The problem with climate geo-engineering solution is not that they won't work, but rather that they don't solve the problem we need to solve. As people say, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. If we had stopped digging, maybe we could employ other solutions (like geoengineering) to get out of the hole.
But we're nowhere near the "stop digging" stage; in fact, we are at "we might be digging at maximum speed now, because at least we're not digging noticeably faster every coming year" stage.
Whatever we do, we will need to restructure the global economy to drastically reduce CO2 emission. Any potential "alternative" solution is an auxiliary measure we could employ on top of decarbonization; it cannot replace decarbonization.
You know I hear people say stuff like this a lot. Big catastrophe and we need major changes. But then I don’t see many studying Chinese so they can help negotiate a global treaty. Or working on effective propaganda to convince the public that nuclear is good. Instead I see a lot of reusable totes, compost bins, and other virtue signaling trivialities. So what should I believe, what people say or what they do?
Because Chinese are already ahead of almost everyone in terms of emission reductions and nuclear won't solve anything. That's why you don't see people involved in these activities.
No, they are ahead for far simpler reasons - China is going to be extremely affected by climate change due to its geography, and they don't share our irrational belief in the free market. They also don't have fossil fuel incumbents manipulating the public opinion.
Successful fossil fuel propaganda given 10+ years to build and a single political cycle across that time to keep it closed before ever being "turned on".
- source happened to my relatives grids a few times, and they got pretty cynical to the "tax" imposed to get nuclear then no nuclear.
I don't think there is enough nuclear fuel for everyone to significantly (more than several times than today) run on nuclear. Yes, there are these breeder ideas, but it's not mature. So (aside from capital costs) it will generate only a relatively small portion of total electricity consumption.
Nuclear is a red herring. It takes way to long and is way too expensive. Keep bringing solar and wind online, and if your nuclear plant ever gets finished, that will be nice too.
Plenty of people already speak Chinese in Western countries and plenty of Chinese speak English, so want of people to translate is not the problem either.
And while opposition to nuclear is a challenge in a lot of areas, Canada for example has several places that already have nuclear power plants and are willing to accept more. Plans already have been drawn up. It is just considered too expensive, so it isn't happening.
You don't need to observe people around you to know when a storm is coming. Instead you look at barometers, winds, and satellite photos. If a storm is coming and people around you are arguing about how much they should be paid for closing the shops, it doesn't mean the storm isn't coming. It just means someone will end up with broken windows.
Parent isn't saying he doesn't believe in it; he's saying: put your money where your mouth is if you're going to be causing such a fuss about things, and actually put energy into efforts that move the needle -- rather than continuously going on and on about actions that do so little to be more than worthless (e.g. stop oil protests blocking the roads leading to a loss in public favor, or the propaganda around recycling and personal-responsibility which adds onto concern burnout).
There is a lack of creativity in climate change activism. Which does beg the question: do people actually care deeply and seriously about this issue? Or are they simply trying to assuage their personal anxieties and other neurotic personality traits? I.e., are they deeply unserious people just doing this for themselves?
The one true measure of every activist on any issue is effectiveness. If would-be activists are not in a position to effect meaningful change they ought to find something else to do with their time.
> restructure the global economy to drastically reduce CO2 emission
agreed except that is almost certainly _not_ going to happen until there is a catastrophe of enormous proportions in _industrialized_ nations (tragically, millions dying in Botswana, Bangladesh or Bolivia won't move the needle)
so in the meantime we need the alternatives to put off that catastrophe for as long as we possibly can
Unfortunately in many spaces, we have become reactive, not proactive.
I have long suspected that in a few hundred years they will look back on us as idiots in the same way many do about the astrologer blood letting types.
Slightly different take on it, as I think that some of us already look at others as idiots. So some are ahead of the curve. We're still waiting for the "idiots" to have that aha! moment.
As you just said, if we use geoengineering to delay the catastrophe as much as we can, and if we aren't going to wake up until the catastrophe hits ...
... then it's questionable whether geoengineering helps at all, isn't it? All it does is to postpone the inevitable until disasters hit Texas and California, and potentially prolong the misery for Botswana and Bangladesh.
>> Eventually, a new generation [that grew up with climate-saving adaptations like electric cars] replaces the old, but that will not be in time for global warming to remain under the identified likely tipping points. If we can make do with artificial cooling for two or three decades, that may be the crucial amount of time we need to deal with the overshoot.
>> I don't know if we will need this [but we should] consider whether that temporary effect is useful
The real issue is that you need to keep the excess carbon out of the cycle. It is said that if we could grow trees, cut them down a bury them - that could work. But who is going to fund this. Currently logging and using wood is merely slowing the cycle which is not pointless but not a decent long term response.
At a distance, it just looks so dang silly that ideas like this is what it has come to.
