Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 581 posts

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#511

Post by jshen »

jshen wrote: post #482
fasterik wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That is why discussions around such technological silver bullets are always toxic: people want to believe. On the flip side, some people reject technological solutions on principle because for them, it's not about solving problems, it's about atoning for the sins of humanity. What does the alternative future look like where we solve the climate crisis by changing the way we live and organize society? Personally, I w…

“ What does the alternative future look like where we solve the climate crisis by changing the way we live and organize society? Personally, I would prefer to continue having electricity, heat, running water, sewage treatment, shipping, transportation, and the internet.” This is either dishonest or ignorant. We can make a huge difference by moving faster to solar, eating a lot less meat, living in denser settings rat…

Here's one relevant article.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/10/02/treating...

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#512

Post by aCoreyJ »

petre wrote: post #91
aCoreyJ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ways to make clouds and have this effect that don't involve sulfur! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening

You know what happens to soil when it rains salt from the clouds, right? Sulphur at least is more natural, as it's also released by volcanoes. https://extension.psu.edu/sulfur-fertility-management-for-gr...

The salt water comes from the ocean and goes back to the ocean.

I'm not sure what to take from the natural comment or if it's serious... Natural things can be profoundly bad for the earth and things that live on it, like poison... Or volcanos...

Also salt water, incredibly natural it turns out.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#513

Post by aCoreyJ »

junofan wrote: post #92
aCoreyJ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ways to make clouds and have this effect that don't involve sulfur! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening

Am I understanding that page correctly? Sounds like 3–4 deg C of cooling for an estimated $5 bn/yr.

The biggest thing about this realization is that we just ran a massive natural experiment about its effectiveness and side effects without realizing it. An experiment that never would have been run if proposed, both politically and economically.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#514

Post by aCoreyJ »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #485
adamisom wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

those who believe we will hit a discontinuous tipping point are precisely those who should be advocating for geoengineering now , despite its unknowns and downsides… yet the voices to do so are curiously absent

I don't know if they should be advocating for geoengineering now, but we should definitely start getting used to the idea that we might need it very soon. That means a huge acceleration of research to test the techniques we have, and make sure they don't have unintended consequences (like accidentally destroying the ozone layer.) > yet the voices to do so are curiously absent It's easy to think this if you're not pay…

The biggest thing about this sulfur realization is that it's a massive experiment we have been accidentally running on its effectiveness and the side effects caused by it... And now without it.

Makes it a lot easier to validate your solution and be more sure of side effects

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#515

Post by pfdietz »

nostrebored wrote: post #167
nologic01 wrote: post #156

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.

This is a ridiculous overstatement of the risk of such activities.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#516

Post by at_a_remove »

UncleMeat wrote: post #510
at_a_remove wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my "thing" for some time. Now, carrying capacity for Earth is a function, and one of the arguments is lifestyle, but I believe that we are beyond most values of that function for anything beyond "miserable and half-starved." The population will drop. We can do it or Nature will do it for us. Nature will be wanton, cruel, perhaps overshoot. It will be ugly and horrific. We will not be left in great shape…

These “unpleasant conversations” have been universally the powerful talking about how to genocide the powerless. Frankly, I’d rather nature do it than follow the population control proposals we’ve seen. Everybody who decides that what they need to do is kill extremely large numbers of other people can just off themselves instead.

See, this is what I am talking about. You immediately leap to the problems of the past as a way to misinterpret what was said. This is why people simply cannot agree on a way forward and why Nature will be doing it for us. Some have even codified this into an ethical stance.

And so the scavengers will feast and the plagues will bloom again. And because no-one will agree, we will have little local wars over resources. Maybe someone will grab a warhead or two. Technology still keeps happening, so expect at least one plague to be targeted. And some group will have a "if we can't have it, nobody can," so a self-irradiated country will get to keep a resource out of some other group's hands. You'll get real genocides, then.

