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There seems to be a current attempt to get this kind of dangerous nonsense accepted as 'normal'. No doubt the next step is to go for some public support from a
by jaggs 4y ago
There seems to be a current attempt to get this kind of dangerous nonsense accepted as 'normal'. No doubt the next step is to go for some public support from a 'celebrity' en route to a fully funded trial. Awful awful awful.
- hef19898 4y agoIn case selling credits doesn't work, they can sell crypto tokens or NFTs, can't they?
- andyjsong 4y agoActually, it's working with scientists that are open to supporting our efforts publically. We're speaking to several leading scientists at the moment supporting what we're trying to do, but they are afraid of the scorn they'll get from people like you and be excommunicated by their peers.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tsimionescu 4y ago> they are afraid of the scorn they'll get from people like you and be excommunicated by their peers Rightly so - this type of intentional pollution of our shared environment is simply not acceptable, even as a scientific study. You can't run a controlled experiment by releasing gases in the upper atmosphere, so it's very hard to understand what scientific value there could be to this anyway.
- encryptluks2 4y agoDefinitely picking up the cultish vibes. What's up with these Musky villain type characters thinking they are God's gift to the world?
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoArrogance. Ignorance. The cult of the Genius Founder that, ahem ahem, Y Combinator among others have been pushing for decades.
- roter 4y agoI would say that most climate scientists, including myself, subscribe to the lesson of "The King, The Mice, and The Cheese" [0]. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/446759.The_King_the_Mice_and_the_Cheese https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/446759.The_King_the_Mice...
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoWow, how thoughtful. Thank you for making potentially life changing decisions for myself and everyone I know without asking us how we feel. You're such a thoughtful and caring guy. Keep up the good work.
- dotancohen 4y ago> There seems to be a current attempt to get this kind of dangerous nonsense accepted as 'normal'. Why not? Society still considers expelling CO2 and NO2 into the atmosphere as 'normal'. Maybe the outrage directed at this effort should be directed at the industries expelling CO2 and NO2 as well.
- hef19898 4y agoNOx led to the VW emissions scandal, so we take the quite serious. CO2, well, we should be more aggressive, but it is tackled, e,g, no new ICE cars in the EU after 2035 (?). I still remember dead forests due to acid rain, caused by various sulfur-based shit in the atmosphere, we got rid of that. Same for some of the ozone layer destroyers, we got rid of those, too. That it takes longer to get rid of that crap shouldn't be used to accept start-ups intentionally (as opposed to being a side effect like other industries) polluting, and promoting that, as PR stunts and funding vehicles. Especially since the latter can be so easily stopped.
- swader999 4y agoWell there's breathing, is that not normal?
- dotancohen 4y agoPresumably there exist multiple organism that live in a balance, some emitting CO2 and other absorbing it. Being a productive member of an ecosystem is fine, but flooding that ecosystem with excessive emissions is not.
- gavanwilhite 4y agoThe technology is good here. The “move fast and break things” approach is not.
- jaggs 4y agoActually the technology is NOT good. https://archive.vn/AgLi8 https://archive.vn/AgLi8 "The scariest thing about this proposition is that models suggest that many of the people who could well be most harmed by these technologies are already disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Imagine this: North America decides to send sulfur into the stratosphere to reduce the intensity of the sun, in the hopes of saving its corn crops — despite the real possibility of triggering droughts in Asia and Africa. In short, geoengineering would give us (or some of us) the power to exile huge swaths of humanity to sacrifice zones with a virtual flip of the switch."
- neffy 4y agoThe other rather dangerous assumption is that arrogant Californians are the only ones who will try to do this. The problem is Geoengineering is not a zero sum game - if India decided to try and engineer the next ice age for example, to get access to the shallower parts of the Indian Ocean.
- jaggs 4y agoThis is exactly one of the major problems. What happens if a free for all is triggered? Do we get carrier group diplomacy standoffs in various regions to stop nations doing their own bit of engineering? Does the UN step in? So what if it does? It's a nightmare scenario if this stuff takes off.
- MagicMoonlight 4y ago[flagged]
- gavanwilhite 4y agoI’d like to politely point out that you are speaking to the geopolitical coordination challenges related to deployment, not the technology itself. Those are real, important issues to be worked through, and to your point, and they are better served by a multi-stakeholder approach that values climate justice. There is research and work needed both on policy and the technology aspects of this.
- spoiler 4y ago> No doubt the next step is to go for some public support from a 'celebrity' en route to a fully funded trial. Prediction: Americans will make it a Dems vs Reps thing. Pro and Against alignment will largely only depend on who first tweets about it. The other side will just blindly look for arguments against it (regardless of accuracy), even if we found out it performs well. Now, I don't know if this is a bad or a good thing myself (out of my depth here), but I see why experts would be concerned with this, as I imagine it's got far reaching consequences
- hef19898 4y agoYou skipped the part where Elon jumps in, one way or the other...
