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How about solving the actual root cause; making a sustainable economic system which does not exploit earth’s limited resources infinitely?
Discussed 2 days ago with 153 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28451710
Hmm... I think we should approach such things very carefully. Doing this at a scale where it actually affects global warming at a meaningful level, we'd have to spray a lot of particles in the air that might hurt us in other ways. Absorption by insects and polluting the food chain, causing local climate effects by remote areas being covered in these etc. Our ecosystem is very complex and I worry about things being vi…
The particles that serve as nuclei for condensation themselves are actually seasalt. It works like this: there are tiny droplets created by spraying seawater into the air. The water then evaporates, leaving salt particles as nuclei for droplet formation again. The salt content of the proposed measures would increase the naturally occuring levels by just 5-10% from what I know.
How about solving the actual root cause; making a sustainable economic system which does not exploit earth’s limited resources infinitely?
> making a sustainable economic system which does not exploit How about solving the actual actual root cause: humans are currently wired to seek dominance over any and all resources? Barring that, our alternatives are: 1) Open the final frontier to the nearly unlimited mass and energy resources of the solar system (and then on to the stars). 2) Massively reduce the population via increased death or birth control. 3)…
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This seems to be the common sentiment, we don't really have an appetite for geo engineering yet. I think it'll take many more climate related catastrophes before we start to accept that engineering our way out of this problem is necessary.
It's not necessary. We can pass robust carbon pricing legislation, convert our grid to clean energy. If the richest countries in the world go this route, the others will be forced to follow (border adjustments will make it impossible for polluters to compete for that rich country $$$). However politically difficult this might seem, it's going to be a lot easier than geo-engineering the entire planet's atmosphere.
A) go carbon negative B) other geo engineering C) adapt to the new climate
By itself, option C is baked in to be a generation defining disaster; so we really want some help from options A and B
I saw Snowpiercer, no thank you.
It's a good idea to not form opinions about science from Hollywood movies. Snowpiercer itself arguably doesn't hold an opinion about stratospheric injection of aerosols because it's used as a setting for an allegory.
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We don’t know what the second and third order effects would be. We can’t even correctly predict what the weather will be 3 days in advance. No chance that we can predict what the consequences of such a significant and never been done change would be. Seems like a high risk play, only to use as a last resort to me.
I agree, though it seems reasonable to trial it at a small scale as soon as possible so we can gradually scale it up and understand these second and third order effects with minimal risk.
I wonder how well the experimentation approach will work in this case though, as:
1. Effects might be subtle and outside of the expected impact area.
2. Timescale might be really important (effects over a time much longer than we anticipate. Or even a timescale that makes it impossible to run many experiments in reasonable time)
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> making a sustainable economic system which does not exploit How about solving the actual actual root cause: humans are currently wired to seek dominance over any and all resources? Barring that, our alternatives are: 1) Open the final frontier to the nearly unlimited mass and energy resources of the solar system (and then on to the stars). 2) Massively reduce the population via increased death or birth control. 3)…
There are plenty of cultures and practices that did not seek dominance over any and all resources. Would be worth revisiting and adding that as an alternative. Reshaping culture is not as bizarre as it seems (i.e. womens rights, democracy, egalitarianism, voting, an 8 hr workday, public education, all recent inventions/shifts)
Maybe so (I'm skeptical of that claim), but anyway it only takes one culture that does to take over. At some level, a specific group of humans controls each resource, regardless of whether they're generous with it.
Agreed on your second point; it's not an alternative, it's the root cause. If we're able to improve our wiring, that's great. I'm not knowledgeable or optimistic about that prospect, hence the alternatives.
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With marine cloud brightening, which is what this article is about, they spray seawater into the air. They spray it over the ocean. It falls back down pretty quickly, since it's just water, and it doesn't genetically modify anything, because it's just water.
We don’t know what the second and third order effects would be. We can’t even correctly predict what the weather will be 3 days in advance. No chance that we can predict what the consequences of such a significant and never been done change would be. Seems like a high risk play, only to use as a last resort to me.