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We Could Brighten Clouds to Cool the Earth

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Re: We Could Brighten Clouds to Cool the Earth

#131

Post by WhompingWindows »

m0llusk wrote: post #95

This assumes that global warming is the problem, but arguably the most pressing aspect of carbon pollution is the acidification of the oceans which this plan would not address. It might make more sense to focus on capturing carbon pollution than to mitigate some of the side effects of rampant carbon pollution.

Why argue global warming is not a massive existential threat? Both are huge problems, we have the resources to begin tackling/experimenting on both areas, so why downplay solutions to either? The sea is expanding in size as it heats, more ice is melting as it heats as well. This will devastate billions of coast-adjacent humans. It's pretty hard to argue against preventing catastrophic sea-level rise, never mind acidification also being a huge problem.

Re: We Could Brighten Clouds to Cool the Earth

#132

Post by WhompingWindows »

alexgmcm wrote: post #67

What concerns me about almost all of the Solar Radiation Management (SRM) proposals is that they don't address the root issue of high Greenhouse Gas (GHG) concentrations. This means that we would have to continue them indefinitely, forever, without fail. (I'm assuming that we would just use the SRM measures to continue with business as usual, but having seen our progress against GHG emissions so far, that doesn't see…

Are you assuming we'd only use SRM and not continue the MASSIVE efforts already underway to lower yearly GHG emissions? And once we go zero, we're already seeing dozens of plans and ideas to handle what we've already emitted. Really, our current playbook is in its infancy and climate change is WAY out in front of us already due to our political and economic foot-dragging. I don't think we should nay-say anything nascent until we've found the most scale-able, economically viable solutions.

Re: We Could Brighten Clouds to Cool the Earth

#133

Post by alexgmcm »

hannob wrote: post #93
alexgmcm wrote: post #67

What concerns me about almost all of the Solar Radiation Management (SRM) proposals is that they don't address the root issue of high Greenhouse Gas (GHG) concentrations. This means that we would have to continue them indefinitely, forever, without fail. (I'm assuming that we would just use the SRM measures to continue with business as usual, but having seen our progress against GHG emissions so far, that doesn't see…

I'm not a fan of SRM, but this isn't true. The idea people in the SRM research community have go more like that you have declining CO2 emissions, at some point you turn around by deploying negative emissions tech and SRM is basically your "let's cut off the worst effects in times of highest CO2 concentrations". This is e.g. often described by David Keith, who's one of the leading advocates for SRM research. Whether a…

The issue is I don't think that scenario is realistic.

We don't have declining global CO2 emissions and there are no signs we will have that any time soon. In fact, annual CO2 emissions continue to increase at an almost exponential rate.

So first of all we'd have to decrease emissions and invent and deploy some CO2 extraction tech to help lower the current atmospheric CO2 concentration.

To me, it seems far more likely that if SRM was deployed many would just see it as a way to continue with business as usual without having to suffer the effects of global warming.

Re: We Could Brighten Clouds to Cool the Earth

#134

Post by goatlover »

Avalaxy wrote: post #77
Seb-C wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite optimistic about this too. Sure, we have to reduce our impact on the climate and be responsible about it, but even in the worst case scenario, I'm confident that we'll just find a way to deal with it. The current apocalyptic scenarios we see on the medias is too extreme and pessimistic. "If the Earth can't support seven billion people, then all seven billion of us just have to figure out a way! That's how s…

> The current apocalyptic scenarios we see on the medias is too extreme and pessimistic Source? If anything, scientists have been too conservative in their warnings. Time and time again, we see that climate change is going _much_ faster than we anticipated.

The models climate science is based on don't say that climate change is going much faster than expected. We're at about 1.2°C right now with with a current rate of 0.18°C per decade. This last IPCC report puts us in the expected warming range between 2.4°C and 4°C by the end of the century.

Re: We Could Brighten Clouds to Cool the Earth

#135

Post by alexgmcm »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #132
alexgmcm wrote: post #67

What concerns me about almost all of the Solar Radiation Management (SRM) proposals is that they don't address the root issue of high Greenhouse Gas (GHG) concentrations. This means that we would have to continue them indefinitely, forever, without fail. (I'm assuming that we would just use the SRM measures to continue with business as usual, but having seen our progress against GHG emissions so far, that doesn't see…

Are you assuming we'd only use SRM and not continue the MASSIVE efforts already underway to lower yearly GHG emissions? And once we go zero, we're already seeing dozens of plans and ideas to handle what we've already emitted. Really, our current playbook is in its infancy and climate change is WAY out in front of us already due to our political and economic foot-dragging. I don't think we should nay-say anything nasc…

Our "MASSIVE efforts" don't seem to be doing much so far: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

And that's just annual emissions, Atmospheric CO2 concentration is even worse: https://climate.nasa.gov/internal_resources/1914

If we go into the 2030's and we are still doing business as usual with our near-exponentially increasing global CO2 emissions then I suspect a large amount of climate damage will already be 'locked in'.