Aka the farmer who plants the trees will bulldoze the land or not water the trees then bulldoze the dead saplings because it is an efficient use of land.
Also, I am endlessly fascinated by all the ways we have figured out Geo-engineering problems/externalizes. If the only metric we are focusing on is temperature, we can potentially cause a whole lot of other issues.
Reduce incoming light via sulfates works, but could cause crop failures due to said light reduction. Sea water cloud seeding, potential for it to rain salt water. Greening deserts, possibility to change weather patterns over great distances. And so on and so on. Anything but stop digging!
So we would have to make responses to the response. This is not a case of, don't do anything but an acknowledgement of the predicament. Damned if with do, damned if we don't.
I don't like talking about this stuff much because I have seen it many times get picked up by folks as a reason to 'burn baby burn!'.
> Reduce incoming light via sulfates works, but could cause crop failures due to said light reduction.
The temperature change and extreme weather events will also do that. Can it be localized to have its main effect over the ocean and deserts instead? (Afaik it's spread by airplanes anyway.) Or would the amount of light reduction needed to move the needle back from, say, +3°C to +2°C be enough to actually starve plants of light? We're talking of small percentages of light afaik and crops are surely able to deal with cloudy conditions; some even work great with agrivoltaics (but none of this is my specialty; there's a lot I don't know here).
Not sure I'm adequately responding to, or understanding, your overall point though. On the one hand, I read "we can potentially cause a whole lot of other issues." with examples, which sounds like we shouldn't even try, but on the other you say "This is not a case of, don't do anything but an acknowledgement of the predicament." which sounds like the comment might be meant as at least not opposed to trying alternatives since we are increasingly finding ourselves in a climate (figurative and literal) where prevention has failed
I get it is small percentages of light but it can impact some plants fairly heavily, it is a non-linear feed back. They can handle cloudy days but that is a temporary phenomena and the dimming would be on top that already existing trait.
As for the acknowledgement of the predicament, this come down to the problem of first movers on any technology. Those that do not consider the blow back will be the first to deploy and the first to potentially make a big mistake.
I fear that a country that is being hit hard by climate change will be pushed into a corner and just deploys something quickly without considering all the multi-order events downwards. Or even knowingly aware of impact that will benefit them at the expense of other nations.
Just because a volcano eruption can cool the planet doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The cooling would only be temporary anyway.
Check out the Year without a Summer for a historical example:
> The year 1816 AD is known as the Year Without a Summer because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1 °F). Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest of any on record between 1766 and 2000, resulting in crop failures and major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.
> Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in April in the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia).
People need time to adapt to things. We often stereotype old people as being stuck in their ways and, while they can change, they typically appear much more reluctant to, or have real trouble even if they want to (such as when needing to learn how to drive an automatic, or how to work with that new laptop OS version, or now how to use a touchscreen phone with a notification area: my parents barely get it, let alone my still-alive grandparents). Changes like an electric vehicle are difficult because charging works very differently from refueling and you need to additionally know how to use a phone to find charging spots while you may be stressing about being in a foreign country and needing to get somewhere (this is how a ~60 year old family member experiences it at least). These sorts of "we can't go on like this" versus "things were better 20 years ago" also reflect in elections, but the scales tip over time and what were once young people's opinions become the new normal.
Eventually, the new generation replaces the old, but that will not be in time for global warming to remain under the identified likely tipping points. If we can make do with artificial cooling for two or three decades, that may be the crucial amount of time we need to deal with the overshoot.
I don't know if we will need this, it's just that dismissing it as "it's just temporary, what's the point" does not consider whether that temporary effect is useful
And, increase CO2, increasing warming, in the long term. I would also naively assume that the reduced light would somewhat pause natural sequestration, from plants, for the duration of the cooling.
The article noted the CO2 released matches what humans do in 2.5 hours. Yet, some eruptions have lowered temps globally for months/years. The long term effect from the CO2 is real, but also a tiny drop in the bucket compared to humans
I feel that this articles’ purpose is to keep the status quo. Especially, that it starts with a strawman, and even contradicts itself during dissecting that. I like the individualistic aspect, but it’s completely orthogonal to everything else in the article.
Yes, it’s a strawman even in ‘93, and time already ran out in the context of ‘93.
It’s a strawman, because it’s so simplified that they lost all meaning. Except the first one which means even more than what was originally meant to be, but it’s not surprising from a “spritiual leader”. It’s easy to construct situations which contradicts the notion that anybody ever thought these things, or the opposite of these (e.g. the future matters, I give you 100 dollars now, but I shoot you in 10 minutes).
When people says that we need to act now, or there will be consequences, the consequences are already happened in context of ‘93, or 100% they will happen (like collapse of Atlantic currents are certain now). Today, the consequences are wildly different.
> It’s a strawman, because it’s so simplified that they lost all meaning.
