3 ms·
I dunno, I think intentional geo-engineering shouldn't have to hold itself to a higher standard of caution than everyone else on the planet. When this past summ
by abeppu 3y ago
I dunno, I think intentional geo-engineering shouldn't have to hold itself to a higher standard of caution than everyone else on the planet. When this past summer, we saw record high ocean surface temps b/c container ships had cut back on their sulfur emissions and produced less artificial cloud cover, that highlighted to me that we're _already_ doing these things, but we hold ourselves to a much higher standard if doing it intentionally than if doing it on accident. Somehow a shipping companies does it on accident for decades that's not so scary, but if a group wants to do it intentionally (say, with seawater so it doesn't produce acid rain), that's irresponsible.
There's a spectrum of how controllable these things are (how large a region do you impact? how long does the effect persist after you shut your operation down?), and there are things at the more local / shorter-lived end of the spectrum that I think we should be trying. Are they a "sure thing"? No, not absolutely. But billions of us are pumping carbon into the air and nitrogen runoff into rivers and plastic absolutely everywhere. We're already gambling, but we gotta start picking better things to bet on.