4 ms·

As this post hints at in the discussion of sulfur emissions at sea, all it takes to significantly slow global warming is one country or sufficiently motivated n

As this post hints at in the discussion of sulfur emissions at sea, all it takes to significantly slow global warming is one country or sufficiently motivated non-state actor deciding to go all-in on geoengineering (like seeding the stratosphere with sulfur dioxides). Compare this to the collective action problem of everyone, including rapidly industrializing poorer countries, spending trillions to decarbonize their economy and it's pretty clear which outcome is more likely. The only question is which country (or countries) will be first to attempt it, and what will trigger them to act.

detritus 3y ago
According to the 'novel' The Ministry of The Future, that could be a state Actor... . I put 'novel' in quotes because it's a really weird novel.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  A lot of novels are weird. It's straightforwardly a novel you don't need to put it in quotes.
  - detritus 3y ago
    More that it's a weird form of treatise with the mereset semblance of a coherent novel intertwined within it to encourage people to read it.
- blacksmith_tb 3y ago
  A novel novel, got it. I actually thought it was a pretty straightforward read, but to each their own. According to the novel Termination Shock it could just take an eccentric billionaire to launch a geoengineering effort like that (though with some blowback from state actors) - of course there aren't any of those around, so that's clearly fiction...
  - ericmay 3y ago
    Just as a digression I thought Ministry for the Future was a far better book than Termination Shock was.
candiddevmike 3y ago
Every time humans try and fix nature, we tend to make it worse due to not understanding the problem or consequences.
- theropost 3y ago
  Do we though? Up until very recent history, we thought of nature as deadly, and unforgiving. The wilderness would mean almost certain death. We did not master the environment, we were afraid of it. I wouldn't say we make things worse, I think we make things our own. Is that worse? I'd tend to disagree. I prefer human environments over the deep wilderness. Most of us love nature, but we love the human version of that.. groomed trails, modest temperatures, light breezes, and having all the human comforts within reach. Humanity does certainly do things wrong, but we also do things right.
  - hospitalJail 3y ago
    I'm with you mostly.... But this is fluids, we don't have science to know how it will actually perform. Gosh, I'm so afraid of problems with fluids. My worst case dooms: >The change in energy causes extreme weather >The energy change causes some electrons to leave their orbitals temporarily, causing compounds in the atmosphere that typically never occur(creating cancer air). >Long term effects are not known, causing cancer air.
- tptacek 3y ago
  That's not the point of the comment you're responding to. Climate-driven austerity isn't going to happen, because it's an intractable global-scale collective action problem. If you believe that anthropogenic climate change is going to be a global disaster, you should probably reasonably assume that some country in the world is going to allocate serious resources to mitigating it. There are 50 countries in the world with resources exceeding that of Portugal or New Zealand. Any of those countries could fund and implement a large-scale geoengineering project. No mechanism exists to ensure that any of those countries get permission to do so. So it doesn't much matter whether we think it's a good idea. Either: (1) Anthropogenic climate change isn't going to impose unacceptable costs on the industrialized world, and we'll just blow it off, or (2) Some country is going to intervene directly in the climate.
e44858 3y ago
Sulfur dioxide + water + oxygen = sulfuric acid, which is not something you want in the atmosphere where rain clouds form.
- idlewords 3y ago
  Rain clouds don't form in the stratosphere, and there's very little water there.
  - pictureofabear 3y ago
    So the sulfur dioxide would stay in the stratosphere and not make its way down into the troposphere?
  - e44858 3y ago
    Thunderstorms can actually push water into the stratosphere: https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-powerful-thunderstorms-push-water-high-atmosphere https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-powerful-thunderstorm...
OrwellianChild 3y ago
In which idlewords basically cites the plot of "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson... :-)
- idlewords 3y ago
  Please don't make me read another one of his books. I'm still recovering from the Seveneves fiasco.
  - OrwellianChild 3y ago
    I didn't hate it, even though it played out more like a REAMDE type thriller than some of his earlier stuff (Anathem, Baroque, etc). I liked Seveneves, though.
  - sbierwagen 3y ago
    It reads a lot like Mother Earth Mother Board, in that it's a travelogue long-form article about a device that doesn't actually exist yet. It's not really a "novel" in the sense of having a "plot". Anyone who has read the wikipedia article on sulfur injection can safely skip it.
scythe 3y ago
>The only question is which country (or countries) will be first to attempt it, and what will trigger them to act. The capability + motivation factors certainly point to India as the most likely candidate, since they're among the closest to disastrous wet-bulb temperatures and have a domestic nuclear umbrella that allows them to say "and what are you going to do about that?". If a heat wave makes it impossible or deadly to harvest crops at a critical moment, panic is a possible outcome.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
No world leader is going to stick their neck out and spend billions to rain acid (even if thats exactly what the country needs), especially if their country is in a climate crisis. They mind as well hand in their resignation.
black_puppydog 3y ago
You do realize that even if it might work, and even if there weren't any other side effects like acid rain, this would essentially make every piece of sky on every day hazy. We'd essentially trade the very concept of "blue sky" for a livable temperature. Kinda hard to put a price on that for me. Maybe I'd prefer living with genuinely less comfort but blue skies.
- idlewords 3y ago
  You can get a lot of darkening without perceptible effect on the sky, and as a bonus you get amazing sunsets. This happens naturally every time there's a major volcanic eruption; this would just be hurrying the process along a bit.
- deanCommie 3y ago
  > Kinda hard to put a price on that for me. Maybe I'd prefer living with genuinely less comfort but blue skies. If all you have to trade off is comfort, maybe you can't. If you were one of the literal HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of people who are living in parts of the world that could become unsurvivable in the next few decades, or get flooded by rising sea levels, you'd have a different perspective. For what it's worth, I agree with you that reckless geoengineering could easily cause more harm than good. But aesthetically desiring a blue sky is a bit silly when up to a billion human lives are on the line (and that's a low estimate)
  - data_maan 3y ago
    I think there's also a balance here to make where we don't even know the effects on non-blue skies on animals, who perhaps depend on the sky being as it is for things like orientation? Would a billion+ animals deserve to die (that did not contribute to climate change), to save millions of other animals, called human (who actually contributed to this situation)? It's an impossible question, but still needs to be posed. Thr fact of the matter remains - we humans seem to try to be doing anything (geo-engineering, clever carbon offsetting schemes, etc) than the only reasonable thing: cutting down on consumption, de-growth. Somehow the human mind seems completely incapable of accepting this fact (let alone acting on it) that for once we need to be humble and self-limit ourselves. Seems to go against the grain of the credo of most societies on earth (in particular the western one). Let's see how many people prove me right by downvoting ...
callmeal 3y ago
I don't think people watching their cars rust before their eyes will go over well. Did we forget acid rain already? 1991 was not that long ago. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/09/news/new-paint-new-cars-acid-rain-often-they-don-t-mix.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/09/news/new-paint-new-cars-a...
- idlewords 3y ago
  This is about stratospheric SO2, the stratosphere by definition doesn't mix (on short timescales) with the air we park our cars in.

