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Cloud-forming isoprene and terpenes from crops may drastically improve climate
- black_13 1y ago[dead]
- ricardobayes 1y agoI think I saw this movie
- bananapub 1y agoIt really does seem like it’s going to be impossible to stop rich lunatics from having a go at geoengineering instead of just actually helping to slash emissions. Pretty embarrassing overall for the species.
- ch4s3 1y ago> just actually helping to slash emissions The word just here hides a lot of complexity and difficult tradeoffs.
- mslansn 1y agoDon't know what rich assholes have to do with it, when all things I've seen proposed hurt poor people the most. Make meat unaffordable, make private transportation unaffordable, make travelling by plane unaffordable, make new clothes unaffordable, and the list goes on forever.
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoDo you think carbon emissions are coming from poor people’s consumption? Even in the US only half the population will fly in any year and you can be sure it’s not the poorer half. It’s not the rich half using public transport, they are only going to benefit from a transition away from private car ownership.
- throwaway5752 1y agoYes. Poorer people buy things made overseas that requires a lot of shipping, and are lower quality that require more frequent replacement. They tend to have more children. They usually have more polluting energy sources. And there are many orders of magnitude more of them than rich people. None of this is their fault, but ignoring it isn't good either. All aircraft emissions are just 3% of US total. If all rich people (either the top 1% or 10%) reduced their emissions to zero tomorrow we would still not reach reduction targets needed to avoid catastrophic warming. Everyone needs to contribute.
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoShipping the things that poor people buy is almost unfathomably eco-friendly. Gargantuan slow ships are actually a great way to move stuff.
- trollbridge 1y agoI'm a little sceptical of claims like "poor people cause more pollution because they have more children than rich people do".
- throwaway5752 1y agoHaving a child is on of the most carbon intensive actions any given person can make. The numbers are what they are. Rich people have much greater obligation to reduce their emissions. They benefit most from economic activity and they cause the most emissions per capita. If there were zero rich people tomorrow we would still have an emissions problem for the climate.
- bilsbie 1y agoWhat if the child is a climate activist?
- adolph 1y ago> Having a child is on of the most carbon intensive actions any given person can make. What about continuing to live at all? That is a decision people make every moment of the day and are not being held accountable for it at all. If there were zero people tomorrow there would be still be an ongoing problem for the climate from the changes wreaked already.
- MildlySerious 1y agoThat's exactly what rich assholes have to do with it. Why do you believe all the consequence falls onto the working class and the poorest, when the richest have per capita the largest emissions, by whole orders of magnitude? Yeah, the changes required are systemic and go from the top all the way to the bottom, and the things you mention are part of that process, but pricing people out of everything without offering an off-ramp is sadistic bullshit, and the only reason it's a thing is because rich people and stock prices have more representation in politics than the poor and the environment.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoWho cares about per capita emissions? Billionaires could have 1000x the emissions as normal people, but there are so few of them, cutting their emissions down to zero would have absolutely no impact on climate change.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- phatskat 1y agoDo you consider the factories, farms, etc that they own to be part of the equation? I do, and so if you were to “cut the emissions down to zero” of the owner of a large chicken processing company, all those factory farms disappear and that’s not peanuts for climate change.
- MildlySerious 1y agoYou could cut the emissions of the top 1% in half, or reduce the emissions of the bottom 4 billion to 0. Same result. Which do you believe is likely the lower hanging fruit, has a higher return per dollar spent and is likely to be more ethical and less invasive? So yeah. I care about per capita emissions on the grounds that things need to change fast, and adjusting the lifestyle of a few million is radically easier than wiping half the planet off the emissions map.
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- zahlman 1y agoWhat do you suppose is the net worth of the people spearheading efforts in solar power and electric vehicles?
- zemvpferreira 1y agoCut carbon emissions to zero tomorrow and we’re still in a great deal of trouble. Earth is a lagging system and the damage has been done 10 times over. I don’t blame anyone for looking at radical solutions. We’re not putting out the fire by putting the wood back in a pile.
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoWhat about blaming people for grabbing an assortment of different non-wood, non-water objects and throwing them on the fire? There’s obviously some need to experiment to see if we can find solutions, but historically our track record for engineering complex systems has not been great.
- bilsbie 1y ago[flagged]
- sweettea 1y agoI mean, we're already having democratized geoengineering: Make Sunsets (https://makesunsets.com/ https://makesunsets.com/) allows you or anyone else to fund deploying high-altitude clouds for geocooling.
- dylan604 1y agoI guess FloridaMan won't be doing this as they've recently passed legislation to ban this type of stuff. I think this is one of those cases where it was done for the wrong reasons, but it kind of works out in the end https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/23/chemtrails-florida-desantis-bans-geoengineering-weather-modification/84315376007/ https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/23/c...
- delfinom 1y agoSounds like florida man needs to ban plants
- gsf_emergency_2 1y agoDemocracies around the world are already doing a fine job not making the changes voters expect, how can we expect them to take responsibility for effects that are not entirely predictable?
- ElevenLathe 1y agoRain follows the plow?
- axiolite 1y agoClever, but no. This is about cloud formation, and doesn't indicate any (significant) increased chances of precipitation.
- fred_is_fred 1y agoThis is exactly backwards from what I would think: "Bright ones at low altitudes generally reflect solar energy away, whereas wispier ones up to 20,000 feet tend to trap heat.". I would have guessed high ones reflect it before it gets lower into the atmosphere.
- jvanderbot 1y agoYou might be surprised to learn how much global warming impact from jet aircraft is actually from creating "high-up wispy clouds" in the form of contrails (which are just water vapor).
- roter 1y agoThe whispey ones are largely transparent to incoming shortwave radiation but largely opaque to outgoing longwave radiation. You just need to put on your ~10 micron wavelength goggles.
- pfdietz 1y agoIndustrial production of isoprene is about 800,000 tons/year. Global emission from plants of the chemical is about 600 million tons/year. In the US, the large natural emission of isoprene is why emission control for vehicles shifted to focus on NOx emission.
- gsf_emergency_2 1y agoThat's why I changed the title to better reflect the aspirations of the Smithsonian. Because some people might take "plants" to mean "chemical plants" :) Less ironically, there was a HN submission this week finding cryptic isoprene emission in soybean. You know, famous for the GM. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2502360122 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2502360122
- dtgriscom 1y agoThe edited title is misleading. The original aricle's title is "Scientists Are Just Beginning to Understand How Life Makes Clouds, and Their Discoveries May Drastically Improve Climate Science." Indeed, this knowledge will improve the models we use to understand and predict the climate. The supplied title "Cloud-forming isoprene and terpenes from crops may drastically improve climate" is completely different, as it states that crop emissions may change climate for the better. "Understanding cloud-forming isoprene and terpenes from crops may drastically improve climate science" would be a much better title for this post.
- gsf_emergency_2 1y agoI changed the title to better reflect the aspirations of the Smithsonian. Because some people might take "plants" to mean "chemical plants" :) In clearly better faith, there was a HN submission this week finding cryptic isoprene emission in soybean (3pts). The crop that's Taleb-famous for the GM in GMO. Title & theme of that paper seemed to have bounced off the enthusiasts here.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44377401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44377401 (Maybe yours is a bit long,maybe not, but imho we're a bit closer than only "understanding".)