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> chemistry happening in the upper atmosphere That's not a concern for the idea I linked, which restricts itself to the lower atmosphere, using nothing more th

• jijijijij 2y ago
  I hope you still get the point. It might have unforeseeable consequences and at some point we may end up trapped in a dilemma. When we've gone carbon neutral, we may think about these measures to reduce the temperature a bit again, but it's just a recipe for disaster, if used to "buy some time".
  • DennisP 2y ago
    Against your unforeseeable consequences, I'll balance the entirely foreseeable consequences of excess heat, plus the unforeseeable consequences of excess heat. It's not like our choices are between cloud seeding and a pristine planet. The reason we need this to buy some time is that those climate feedbacks aren't far away. We've seen in the geological record that really doesn't take much excess heat (usually from orbital variations) to kick off a warming cycle that would take things entirely out of our hands. Simply eliminating emissions would have been a great plan, but we're beyond that now. A lot of climate scientists say the safe CO2 level is 350ppm. I remember when we blew past that and they said "ok, but seriously don't go past 400ppm." Now we're at 425ppm with emissions going strong. Solar power, electric cars, all this stuff gives me hope for the future if we can do it in time, but we're in a race and we're losing. And it's not like this sort of cloud seeding would deploy all at once. We'd ramp up gradually and see how it goes. At the very least, we could replace the cloud cover that the article says we've eliminated over the past twenty years.