Live data from Hacker News

Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

science.org

141–146 of 146 posts

Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO implementing solar shielding measures, while still pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is a recipe for a rapid climate apocalypse, an epic dilemma, probably worse than adapting to progressive climate worsening. We've just got a taste of it, when we realized the sulfur contamination by crude oil burning cargo ships was unknowingly off-setting climate effects by solar shielding, because cleaning up emissio…

> chemistry happening in the upper atmosphere That's not a concern for the idea I linked, which restricts itself to the lower atmosphere, using nothing more than seawater.

I hope you still get the point. It might have unforeseeable consequences and at some point we may end up trapped in a dilemma.

When we've gone carbon neutral, we may think about these measures to reduce the temperature a bit again, but it's just a recipe for disaster, if used to "buy some time".

Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

#143
post #30
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China also has more people than the US and the EU combined, and per capita it pollutes way less than the US. Additionally, the left is not in charge almost anywhere in the EU.

>Additionally, the left is not in charge almost anywhere in the EU. Basically an overwhelming majority of the countries + the commission?

[flagged]

Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> chemistry happening in the upper atmosphere That's not a concern for the idea I linked, which restricts itself to the lower atmosphere, using nothing more than seawater.

I hope you still get the point. It might have unforeseeable consequences and at some point we may end up trapped in a dilemma. When we've gone carbon neutral, we may think about these measures to reduce the temperature a bit again, but it's just a recipe for disaster, if used to "buy some time".

Against your unforeseeable consequences, I'll balance the entirely foreseeable consequences of excess heat, plus the unforeseeable consequences of excess heat. It's not like our choices are between cloud seeding and a pristine planet.

The reason we need this to buy some time is that those climate feedbacks aren't far away. We've seen in the geological record that really doesn't take much excess heat (usually from orbital variations) to kick off a warming cycle that would take things entirely out of our hands.

Simply eliminating emissions would have been a great plan, but we're beyond that now. A lot of climate scientists say the safe CO2 level is 350ppm. I remember when we blew past that and they said "ok, but seriously don't go past 400ppm." Now we're at 425ppm with emissions going strong. Solar power, electric cars, all this stuff gives me hope for the future if we can do it in time, but we're in a race and we're losing.

And it's not like this sort of cloud seeding would deploy all at once. We'd ramp up gradually and see how it goes. At the very least, we could replace the cloud cover that the article says we've eliminated over the past twenty years.

Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what's wrong about OP's use of the term in the context they are using it. In the context given the number of days in the denominated unit is 1. Which means as dividend or factor it is going to give you the same result. Again in this context watts per day is much more intuitive for most people too reason about.

I don't mean to be rude, but anyone who thinks watts/day and watt days are ever interchangeable will have severe problems reasoning about anything electricity-related or energy-related. It is akin to thinking that "2 apples" and "an apple divided by 2" are interchangeable because both expressions involve the concept of an apple and the number 2.

I think we may be talking at cross purposes. I specifically used the number one because it behaves like a unit here. unlike 2 or any other number, 1 is also the standard 1D unit vector, so 1apples is indeed the same quantity as apples/1, but because it is a unit we usually imply its presence rather than express it explicitly as above.

watts/unit thus seems fine to me, whatever the unit may be, even if it itself is derived from time. watts per day would just work out to joules/second/1/24*60*60, making 1 watts per day a derived unit that expresses joules/84600 seconds, or an instantaneous rate of one 84600th of a joule.

Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

#146
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Daily mail user accidentally found wrong site? The world doesn't care enough about you to lie this much. Get over yourself.

[flagged]

Mate I'm literally studying antarctic science the world isn't out to get you.
Post reply on HN