In other words: nobody ever thought these. Thoughts are way more complex.
Also writing more sentences without any substance is not expanding.
Edit: to expand a little bit. Nobody thinks that time runs out. They think that time runs out about X in the context of Y. Even when people use the absolutist version there is always a context. Author transformed these to the usual religious absolutism nonsense with no good reason, except of course that absolutists statements are easier to attack, hence the strawman.
When I am in the right sort of contrary mood I like to do a little mustache twirl and boldly proclaim.
We worked hard to get the sulfur compounds out of our fuels... What if that was a long term mistake. Perhaps we should be putting extra sulfur in our jet fuels.
> Stratospheric aerosol injection is a proposed method of solar geoengineering (or solar radiation modification) to reduce global warming. This would introduce aerosols into the stratosphere to create a cooling effect via global dimming and increased albedo, which occurs naturally from volcanic winter.
I recall a suggestion that jets should "run rich" which would increase the water vapor in the exhaust and create more contrails in combination with eliminating redeye flights so that contrails aren't formed at night (allowing more radiative escape)
> Marine cloud brightening also known as marine cloud seeding and marine cloud engineering is a proposed solar radiation management climate engineering technique that would make clouds brighter, reflecting a small fraction of incoming sunlight back into space in order to offset anthropogenic global warming. Along with stratospheric aerosol injection, it is one of the two solar radiation management methods that may most feasibly have a substantial climate impact.
The much better solution is injecting it into the stratosphere, where it will have the full reflective effect, while having orders of magnitude less acid rain impact.
> Acid rain was not that bad... was it?
My least favorite property of environmentalism is the inability to consider tradeoffs.
If asked to choose between acid rain and global warming, the typical environmentalist will just refuse.
One serious issue with that is that injected sulfides do not stay around long. If we use them to cause cooling or to stop warming before we have started reducing CO2 emissions or at least are firmly and irrevocably on a reasonable path to doing so we'll have to keep injecting sulfides.
If we use the sulfides to mitigate the effects of warming without addressing the causes and then stop with the sulfides all the warming that was countered by the sulfides happens over a short period.
That would probably be much worse than having not used the sulfides at all. If you get some particular amount of warming spread over 20 years that's probably easier to adapt to than if you get that same amount of warming over 2 years after 18 years of no warming.
> One serious issue with that is that injected sulfides do not stay around long.
To me, this is one of the best features! Because if, by some unforeseen anomaly, it turns out to actually have bad net effects, you can just wait 1-2 years, and it goes away by itself!
The reality is that even if we stop CO₂ emissions cold today, CO₂ levels will stay the same, not go back to preindustrial levels for at least several centuries.
So the best practical plan I know is this:
- Learn how to spray SO₂ in the stratosphere so it cools down Earth to desirable levels.
- Figure out large scale CO₂ sequestration, to bring CO₂ levels back down. My guess is this takes ~50 years.
- As CO₂ levels go down, we can tamper down the SO₂ injections, and get the planet back to a healthy state.
What if an enterprising billionaire got tired of waiting for meaningful action to mitigate climate change,
and undertook to put sulfur back into the atmosphere, on the cheap?
"Taken from tomorrow's headlines..." perhaps. There are no international conventions or bodies currently prepared to regulate cowboy geoengineering, let alone capable of coercion.
In Neal Stephenson's book Termination Shock, a billionaire builds a sulfur cannon designed to fire sulfur into the atmosphere with the intent to cool the Earth and alter climate change. He names the cannon "Pina2bo" after Mount Pinatubo, which the article talks about.
Mount Tambora's eruption resulted in "the year without a summer", where most of the Northern Hemisphere had deep snows into June and all the crops froze with massive, rapid dieoffs of livestock.
Climate change is definitely bad, but not quite as dramatic in as short a time. People make fun of the Day After Tomorrow for trivializing climate change, but the Mount Tambora eruption resulted in very fast, rapid changes worldwide. And it seems foolish to think we would be any good at controlling the strength of a volcanic eruption.
Yeah, but global temps have climbed ~1.5 degrees since then, so lowering them by 0.5 degrees wouldn't have the same effect (crops freezing) as it did back then.
But if it's just a temporary fix for one year, then it's probably a bad idea.
A sudden drop is pretty bad. Plants have tight tolerances and farmers purchase seeds based on expected conditions, not a hypothetical where some rogue country is triggering a volcanic eruption. It’s entirely possible that people plant the wrong crops, a volcanic eruption is triggered, and we see crop failures due to how optimized modern farming is.
Fair point. If such drastic action was ever contemplated it would have to be planned out in advance so that farming could adapt that year to expected shifts.
But there will come a tipping point at which time we'll consider drastic measures that society would not otherwise tolerate. Look at Covid for a recent example.