detritus 3y ago

According to the 'novel' The Ministry of The Future, that could be a state Actor... . I put 'novel' in quotes because it's a really weird novel.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
A lot of novels are weird. It's straightforwardly a novel you don't need to put it in quotes.
- detritus 3y ago
  More that it's a weird form of treatise with the mereset semblance of a coherent novel intertwined within it to encourage people to read it.
blacksmith_tb 3y ago
A novel novel, got it. I actually thought it was a pretty straightforward read, but to each their own. According to the novel Termination Shock it could just take an eccentric billionaire to launch a geoengineering effort like that (though with some blowback from state actors) - of course there aren't any of those around, so that's clearly fiction...
- ericmay 3y ago
  Just as a digression I thought Ministry for the Future was a far better book than Termination Shock was.

candiddevmike 3y ago

Every time humans try and fix nature, we tend to make it worse due to not understanding the problem or consequences.

theropost 3y ago
Do we though? Up until very recent history, we thought of nature as deadly, and unforgiving. The wilderness would mean almost certain death. We did not master the environment, we were afraid of it. I wouldn't say we make things worse, I think we make things our own. Is that worse? I'd tend to disagree. I prefer human environments over the deep wilderness. Most of us love nature, but we love the human version of that.. groomed trails, modest temperatures, light breezes, and having all the human comforts within reach. Humanity does certainly do things wrong, but we also do things right.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  I'm with you mostly.... But this is fluids, we don't have science to know how it will actually perform. Gosh, I'm so afraid of problems with fluids. My worst case dooms: >The change in energy causes extreme weather >The energy change causes some electrons to leave their orbitals temporarily, causing compounds in the atmosphere that typically never occur(creating cancer air). >Long term effects are not known, causing cancer air.
tptacek 3y ago
That's not the point of the comment you're responding to. Climate-driven austerity isn't going to happen, because it's an intractable global-scale collective action problem. If you believe that anthropogenic climate change is going to be a global disaster, you should probably reasonably assume that some country in the world is going to allocate serious resources to mitigating it. There are 50 countries in the world with resources exceeding that of Portugal or New Zealand. Any of those countries could fund and implement a large-scale geoengineering project. No mechanism exists to ensure that any of those countries get permission to do so. So it doesn't much matter whether we think it's a good idea. Either: (1) Anthropogenic climate change isn't going to impose unacceptable costs on the industrialized world, and we'll just blow it off, or (2) Some country is going to intervene directly in the climate.