Re: We Could Brighten Clouds to Cool the Earth

#136

Post by baron_harkonnen »

phreeza wrote: post #71
myrmidon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm extremely sceptical that climate engineering is gonna help: Mitigating continued CO2 emissions is VASTLY more expensive than reducing emissions themselves (in every scenario I've seen so far), and we had 4 decades (!!) to do anything about the emissions but nothing happened. I see no reason to assume that governments are suddenly going to spend significant parts of GDP on climate engineering if they could not be…

You're right from a financial standpoint, but I wonder if from a psychological standpoint, it is easier for humans to start doing something new than it is to stop doing something they have been doing for a long time?

Exactly, this is why wearing masks and getting vaccinated worked so effectively at curbing the pandemic. People didn't want to change their way of life. Stopping the pandemic would have required an extreme economic shut down in April, far more extreme than what we saw. Sure this economic hit would be much less than the long run impact of pandemic never really going away, but it was too much for people.

So they all agreed that wearing maskings in public and private gathering, plus universal adoption of the vaccine would be the easier, if not ultimately more expensive path.

While the pandemic did stick around for a bit, by spring it was basically gone. Now when I go out I see people in packed clubs, happily drinking and dancing mask free.

Sure by comparison universal mask adoption and vaccination is to climate mitigation like building a lego castle is to building the pyramids by hand, but since we solved that problem so effectively I'm extremely optimistic about how we're going to tackle climate change.

We showed that we can solve pandemic without effecting the economy or our lifestyles, and we can just as easily to the same for climate change.

Re: We Could Brighten Clouds to Cool the Earth

#137

Post by [deleted] »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #136
phreeza wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right from a financial standpoint, but I wonder if from a psychological standpoint, it is easier for humans to start doing something new than it is to stop doing something they have been doing for a long time?

Exactly, this is why wearing masks and getting vaccinated worked so effectively at curbing the pandemic. People didn't want to change their way of life. Stopping the pandemic would have required an extreme economic shut down in April, far more extreme than what we saw. Sure this economic hit would be much less than the long run impact of pandemic never really going away, but it was too much for people. So they all ag…

[deleted]

Re: We Could Brighten Clouds to Cool the Earth

#138

Post by SllX »

sleepydog wrote: post #129
SllX wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanical and electrical engineering aren’t going to do you enough good quickly enough. But can you think of any forms of life on the bottom of the food chain that depend on carbon inputs as part of its own metabolic processes in order to reproduce itself? Because if you want a self-sustaining ocean-based carbon capture solution, that’s where I would look.

So like a smaller version of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event e.g, instigate some large bloom of plant matter or algae, and engineer/find the right conditions for the matter to sink to the bottom of the ocean without decomposing.

At least the first part. There’s an easy profit motive: increasing the base of the food chain feeds the rest of it, and some of those are products we like to eat.

The second part, if you can find a profit motive to compost the ocean floor and actually do it in a profitable way, then it will get done. Else we’re stuck relying on natural processes.

Re: We Could Brighten Clouds to Cool the Earth

#139

Post by sailingparrot »

myrmidon wrote: post #66
TillE wrote: post #2

I think I'm a relative optimist about global warming because there are a number of possible climate engineering interventions which seem fairly cheap and could plausibly buy us another decade or so. I can imagine a future where perhaps India or China decides to act on their own to this effect, risks be damned.

I'm extremely sceptical that climate engineering is gonna help: Mitigating continued CO2 emissions is VASTLY more expensive than reducing emissions themselves (in every scenario I've seen so far), and we had 4 decades (!!) to do anything about the emissions but nothing happened. I see no reason to assume that governments are suddenly going to spend significant parts of GDP on climate engineering if they could not be…

The immediacy of a threat is directly proportional to the willingness and resources allocated to tackle it. 40 years ago, no politician was willing to bank their mandate on starting to tackle a problem that was (mistakenly) thought to be a century in the future. This is starting to change.

Take COVID. Every government knew it could happen, and the damages to the economy (i.e. cost) it could have, yet none of the countries in the West did anything to prepare for it, and had to foot a much bigger bill in the end than say Taiwan or Japan. Again, because the threat was elusive and didn't feel immediate.

Re: We Could Brighten Clouds to Cool the Earth

#140

Post by Thrymr »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #97
m0llusk wrote: post #95

This assumes that global warming is the problem, but arguably the most pressing aspect of carbon pollution is the acidification of the oceans which this plan would not address. It might make more sense to focus on capturing carbon pollution than to mitigate some of the side effects of rampant carbon pollution.

I'm not sure I buy that, but sure, both are important problems. Question, what do we know about the ocean as a carbon sink? Is it's capture rate variable with anthing? Is it easier to capture carbon from the ocean than in the air? Could we try to increase the capture rate into the ocean and then extract rapidly from the same area?

Indeed, there have been experiments that demonstrate fertilizing some parts of the ocean can increase carbon uptake in plankton blooms [0].

[0] https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/fertilizing-the-ocean-w...

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