The people capable of financing such a project are the kind of people who would think "I'm not going to waste this massive eruption on an unpopulated area".
People average 100x the annual CO2 from all volcanoes combined. Large eruptions release a great deal of matter but not that much CO2 as a percentage and not very quickly.
Even if by large you’re talking about once in 50 year events like the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo that lasted days during which it released 10 cubic kilometers of material. But it still only added 0.05 GT of CO2, roughly what people currently release every 12 hours.
Why would we expect a volcano to emit more than incidental amounts of CO2 in the first place? Despite the superficial similarities, it's not a bonfire.
That was only a local effect, in densely populated areas. And it wasn't cooling; it was a reduction in the variation between day and night. As reported at the time:
Travis et al. (2002) produced a calculation suggesting that the lack of contrails during the airline shut- down following the attacks of 11 September 2001 resulted in a substantial rise in the diurnal temperature range across the US.
I'm certainly no climate expert but I'm quite sure that this would be a very large change to happen in such a short time. This seems to be a rather dubious claim.
> somehow nobody else seems to remember
When something like this happens, a common culprit is confabulation.
Where did you get these ridiculous ideas? We just need more renewable power and storage. Then we replace every use of fossil fuels with electricity. 90% of the solution is not hard, it's just expensive.
After factoring in the entire supply-chain (mining, manufacturing, maintenance, yield, reliability, waste management), renewables barely make a dent.
Drastic reductions need drastic measures. It is time we reconcile with the fact that modern living does not compute with our objectives of carbon emission.
Sounds like you're in LA? Installing both solar panels and and AC on every home in America would be huge (there are quite many that have neither). It would be hard to have an AC you power yourself be rationed.
The problem with climate geo-engineering solution is not that they won't work, but rather that they don't solve the problem we need to solve. As people say, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. If we had stopped digging, maybe we could employ other solutions (like geoengineering) to get out of the hole.
But we're nowhere near the "stop digging" stage; in fact, we are at "we might be digging at maximum speed now, because at least we're not digging noticeably faster every coming year" stage.
Whatever we do, we will need to restructure the global economy to drastically reduce CO2 emission. Any potential "alternative" solution is an auxiliary measure we could employ on top of decarbonization; it cannot replace decarbonization.
You know I hear people say stuff like this a lot. Big catastrophe and we need major changes. But then I don’t see many studying Chinese so they can help negotiate a global treaty. Or working on effective propaganda to convince the public that nuclear is good. Instead I see a lot of reusable totes, compost bins, and other virtue signaling trivialities. So what should I believe, what people say or what they do?
Because Chinese are already ahead of almost everyone in terms of emission reductions and nuclear won't solve anything. That's why you don't see people involved in these activities.
China plans to quadruple their nuclear output from ~50GW (~5% of total) to 200GW by 2030 and even more later 1400GW by 2100. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
Because they want to reduce their reliance on Middle Eastern oil that can be easily blockaded in the event of a war with the US.
I think that sets the pattern for emissions reactions: they will happen when people have other reasons to do it as an incidental benefit.
No, they are ahead for far simpler reasons - China is going to be extremely affected by climate change due to its geography, and they don't share our irrational belief in the free market. They also don't have fossil fuel incumbents manipulating the public opinion.
Why couldn’t nuclear solve anything?
Successful fossil fuel propaganda given 10+ years to build and a single political cycle across that time to keep it closed before ever being "turned on".
- source happened to my relatives grids a few times, and they got pretty cynical to the "tax" imposed to get nuclear then no nuclear.
I don't think there is enough nuclear fuel for everyone to significantly (more than several times than today) run on nuclear. Yes, there are these breeder ideas, but it's not mature. So (aside from capital costs) it will generate only a relatively small portion of total electricity consumption.
Nuclear is a red herring. It takes way to long and is way too expensive. Keep bringing solar and wind online, and if your nuclear plant ever gets finished, that will be nice too.
> . Keep bringing solar and wind online
What happens if you get an extended period of low winds? Cloudy weather? You need a LOT of extra capacity and storage.
Plenty of people already speak Chinese in Western countries and plenty of Chinese speak English, so want of people to translate is not the problem either.
And while opposition to nuclear is a challenge in a lot of areas, Canada for example has several places that already have nuclear power plants and are willing to accept more. Plans already have been drawn up. It is just considered too expensive, so it isn't happening.
> But then I don’t see many studying Chinese so they can help negotiate a global treaty.
Yeah because that's what an average citizen needs to do to participate a global treaty: studying Chinese.
There are plenty of people who speak both languages. Hell, there are plenty of people who speak both languages on hackernews alone.