- jaggs 4y agoIndeed :)
- AzzieElbab 4y agoWait until ppl find out that the whole idea came from Microsoft’s early CTO
- hef19898 4y agoSo we will get a sulfur-yellow screen of death instead of a blue one?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- AzzieElbab 4y agoMore like rain of sulphur bugs. But hopefully not.
- tanseydavid 4y agoNathan Myhrvold to be more specific. Some people think that Mhyrvold's approach to climate-change-mitigation has already been implemented rather than just being an idea.
- AzzieElbab 4y agoThe process is supposed to be entirely reversible. So maybe not so awful awful
- sofixa 4y agoSupposed to be. And what's the plan B if it turns out it isn't?
- AzzieElbab 4y agoWho cares? We are all going to die from climate change in 12 years anyway, right? But seriously, the experiment is highly localised for now
- sofixa 4y agoClimate is never localised, everything is highly interdependent. Volcano eruptions in Indonesia have caused mass famines in Europe, for instance. > We are all going to die from climate change in 12 years anyway, right We aren't there yet, that we know of.
- AzzieElbab 4y agoTheir entire profitability model is based on being able to control where those artificial clouds stay. Large volcano eruptions were always global events, this isn’t
- jonathankoren 4y agoAre you honestly holding up a profitability model by a failson as superior to climate models by actual climate scientists?
- hef19898 4y agoI just felt the urge to look at their website. Is it just me, or is the whole business plan to sell anti-climate-change credits to everyday people for 10 bucks per credit, and accepting all common credit cards? Based on fear over climate change, and selling themselves as the only ones to be able to solve it, at 50k bucks per launch? Pretty, let's say, optimistic without any scientific proof. If it wasn't for the YC angle, I would call it a scam. Know what, I'd say it is one regardless of YC, after all they funded a start-up that attempted to mate the gig economy with organized smuggling (forgot the name of that fun idea of paying traveling students tu transport all kinds of things past customs in their luggage).
- jaggs 4y agoYeah, there's something going on here, isn't there?
- jonathankoren 4y agoHonestly, I think the Luke Iseman, the founder of Make Sunsets, is just a run of a mill Silicon Valley Dunning-Kruger. He’s been bouncing around the TEDx circuit (i.e. open mic night for wannabe influencers) for awhile with half thought out environmental/subsistence farming ideas for years now. He’s apparently a good bullshitter for some of the VC crowd, but when you watch him, he’s thoroughly unimpressive. Nothing moves beyond hobby level — nor could it. Here’s a video of him showing around his projects from a few years ago. Container hydroponics and rocket stoves. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HWIJc144mgQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HWIJc144mgQ After watching this, I’m not afraid of him or Make Sunsets at all. If you watch him, and then read his interviews about the fallout of Make Sunsets, he says what he did. He put some spoonful of sulfur into a helium balloon. That’s it. He even says, he didn’t measure anything. He doesn’t even know where the balloon ended up. (All those viral videos about launching a cell phone to stratosphere collected more data!) There’s literally NOTHING of use here beyond a press release. He could have accomplished the same by just saying he launched a balloon. To be perfectly honest. I don’t think the former Director of Hardware for Y Combinator is smart enough to move the climate at all. It’s just selling party balloons and calling them carbon credits. Now, someone else might be able to do it, but it ain’t this guy.
- toss1 4y agoYup, and the real problem is not getting geoengineering itself accepted as normal, but getting rogue geoengineering programs accepted as normal. Once it seems sort of OK for anyone to do it, it'll become a massive free-for-all, with geoengineering schemes that overlap or compete with different goals. We could easily end up with unintended consequences — dueling programs with net near-zero result but massive new pollution, mutually reinforcing programs that massively overshoot, etc. Then a bigger program to fix that one, and another to fix that one... I deeply feel the urgency to get started yesterday, and there's an initial feelgood rush reading this. But thinking for a few seconds on the cascading results of allowing rogue efforts and it turning into a free-for-all — sure, let's just play "move fast and break things" with the entire global climate. No thanks. We'd be better off choosing to play Global Thermonuclear War (it'd be over in ~48 hours and the global effects would be more brief).
- thatguy0900 4y agoWe will be playing global nuclear war in this scenario. What happens when a countries rainfall is deemed not enough so they start seeding rainclouds and stealing the rainwater from neighboring countries that needed them for agriculture.
- toss1 4y agoGood point, we get two-for-one disasters!