favor of deeplearning in this article only point towards the need for heavy calculations, but I would say it's not deeplearning that's required, but instead very precise physical simulations. For example to help the deployment of drones to spread the aerosols, I don't think that you can model winds better with deeplearning than with current models used by meteorological agencies. Or, at least, it does not seem to me the bottleneck here. Or, OK maybe there will be breakthroughs that would replace physical simulation-based meteorology by deeplearning models, but I don't think it is helpful right now, or you would need to do a lot more explaining to convince me.
- acc_297 4y ago
  yeah that's the weirdest part of it aerosol injection is heavily debated and reasonable people can disagree about it but standard engineering principles can be applied to build new planes and standard global circulation models can be applied to model long range particle transport in the atmosphere -- these are very understood problems by human beings and have been for years -- sure AI can assist with tweaks / optimizations i.e. with airfoils etc. the emphasis that these are problems where AI / ML are ripe to be applied is bizarre and speak to a greater bias in favour of AI / ML development and adoption than a bias in favour of geo-eng solutions to climate change
IngvarLynn 4y ago
See also: reversal of siberian rivers, aral sea obliteration.
drakmo 4y ago
That would be the mother of all jokes: After we clowned the Chemtrail-Simps we actually need Chemtrails to safe the world from chemicals. Humanity is a clown-show
ShredKazoo 4y ago
As the climate warms, we can expect more flooding in low-lying coastal areas. What if someone created a mobile climate response team that dealt with floodwaters by injecting them into the air as aerosols? Kill 2 birds with one stone. It's even possible that you could do it as a for-profit, by charging municipalities for the service. (For profit means more scaleable, easier to get capital) I don't know what sort of approach might be feasible here. Could do something really imaginative like an inflatable tower with tubes running along it and pumps at the bottom. Or drones as described in the OP.

25 points by kkm 4y ago

gizajob 4y ago

What could possibly go wrong!

FrenchAmerican 4y ago
Indeed, what could go wrong... The author wants the scientists to be involved in the coming COP27, as if they were not already. As if no technical anf scientific solutions had been provided to climate change! Plenty of solutions have been found already. We absolutely know how to resolve this issue on the technical aspects ; this doesn't mean that no research and development is needed: we can and will come up with even better solutions. But we already have the solutions. No technical challenge here, just a political challenge: decide how to share the costs. Because we are lazy and don't understand what game theory tells us about the current stand-still. This is a game where each country would benefit the most if it succeeds doing the least - as long as the others do enough. Hence the need for a political COP27: the only issue is to find a consensus and start acting promptly at the required scale (which is a big one, but much smaller than WWII for example on the economic side). Geo-engineering is a quest for the silver bullet. As if technology had ever provided a solution to a political issue... It hasn't. When it looks like it has, it's always because the policies are embbeded into the technogly: cf "code is law" for example.

HKH2 4y ago

Chemtrails are just a conspiracy theory.

blablabla123 4y ago
Obviously they are although I often think many modern conspiracy theories are just an extremely poor attempt of story telling actual problems. Maybe it's not even on purpose but imagining how the theory is told from person to person, with more noise, distortions and embellishments until it gets written down...

shafyy 4y ago

It’s sad that the greed and selfishness of our societies lead to these kind of dystopian attempts to stop climate change. People are ready to try the craziest things, as long as it’s not one of: curbing their consumption, stop flying or stop eating animal products. But sure, let’s blast fucking aerosols into the atmosphere. Fucking sad.

wahnfrieden 4y ago
Individual purchasing habits are not the solution at scale. Why does our industry love systemic analysis of tech failure and systemic mitigation, but then blames the individually powerless masses on an individual level for our biggest problems. Your stance that individuals need to do their daily shopping better is just a way to make yourself feel good and to spread division amongst workers and the poor.
- zahma 4y ago
  Since when did eating meat and flying concern only the working class and poor? How is collectively cutting back on carbon-intensive activities going to create these rifts? Also, and more to the point, if these sectors have such a large carbon footprint, then where did that demand come from? I don’t buy that cutting back on animal products or flying aren’t scaleable. Our global culture isn’t inexorably evolving to flying helicopters to work and eating meat 4x a day with a tall glass of milk, so why aren’t we talking about behavior change more in the West? We’ve always had a choice, and we know better now that these choices and path dependencies are destructive. Furthermore, companies that produce these products are simply providing for demand. It’s silly to lay the blame at their feet when they’ve no incentive to stop.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    >Furthermore, companies that produce these products are simply providing for demand. It’s silly to lay the blame at their feet when they’ve no incentive to stop. you're not thinking systemically enough - the incentive system is also a choice there's a reason big oil were the original champions of plastics recycling as a marketable non-solution that focuses on individual/peer consumer habits over anything that would challenge their position. this neoliberal approach ultimately ensures their power remains. these replies are saying to take the solutions available to us individually, but you're promoting individual actor conscientiousness over organizing to effect systemic change at scale. I'm not saying only corps/govs have the power to fix this, I'm saying that by taking an individualist consumer solution perspective, we let corps/govs off their leash because individuals can't stand up to their level of organized power.