YC and others could be investing in climate remediation, as the need for it is inevitable. But they aren’t. Elvis had it right:
> A little less conversation, a little more action, please
You don't need to observe people around you to know when a storm is coming. Instead you look at barometers, winds, and satellite photos. If a storm is coming and people around you are arguing about how much they should be paid for closing the shops, it doesn't mean the storm isn't coming. It just means someone will end up with broken windows.
How about you believe whatever the scientific consensus is?
Parent isn't saying he doesn't believe in it; he's saying: put your money where your mouth is if you're going to be causing such a fuss about things, and actually put energy into efforts that move the needle -- rather than continuously going on and on about actions that do so little to be more than worthless (e.g. stop oil protests blocking the roads leading to a loss in public favor, or the propaganda around recycling and personal-responsibility which adds onto concern burnout).
There is a lack of creativity in climate change activism. Which does beg the question: do people actually care deeply and seriously about this issue? Or are they simply trying to assuage their personal anxieties and other neurotic personality traits? I.e., are they deeply unserious people just doing this for themselves?
Activists are rarely in the position to introduce effective measures e.g. a carbon tax.
The one true measure of every activist on any issue is effectiveness. If would-be activists are not in a position to effect meaningful change they ought to find something else to do with their time.
> restructure the global economy to drastically reduce CO2 emission
agreed except that is almost certainly _not_ going to happen until there is a catastrophe of enormous proportions in _industrialized_ nations (tragically, millions dying in Botswana, Bangladesh or Bolivia won't move the needle)
so in the meantime we need the alternatives to put off that catastrophe for as long as we possibly can
Unfortunately in many spaces, we have become reactive, not proactive.
I have long suspected that in a few hundred years they will look back on us as idiots in the same way many do about the astrologer blood letting types.
Slightly different take on it, as I think that some of us already look at others as idiots. So some are ahead of the curve. We're still waiting for the "idiots" to have that aha! moment.
Another alternative is to make carbon neutral alternatives economically advantageous. That is already happening for renewable energy.
As you just said, if we use geoengineering to delay the catastrophe as much as we can, and if we aren't going to wake up until the catastrophe hits ...
... then it's questionable whether geoengineering helps at all, isn't it? All it does is to postpone the inevitable until disasters hit Texas and California, and potentially prolong the misery for Botswana and Bangladesh.
> All it does is to postpone the inevitable
I don't want to repeat all of what I wrote below an older comment dismissing it for a similar reason, but a shorter version of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40887461> is:
>> Eventually, a new generation [that grew up with climate-saving adaptations like electric cars] replaces the old, but that will not be in time for global warming to remain under the identified likely tipping points. If we can make do with artificial cooling for two or three decades, that may be the crucial amount of time we need to deal with the overshoot.
>> I don't know if we will need this [but we should] consider whether that temporary effect is useful
I tend to agree with this take
cans really enjoy being kicked though, so you have to take their feelings into consideration.
Why not both? Planting trees doesn't stop logging, but it definitely helps mitigate the damage.
Call it.... Sustainability engineering if you will.
The real issue is that you need to keep the excess carbon out of the cycle. It is said that if we could grow trees, cut them down a bury them - that could work. But who is going to fund this. Currently logging and using wood is merely slowing the cycle which is not pointless but not a decent long term response.
At a distance, it just looks so dang silly that ideas like this is what it has come to.
Planting trees generally does not achieve much, especially as part of offset schemes because no one guarantees their long term future.
Aka the farmer who plants the trees will bulldoze the land or not water the trees then bulldoze the dead saplings because it is an efficient use of land.
The powerful institutions and states are determined to incentivize digging and punish those who oppose them.
Also, I am endlessly fascinated by all the ways we have figured out Geo-engineering problems/externalizes. If the only metric we are focusing on is temperature, we can potentially cause a whole lot of other issues.
Reduce incoming light via sulfates works, but could cause crop failures due to said light reduction. Sea water cloud seeding, potential for it to rain salt water. Greening deserts, possibility to change weather patterns over great distances. And so on and so on. Anything but stop digging!
So we would have to make responses to the response. This is not a case of, don't do anything but an acknowledgement of the predicament. Damned if with do, damned if we don't.
I don't like talking about this stuff much because I have seen it many times get picked up by folks as a reason to 'burn baby burn!'.
> Reduce incoming light via sulfates works, but could cause crop failures due to said light reduction.
The temperature change and extreme weather events will also do that. Can it be localized to have its main effect over the ocean and deserts instead? (Afaik it's spread by airplanes anyway.) Or would the amount of light reduction needed to move the needle back from, say, +3°C to +2°C be enough to actually starve plants of light? We're talking of small percentages of light afaik and crops are surely able to deal with cloudy conditions; some even work great with agrivoltaics (but none of this is my specialty; there's a lot I don't know here).