e44858 3y ago

Sulfur dioxide + water + oxygen = sulfuric acid, which is not something you want in the atmosphere where rain clouds form.

idlewords 3y ago
Rain clouds don't form in the stratosphere, and there's very little water there.
- pictureofabear 3y ago
  So the sulfur dioxide would stay in the stratosphere and not make its way down into the troposphere?
- e44858 3y ago
  Thunderstorms can actually push water into the stratosphere: https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-powerful-thunderstorms-push-water-high-atmosphere https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-powerful-thunderstorm...

OrwellianChild 3y ago

In which idlewords basically cites the plot of "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson... :-)

idlewords 3y ago
Please don't make me read another one of his books. I'm still recovering from the Seveneves fiasco.
- OrwellianChild 3y ago
  I didn't hate it, even though it played out more like a REAMDE type thriller than some of his earlier stuff (Anathem, Baroque, etc). I liked Seveneves, though.
- sbierwagen 3y ago
  It reads a lot like Mother Earth Mother Board, in that it's a travelogue long-form article about a device that doesn't actually exist yet. It's not really a "novel" in the sense of having a "plot". Anyone who has read the wikipedia article on sulfur injection can safely skip it.

scythe 3y ago

>The only question is which country (or countries) will be first to attempt it, and what will trigger them to act. The capability + motivation factors certainly point to India as the most likely candidate, since they're among the closest to disastrous wet-bulb temperatures and have a domestic nuclear umbrella that allows them to say "and what are you going to do about that?". If a heat wave makes it impossible or deadly to harvest crops at a critical moment, panic is a possible outcome.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

No world leader is going to stick their neck out and spend billions to rain acid (even if thats exactly what the country needs), especially if their country is in a climate crisis. They mind as well hand in their resignation.

black_puppydog 3y ago

You do realize that even if it might work, and even if there weren't any other side effects like acid rain, this would essentially make every piece of sky on every day hazy. We'd essentially trade the very concept of "blue sky" for a livable temperature. Kinda hard to put a price on that for me. Maybe I'd prefer living with genuinely less comfort but blue skies.

idlewords 3y ago
You can get a lot of darkening without perceptible effect on the sky, and as a bonus you get amazing sunsets. This happens naturally every time there's a major volcanic eruption; this would just be hurrying the process along a bit.
deanCommie 3y ago
> Kinda hard to put a price on that for me. Maybe I'd prefer living with genuinely less comfort but blue skies. If all you have to trade off is comfort, maybe you can't. If you were one of the literal HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of people who are living in parts of the world that could become unsurvivable in the next few decades, or get flooded by rising sea levels, you'd have a different perspective. For what it's worth, I agree with you that reckless geoengineering could easily cause more harm than good. But aesthetically desiring a blue sky is a bit silly when up to a billion human lives are on the line (and that's a low estimate)
- data_maan 3y ago
  I think there's also a balance here to make where we don't even know the effects on non-blue skies on animals, who perhaps depend on the sky being as it is for things like orientation? Would a billion+ animals deserve to die (that did not contribute to climate change), to save millions of other animals, called human (who actually contributed to this situation)? It's an impossible question, but still needs to be posed. Thr fact of the matter remains - we humans seem to try to be doing anything (geo-engineering, clever carbon offsetting schemes, etc) than the only reasonable thing: cutting down on consumption, de-growth. Somehow the human mind seems completely incapable of accepting this fact (let alone acting on it) that for once we need to be humble and self-limit ourselves. Seems to go against the grain of the credo of most societies on earth (in particular the western one). Let's see how many people prove me right by downvoting ...

callmeal 3y ago

I don't think people watching their cars rust before their eyes will go over well. Did we forget acid rain already? 1991 was not that long ago. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/09/news/new-paint-new-cars-acid-rain-often-they-don-t-mix.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/09/news/new-paint-new-cars-a...

idlewords 3y ago
This is about stratospheric SO2, the stratosphere by definition doesn't mix (on short timescales) with the air we park our cars in.