stirlo 4y ago

I fail to see how AI can really assist with this. Whatever model the AI is fed is going to contain an enormous number of assumptions many of which we have a very limited ability to scientifically test and validate prior to using them as inputs. If the inputs are faulty if doesn’t matter how smart the AI is it’s going to produce inaccurate results.

kkfx 4y ago
It's not a matter of design, such ideas, similar to "in-space shields" and so one are childish ideas by some grown but not really grown mentally, children. Can theoretically reflect Sun light? Of course yes. On scale? NO. We can't build a multi-million square km mirror in space, we can't spray gazillion of tons "powder" of any kind in the sky and so on. Oh, surely when we start to experimenting fly most people say "that's impossible, a childish dream" BUT such experiments do take scale into account. Even in the recent past with experiments like lowering the sea level in the Mediterranean or re-fertilize again central Asia (also ignoring the vast amount of salty land there) was reasoned on scale and dropped because at scale they are simply absurd. Having loss too much culture in reformed education systems to produce Ford model workers "useful idiots" in the ancient Greek language we are now unable to distinguish between "crazy but perhaps possible" and "childish dreams".
bluenose69 4y ago
I also fail to see how AI will be all that helpful in this problem. But I suppose it's not all that surprising to see such a message on a site that's about AI.
IngvarLynn 4y ago
The real reason why these topics met is that Andrew Ng is a prominent politician.

melling 4y ago

Almost 45 years after we were told not to burn all that coal, we are still burning all that coal. https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI But 45 years from now we’ll be smart enough to reverse all the damage we did for almost a century.

wahnfrieden 4y ago
Lot of people have let optimism for science and technology get in the way of responsibility for risks that breakthroughs don’t come quickly enough
is_true 4y ago
It's a hard problem, it's similar to what happens when developed countries ask those underdeveloped to not exploit it's natural resources the way they did to get where they are now.

mherrmann 4y ago

Does anybody see a way something like this can actually be avoided? Fighting climate change is expensive. And while the costs of a climate catastrophe are even higher, they only need to be paid long after today's politicians have left office. Policy makers who want to get re-elected tomorrow have very little incentive to do what's right. What's more, it's a global problem where individual countries can benefit by defecting and letting others do the hard work. They can blame each other to justify inaction. It's a wonder that any measures get taken at all. Direct air capture is not looking promising. I bet there will be so little action that shit will hit the fan and we will need some kind of geoengineering. An eternally dark sky like in the Matrix? Hopefully not. But perhaps targeted control of the weather to prevent the worst droughts and storms. And a massive, forceful change to the planet to offset the additional warming. Please someone convince me I'm wrong?

Retric 4y ago
The possibility for improvement without massive government intervention exists. The rate of increase in CO2 emissions has seemingly slowed down dramatically. Emissions increased ~5% over the last decade while the decade before that was 32%. On the surface increasing emissions is still terrible, but as oil, coal, and natural gas are only getting more expensive and the alternatives get cheaper. Many of the worst estimates are no longer relevant and people in 2070+ might not need dramatic measures to deal with climate change.
- mort96 4y ago
  The rate of increase in CO2 emissions has slowed down dramatically in large part because of massive government intervention though, no?
  - Retric 4y ago
    Depends on what you mean by massive. US’s net renewable subsides over fossil fuels work out to something like 0.1% of the budget in that time period. On one had that’s serious money on the other hand it’s not enough for tax payers to notice the expense.

jaggs 4y ago

Yet another stupid attempt to push this flawed proposal. There are so many things wrong with the idea it's almost ludicrous. For one thing, who gets the right to determine how this goes planetwide? For example, who will guarantee that releasing sulphuric acid into the sky won't trash the monsoon and kill billions of people? The number of unintended consequences we could suffer as a result of this moronic idea boggles the mind.