Not sure I'm adequately responding to, or understanding, your overall point though. On the one hand, I read "we can potentially cause a whole lot of other issues." with examples, which sounds like we shouldn't even try, but on the other you say "This is not a case of, don't do anything but an acknowledgement of the predicament." which sounds like the comment might be meant as at least not opposed to trying alternatives since we are increasingly finding ourselves in a climate (figurative and literal) where prevention has failed
I get it is small percentages of light but it can impact some plants fairly heavily, it is a non-linear feed back. They can handle cloudy days but that is a temporary phenomena and the dimming would be on top that already existing trait.
As for the acknowledgement of the predicament, this come down to the problem of first movers on any technology. Those that do not consider the blow back will be the first to deploy and the first to potentially make a big mistake.
I fear that a country that is being hit hard by climate change will be pushed into a corner and just deploys something quickly without considering all the multi-order events downwards. Or even knowingly aware of impact that will benefit them at the expense of other nations.
Just because a volcano eruption can cool the planet doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The cooling would only be temporary anyway.
Check out the Year without a Summer for a historical example:
> The year 1816 AD is known as the Year Without a Summer because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1 °F). Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest of any on record between 1766 and 2000, resulting in crop failures and major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.
> Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in April in the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
> The cooling would only be temporary anyway.
But the world changes in the meantime.
People need time to adapt to things. We often stereotype old people as being stuck in their ways and, while they can change, they typically appear much more reluctant to, or have real trouble even if they want to (such as when needing to learn how to drive an automatic, or how to work with that new laptop OS version, or now how to use a touchscreen phone with a notification area: my parents barely get it, let alone my still-alive grandparents). Changes like an electric vehicle are difficult because charging works very differently from refueling and you need to additionally know how to use a phone to find charging spots while you may be stressing about being in a foreign country and needing to get somewhere (this is how a ~60 year old family member experiences it at least). These sorts of "we can't go on like this" versus "things were better 20 years ago" also reflect in elections, but the scales tip over time and what were once young people's opinions become the new normal.
Eventually, the new generation replaces the old, but that will not be in time for global warming to remain under the identified likely tipping points. If we can make do with artificial cooling for two or three decades, that may be the crucial amount of time we need to deal with the overshoot.
I don't know if we will need this, it's just that dismissing it as "it's just temporary, what's the point" does not consider whether that temporary effect is useful
> The cooling would only be temporary anyway.
And, increase CO2, increasing warming, in the long term. I would also naively assume that the reduced light would somewhat pause natural sequestration, from plants, for the duration of the cooling.
The article noted the CO2 released matches what humans do in 2.5 hours. Yet, some eruptions have lowered temps globally for months/years. The long term effect from the CO2 is real, but also a tiny drop in the bucket compared to humans
I had not thought about that. That is a reasonable collusion about a non intuitive feedback loop.
> The cooling would only be temporary anyway.
I’d say just do it till I no longer need the earth; you all can burn it to the ground once I’m gone.
While post sentience nihilism is one way of looking at the world, another is to see the problem as a symptom of a deeper problem:
https://tricycle.org/magazine/green-credo/
I feel that this articles’ purpose is to keep the status quo. Especially, that it starts with a strawman, and even contradicts itself during dissecting that. I like the individualistic aspect, but it’s completely orthogonal to everything else in the article.
Do you think that in 1993 the below was a strawman?
Clearly time has continued running out in the subsequent 30+ years.Yes, it’s a strawman even in ‘93, and time already ran out in the context of ‘93.
It’s a strawman, because it’s so simplified that they lost all meaning. Except the first one which means even more than what was originally meant to be, but it’s not surprising from a “spritiual leader”. It’s easy to construct situations which contradicts the notion that anybody ever thought these things, or the opposite of these (e.g. the future matters, I give you 100 dollars now, but I shoot you in 10 minutes).
When people says that we need to act now, or there will be consequences, the consequences are already happened in context of ‘93, or 100% they will happen (like collapse of Atlantic currents are certain now). Today, the consequences are wildly different.
The author expands and addresses each within the article. What marks of a strawman do you see within the author’s description?
> It’s a strawman, because it’s so simplified that they lost all meaning.
In other words: nobody ever thought these. Thoughts are way more complex.
Also writing more sentences without any substance is not expanding.
Edit: to expand a little bit. Nobody thinks that time runs out. They think that time runs out about X in the context of Y. Even when people use the absolutist version there is always a context. Author transformed these to the usual religious absolutism nonsense with no good reason, except of course that absolutists statements are easier to attack, hence the strawman.
When I am in the right sort of contrary mood I like to do a little mustache twirl and boldly proclaim.
We worked hard to get the sulfur compounds out of our fuels... What if that was a long term mistake. Perhaps we should be putting extra sulfur in our jet fuels.
Acid rain was not that bad... was it?