Nobody wants to participate in the one way of getting their hands bloody, pretending that they won't get bloody later on, up to the elbows.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#517

Post by fasterik »

titzer wrote: post #369
fasterik wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's a magic fix, I'm saying it's a really hard problem that we can solve if we put the resources and brain power into it. But some people apparently think that even trying to solve the problem is pointless. Needless to say, I disagree. >Incredibly tone deaf, frankly, when most past humans had none of those things and yet dealt with it, living actual full lives. We've basically forgotten what we are, w…

> We came from a history of mostly starving, struggling for survival, dying of infections, dying during childbirth, being illiterate, and having little shelter or comfort. I think this nostalgia for the past is a golden age fallacy that needs to die. Technology has vastly improved human life and taking it away is essentially a call for reducing the standard of living for everybody. The past wasn't sunbeams and frolic…

>But under no configuration is modern life sustainable for 8 billion people, energy, living space, and raw materials wise, so this situation is going to keep drawing down the reservoir until there is a brutal correction.

We can fit far more than 8 billion people on the planet. Look how much of it is uninhabited by humans right now. The limit isn't living space, it's our ability to generate and distribute clean energy. Raw materials are a concern, but I don't think we're anywhere close to running out at the moment, and if we get our shit together technologically there are plenty of raw materials in the solar system.

>As if native peoples lives (over hundreds of thousands of years, indeed) are such utter trash that they need to be rescued from it by technology. "Oh, the poor brown people living such primitive lives, how sad. Let's do a mission to convert them to consumerism and fill their lives with junk, get them some jobs and atomize their tribes."

> I mean, those stupid native Americans and their huts. Good thing we fixed that, right?

I'm not sure why you needed to bring race/skin color into the discussion, or to attribute this view to me in that tone. How about we ask people what they want, rather than prescribing how they should live from our idealized/nostalgic view of native people? Let's see whether they want to live with an electric grid, medical care, and access to modern goods and services. If we judge by the number of industrializing societies across the world, it seems like people do want these things.

>I invite you to visit basically any place on Earth that is not Europe or North America.

I invite you to look at statistics like life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, healthcare outcomes, and access to food and housing. I think you'll find that most places in the world don't do as well on these metrics as Europe and North America. You're basically arguing that these people should stay in poverty. Again, I think you should ask the people you're talking about whether they want that.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#518

Post by fasterik »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #471
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a very bad analogy because we have no know working solution. We simply have never achieved zero carbon emissions given a modern world of 8 billion people.

We certainly do have a known solution to emissions, it’s to cut them. The most straightforward way to do that is to cut consumption, drop standards of living. The solution is crystal clear, we have real life working examples right now all over the world, for example the people living in Bangladesh are at a level of consumption that would actually be sustainable for all 8 billion of us to embrace. The solution is clea…

Cutting consumption isn't the only way to reduce emissions. The other way is to change the type of energy fueling the consumption with clean energy. It seems to me like it would be a lot easier to build a bunch nuclear reactors than it would be to convince billions of people to significantly reduce their standard of living.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#520

Post by fasterik »

tticvs wrote: post #490
titzer wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an aside, I'm very disturbed to realize this screed is coming from someone of your stature in the tech community. Oh geesh. As if the lines of code I have written are what I put forth to vouch for this. We should divorce the tech fantasies from the meatspace realities. My opinions are based on the many, many, non-tech days that I've spent roaming the Earth[1] and have seen what humans as a whole are really up to…

I see your perspective but I think that it is basically wrong. Your worldview misses a few key points: 1. The human growth explosion already happened. We're dealing with the end stage of it over the next 50-100 years. There will never be a world of "a hundred billion people on Earth" since it turns out people don't want to reproduce that much. We'll hit peak human this century which means that we actually do have a s…

Excellent points. Many people forget that human population is going to peak by about 2100. The "humans are not separate from nature" point is something most people don't believe, but it's perfectly intuitive if you zoom out a bit. A human city is no different than a beehive or an ant colony.
Post reply on HN