Either the world accepts that nuclear energy along with wind and solar is part of the solution to climate change, or we will be forced into geoengineering solutions. We may have already reached that point.
New nuclear energy, at least in the places where most of the HN readership is concentrated, has very little to contribute as an incremental solution to climate change.
Now that Vogtle 3 & 4 are complete or almost so, there is essentially no new nuclear power plants under construction in the United States.
Europe? The long-delayed Flamanville 3 and Hinkley Point C1 and C2.
Canada? Nothing.
Australia? Nothing.
There won't be any additional new nuclear plants built in any of those regions before 2040 (which is only 17 years away)
We will have to almost completely decarbonize our electricity grids by 2035-2040 if the world is going to get net zero by 2050 (which is probably not enough to avoid the need for geoengineering anyway).
Not a bad thread but misses a critical point. If the Sulfur emissions policies were known for >5 years and discussed for >10 years why aren’t they part of mainstream climate models? The best answer I could find was essentially that models use a proxy for aerosols and so including the new policy might cause “double counting” of this forcing. This ‘conservatism’ caused this effect to be left out of the models. So the s…
The models have underpredicted the temperature rise throughout my entire living memory. Even the "pessimistic" scenarios of high-temperature-rise have been blasted right through on a yearly basis. The model is drastically, dramatically understating the natural feedback loops involved and the amount of temperature rise that's going to happen. Feedback loops like methane release are likely also hugely understated, as a…
> The models have underpredicted the temperature rise throughout my entire living memory.
The enthusiasm with geoengineering among the HN community is worrisome. Not sure which computing analogy would drive home the complete recklessness of this mentality but the Earth is not something you can reboot to the last working state once you harebrained patch implodes. It is true that we have been slowly geoengineering for ages (initially unwittingly, recently with eyes wide open) and it is also true that our mo…
Geoengineering is bad. The problem is that the alternatives may be even worse.
I can’t remember who (maybe he’s quoted further in the thread than I quickly scrolled) but there’s a scientist who has been talking about this on Twitter for a long time (when I used to use it). Pretty scary these things can happen, but he was warning basically we are further along with global heating than we thought and this pollution was just masking some of the effect in the Northern Hemsiphere of CO2 we’d already…
I think the final 1/3rd of that book is actually a horrible situation to actually be in. "Someone else's dream" for sure.
Have you played Dungeons and Dragons? It's not supposed to be fun as a place to really live, living in a land harassed by monsters, demons, no security, etc. It's an interesting scenario to explore creativity and conflict in difficult situations.
Sure, but imagine if a D&D setting was an actual world that somehow survived long enough to start implementing countermeasures (remember the last 1/3rd of this book is set thousands of years in the future, so reasonably analogous). If the Player Characters decide they don't want to bother with a problem, it would have to be solved with other methods, like massive use of defoliants (think agent orange) and pesticides, bunker buster bombs (think MOP, if deliverable with enough precision), and as a last resort, dropping massive thermobaric weapons to destroy entire cities, possibly repeatedly, and then setting up miles wide demilitarized zones in a circle around the incident zone with kill-on-sight orders and automated turrets and tracking systems, if feasible with the tech available. Obviously a few Player Characters can't handle everything, so it would be reasonable common as an ordinary person to find out the next city over no longer exists and they have just been drafted to man the "human side" of the newly created DMZ.
The enthusiasm with geoengineering among the HN community is worrisome. Not sure which computing analogy would drive home the complete recklessness of this mentality but the Earth is not something you can reboot to the last working state once you harebrained patch implodes. It is true that we have been slowly geoengineering for ages (initially unwittingly, recently with eyes wide open) and it is also true that our mo…
The more radical geoengineering ideas, like deflecting sunlight from space, are truly potential extinction level events that should be regulated out of existence. This should not be some VC funded endeavor.
The enthusiasm with geoengineering among the HN community is worrisome. Not sure which computing analogy would drive home the complete recklessness of this mentality but the Earth is not something you can reboot to the last working state once you harebrained patch implodes. It is true that we have been slowly geoengineering for ages (initially unwittingly, recently with eyes wide open) and it is also true that our mo…
I highly doubt many proponents of geoengineering think in terms of rebooting or isolating individual factors.
The appeal of geoengineering is you can nudge specific systems slowly into another direction. You can start small and observe expected effects and unwanted side-effects.
Reduction of sulfer emissions by ships is an interesting starting point to learn something.
Bullshit. It clearly shows humans unwillingness to engage with the problem, with no evidence as of yet to support the notion that this will change in any meaningful way at any arbitrary future date. It certainly does not demonstrate any latent ability to curb the problems created by elevated greenhouse gas emissions.
That is just unhappiness with how and when it's tackled not that it won't be tackled.
I mean if you want to proceed from a faith-based position that's a personal choice. Personally I'll start believing in bigfoot 2 seconds after I see one.
The enthusiasm with geoengineering among the HN community is worrisome. Not sure which computing analogy would drive home the complete recklessness of this mentality but the Earth is not something you can reboot to the last working state once you harebrained patch implodes. It is true that we have been slowly geoengineering for ages (initially unwittingly, recently with eyes wide open) and it is also true that our mo…
There is no alternative.
We have "aggravated the situation" (as you put it) beyond recovery. Doing nothing will now surely lead to an unacceptable outcome. We are going to have to fix it, or resign ourselves to a huge shrinking of the habitable region of the planet, with the hunger/famine/war that will accompany that.
Obviously we can always make things worse. But when doing nothing is unacceptable, we have to start taking risks.