> We worked hard to get the sulfur compounds out of our fuels... What if that was a long term mistake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
> Stratospheric aerosol injection is a proposed method of solar geoengineering (or solar radiation modification) to reduce global warming. This would introduce aerosols into the stratosphere to create a cooling effect via global dimming and increased albedo, which occurs naturally from volcanic winter.
Also read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/ (you can find snippets of the NOVA program about)
> Perhaps we should be putting extra sulfur in our jet fuels.
Kind of... though it's an interesting thing. https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-airplane-contrails-are-he...
I recall a suggestion that jets should "run rich" which would increase the water vapor in the exhaust and create more contrails in combination with eliminating redeye flights so that contrails aren't formed at night (allowing more radiative escape)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
> Marine cloud brightening also known as marine cloud seeding and marine cloud engineering is a proposed solar radiation management climate engineering technique that would make clouds brighter, reflecting a small fraction of incoming sunlight back into space in order to offset anthropogenic global warming. Along with stratospheric aerosol injection, it is one of the two solar radiation management methods that may most feasibly have a substantial climate impact.
The much better solution is injecting it into the stratosphere, where it will have the full reflective effect, while having orders of magnitude less acid rain impact.
> Acid rain was not that bad... was it?
My least favorite property of environmentalism is the inability to consider tradeoffs.
If asked to choose between acid rain and global warming, the typical environmentalist will just refuse.
Is it "inability to consider tradeoffs" or "humility in the face of our repeated failure to engineer biological systems the way we intend to?"
You have very little idea what will happen if we inject sulfur into the stratosphere.
What happens when sulfur enters the stratosphere is quite well known, since we have studied what happens when volcanoes do it.
Unless you think "natural" sulphur from volcanoes behaves different than "artificial" sulphur, maybe because it is blessed by Gaia, of course.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1510/global-effects...
Errrr, we know what happens when you put a roughly Pinatubo plume-sized mixture of Pinatubo plume composition in the vicinity of Pinatubo in 1991.
Everything from there is a generalization and abstraction which is very hard to do with complex systems like meteorological ones.
One serious issue with that is that injected sulfides do not stay around long. If we use them to cause cooling or to stop warming before we have started reducing CO2 emissions or at least are firmly and irrevocably on a reasonable path to doing so we'll have to keep injecting sulfides.
If we use the sulfides to mitigate the effects of warming without addressing the causes and then stop with the sulfides all the warming that was countered by the sulfides happens over a short period.
That would probably be much worse than having not used the sulfides at all. If you get some particular amount of warming spread over 20 years that's probably easier to adapt to than if you get that same amount of warming over 2 years after 18 years of no warming.
> One serious issue with that is that injected sulfides do not stay around long.
To me, this is one of the best features! Because if, by some unforeseen anomaly, it turns out to actually have bad net effects, you can just wait 1-2 years, and it goes away by itself!
The reality is that even if we stop CO₂ emissions cold today, CO₂ levels will stay the same, not go back to preindustrial levels for at least several centuries.
So the best practical plan I know is this:
- Learn how to spray SO₂ in the stratosphere so it cools down Earth to desirable levels.
- Figure out large scale CO₂ sequestration, to bring CO₂ levels back down. My guess is this takes ~50 years.
- As CO₂ levels go down, we can tamper down the SO₂ injections, and get the planet back to a healthy state.
Could work, or could end up like snowpiercer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus
The what-if premise of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel) is:
What if an enterprising billionaire got tired of waiting for meaningful action to mitigate climate change,
and undertook to put sulfur back into the atmosphere, on the cheap?
"Taken from tomorrow's headlines..." perhaps. There are no international conventions or bodies currently prepared to regulate cowboy geoengineering, let alone capable of coercion.
> Acid rain was not that bad... was it?
On a huge scale it would be.
A huge (and often overlooked) effect of higher CO2 is ocean acidification and this will come on top of that.
In Neal Stephenson's book Termination Shock, a billionaire builds a sulfur cannon designed to fire sulfur into the atmosphere with the intent to cool the Earth and alter climate change. He names the cannon "Pina2bo" after Mount Pinatubo, which the article talks about.
We have these already, they are called cargo carriers.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
This sucks, it looks like one form of compliance is to “clean” the exhaust in ocean water.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072023/ship-scrubbers-w...
I thought everyone knew that volcanoes outbreaks can affect climate temporarily...
I wonder if one day we'll figure a way to trigger a massive volcanic eruption (in an unpopulated area) as a way to fight climate change.
Krakatoa and Mount Tambora led to measurable famine, so it's probably not a good idea.
Climate change also leads to famine. Which is worse?
Mount Tambora's eruption resulted in "the year without a summer", where most of the Northern Hemisphere had deep snows into June and all the crops froze with massive, rapid dieoffs of livestock.