beachy 4y ago
Yep. Why even consider geoengineering while we're still pouring fucking CO2 into the air? If we can't stop increasing the damage, we don't deserve to continue as a species.
- true_religion 4y ago
  > If we can't stop increasing the damage, we don't deserve to continue as a species. This sounds like back in the 90s, when abstinence only advocates said if you can’t stop having sex then you deserve to die of AIDS, so we should stop wasting money on cures and better treatments. People deserve a chance to live, no matter what their lifestyle.
  - beachy 4y ago
    > People deserve a chance to live, no matter what their lifestyle. I disagree, though I'm aware it's perhaps an unusual position to take and I would selfishly fight tooth and nail if my family were threatened. There will never be a human invention as wonderful as the natural world that we are vigorously destroying. To me, we don't deserve to be here if we continue to destroy it. We are not special, just one species amongst millions.
parkingrift 4y ago
If you think it’s ludicrous go ahead and show us the realistic path to avoiding the known and even more catastrophic outcomes of climate change. Not some comically pie in the sky eco idealism. A path that has a chance of actually happening in the real world. The real world where Russia thinks global warming will be good for them. We’re a decade or more away from peak emissions with best efforts, and that date will be pushed deeper into the future if there is a global recession. Stratospheric aerosol injection needs more research as it is one of the only viable ways we have to stave off global catastrophe.

boringg 4y ago

This is and will always be a terrible way to solve the problem. Should be in the same category as nuclear weapons. Abjectly terrible idea. All the people pushing this idea truly dont understand the implications, think they are smarter than they are, and think this is the easy and obvious solution.

timmg 4y ago
Can you explain why?
- boringg 4y ago
  As humans we like to think that we can control effectively however it's clearly not the case. Something like geo-engineering while certainly possible to study certainly wouldn't be able to understand the ripple effects. Its tantamount to releasing a a non-native species into the wild to control another species will creating another whole host of problems. Geo-engineering is just that on a larger and potentially more deleterious scale.
lumost 4y ago
This seems overly dismissive of a solution to a rapidly approaching crises effecting billions of people. Geoengineering can be studied like anything else. If applied, it will have negative externalities like everything else. The few millions spent is a small bet on something that could have a big impact.
luma 4y ago
Nobody has said this is an easy solution, just that it might be a possible solution. If this one is as bad as you claim, what is the better solution you had in mind? Is that solution actually feasible? If your plan was "massive cut in emmissions", my response is how do you plan on making that feasible when it hasn't been tus far? Or was your plan just to shoot down every solution proposed and to do nothing at all instead?
matthewdgreen 4y ago
This might be the only solution. At any point in the near future we may learn that our previously-emitted GHGs have locked us into a climate feedback loop that ends with unsurvivable temperature increases (at least, unsurvivable for global civilization.) At that point what's the alternative? (And yes: it is catastrophic that we've put ourselves in a situation where this might be our only hope of surviving, happy to discuss the allocation of blame for that mistake.)

henearkr 4y ago

I understand the push for stratospheric aerosols, but the alleged need for deeplearning is poorly justified. All the points listed in favor of deeplearning in this article only point towards the need for heavy calculations, but I would say it's not deeplearning that's required, but instead very precise physical simulations. For example to help the deployment of drones to spread the aerosols, I don't think that you can model winds better with deeplearning than with current models used by meteorological agencies. Or, at least, it does not seem to me the bottleneck here. Or, OK maybe there will be breakthroughs that would replace physical simulation-based meteorology by deeplearning models, but I don't think it is helpful right now, or you would need to do a lot more explaining to convince me.

acc_297 4y ago
yeah that's the weirdest part of it aerosol injection is heavily debated and reasonable people can disagree about it but standard engineering principles can be applied to build new planes and standard global circulation models can be applied to model long range particle transport in the atmosphere -- these are very understood problems by human beings and have been for years -- sure AI can assist with tweaks / optimizations i.e. with airfoils etc. the emphasis that these are problems where AI / ML are ripe to be applied is bizarre and speak to a greater bias in favour of AI / ML development and adoption than a bias in favour of geo-eng solutions to climate change

IngvarLynn 4y ago

See also: reversal of siberian rivers, aral sea obliteration.

drakmo 4y ago

That would be the mother of all jokes: After we clowned the Chemtrail-Simps we actually need Chemtrails to safe the world from chemicals. Humanity is a clown-show

ShredKazoo 4y ago

As the climate warms, we can expect more flooding in low-lying coastal areas. What if someone created a mobile climate response team that dealt with floodwaters by injecting them into the air as aerosols? Kill 2 birds with one stone. It's even possible that you could do it as a for-profit, by charging municipalities for the service. (For profit means more scaleable, easier to get capital) I don't know what sort of approach might be feasible here. Could do something really imaginative like an inflatable tower with tubes running along it and pumps at the bottom. Or drones as described in the OP.