4 ms·
> With sulfates you just turn off the spigot and they're gone in a year or so. There's no "just" about this. The sulfates may be gone, but the effect of their
by wwwtyro 14y ago
> With sulfates you just turn off the spigot and they're gone in a year or so.
There's no "just" about this. The sulfates may be gone, but the effect of their presence will never be, no matter how tiny or great it is. Again, your consideration of this is first order. I can make this clear with this question: what are the long-term effects of releasing sulfate aerosols into the air, and how do you know?
> True, but in this case, if we want civilization to survive we'd better do something.
I'm not following your logic. As I've outlined with the rats and cats example, doing something can cause a larger problem than the initial one. If we want to do something, it should be scaling back our effect on the natural environment, not giving it a good whack and hoping that the trajectory we send it on turns out correct.
> I haven't seen a single argument against albedo adjustment that was more substantial than "something bad might happen, I don't know what."
The unintended consequences of actions in chaotic systems is a damned good argument, no matter how simply you try to state it. If no one offered an argument against the cats on Macquarie Island other than "something might go wrong here, though I can't predict what", would they have been wrong? No. They'd be recognizing that they were turning knobs on a system that they did not understand, and that unpredictably bad reactions could result.
- DennisP 14y agoBehind door #1 is a hungry tiger. If you choose door #1 it will jump out and eat you. Behind door #2 is something else. There's no particular reason to think it will eat you, but who knows, it might. Which door do you choose? If there's a door #3 that will definitely not eat you, then choose it. But so far we don't seem to have found a door like that. Just "scaling back" to any realistic degree is unlikely to be sufficient to avoid door #1, unless we succeed soon in converting our energy supply to advanced fission or cheap fusion. Geoengineering approaches that pull carbon back out of the atmosphere are another avenue, which I prefer to albedo adjustment since they simply return the atmosphere to its original state. But those are much bigger and more expensive, and in some cases have their own side effects.
- gruseom 14y agoThere's no "just" about this. Gerald Weinberg once suggested that whenever you hear the j-word ("just") you should mentally swap it out for "have trouble". For example, "we'll just add that feature" means "we'll have trouble adding that feature". I think that may apply to "just" turning off that spigot. He also recommended that the s-word, "should", be replaced be "isn't". Funny rules, but they work: you learn to notice those words as signs that we don't have a clear view of what we're talking about.