Climate change is definitely bad, but not quite as dramatic in as short a time. People make fun of the Day After Tomorrow for trivializing climate change, but the Mount Tambora eruption resulted in very fast, rapid changes worldwide. And it seems foolish to think we would be any good at controlling the strength of a volcanic eruption.
Yeah, but global temps have climbed ~1.5 degrees since then, so lowering them by 0.5 degrees wouldn't have the same effect (crops freezing) as it did back then.
But if it's just a temporary fix for one year, then it's probably a bad idea.
A sudden drop is pretty bad. Plants have tight tolerances and farmers purchase seeds based on expected conditions, not a hypothetical where some rogue country is triggering a volcanic eruption. It’s entirely possible that people plant the wrong crops, a volcanic eruption is triggered, and we see crop failures due to how optimized modern farming is.
Fair point. If such drastic action was ever contemplated it would have to be planned out in advance so that farming could adapt that year to expected shifts.
But there will come a tipping point at which time we'll consider drastic measures that society would not otherwise tolerate. Look at Covid for a recent example.
The people capable of financing such a project are the kind of people who would think "I'm not going to waste this massive eruption on an unpopulated area".
Presumably that would result in massive amounts of air pollution (much of it probably heavily localized) which would be pretty awful.
The next country testing their nuclear weapons will just have to do it in a caldera. Does Iran have a volcano?
What could possibly go wrong?
This post is most likely related to a recent post on HN: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/so2-injection
The Paul Crutzen quote is huge. I wonder if Pueyo read Susan Solomon’s work on Australian wildfires, particulate pollution, SO2 and ozone though.
I've been curious before on how much an underwater volcano would impact things. Any chance that is already modeled in a place to read?
The dinosaurs also knew this to be true.
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I always figured volcanos where the Earth's engine exhaust pipes
Red 5 standing by.
I can't stop laughing, thank you.
It was a port, not a pipe
So, like a volcano then?
It's also water cooled
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No way, I mean… the press man, the press, UN etc.
/s
> Volcanoes can affect climate
News at 11 ! /s
> Do the Earth's volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities? No.
I hope that a moderately dry and educational page like this would not be taken down for political satisfaction.
Large eruptions probably would. Short term anyway, they don’t really happen often enough.
People average 100x the annual CO2 from all volcanoes combined. Large eruptions release a great deal of matter but not that much CO2 as a percentage and not very quickly.
Even if by large you’re talking about once in 50 year events like the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo that lasted days during which it released 10 cubic kilometers of material. But it still only added 0.05 GT of CO2, roughly what people currently release every 12 hours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_eruption_of_Mount_Pinatub...
There’s been larger eruptions, but I think we’re looking past what people consider ‘Large’ into apocalyptic events.
Why would we expect a volcano to emit more than incidental amounts of CO2 in the first place? Despite the superficial similarities, it's not a bonfire.
Carbon (usually in rocks like limestone) that is subducted is returned to the atmosphere by volcanoes.
Pinatubo affected the ozone layer as well
Your point?
People should be discussing it upfront but apparently Paul Crutzen thinks it’s a risk worth taking so I’ll watch and wait.
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That was only a local effect, in densely populated areas. And it wasn't cooling; it was a reduction in the variation between day and night. As reported at the time:
https://edition.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.cl...
And even that much appears dubious:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/climatechange/2009/05/911_contra...
It was the opposite. Temperature increased.
Travis et al. (2002) produced a calculation suggesting that the lack of contrails during the airline shut- down following the attacks of 11 September 2001 resulted in a substantial rise in the diurnal temperature range across the US.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24868704
IIRC nights were cooler than usual in NYC and the surrounding areas, probably because more heat was able to escape into space.
> climate cooled around 3 degree
I'm certainly no climate expert but I'm quite sure that this would be a very large change to happen in such a short time. This seems to be a rather dubious claim.
> somehow nobody else seems to remember
When something like this happens, a common culprit is confabulation.
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> Large bollide collides with earth and deepens the ice age
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Where did you get these ridiculous ideas? We just need more renewable power and storage. Then we replace every use of fossil fuels with electricity. 90% of the solution is not hard, it's just expensive.
After factoring in the entire supply-chain (mining, manufacturing, maintenance, yield, reliability, waste management), renewables barely make a dent.
Drastic reductions need drastic measures. It is time we reconcile with the fact that modern living does not compute with our objectives of carbon emission.
That is factually wrong.
Sounds like you're in LA? Installing both solar panels and and AC on every home in America would be huge (there are quite many that have neither). It would be hard to have an AC you power yourself be rationed.
Maybe the energy demand of AI will finally get us to invest in nuclear at the scale it deserves?
> Maybe the energy demand of AI will finally get us to invest in nuclear at the scale it deserves?
We already invest in nuclear at scale. In nuclear weapons. /s
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In other news the grass is green.