Study the Risks of Sun-Blocking Aerosols, Say 60 Scientists, the US, the EU, and One Supercomputer (scientificamerican.com) 101
Nine days ago the U.S. government released a report on the advantages of studying "scientific and societal implications" of "solar radiation modification" (or SRM) to explore its possible "risks and benefits...as a component of climate policy."
The report's executive summary seems to concede the technique would "negate (explicitly offset) all current or future impacts of climate change" — but would also introduce "an additional change" to "the existing, complex climate system, with ramifications which are not now well understood." Or, as Politico puts it, "The White House cautiously endorsed the idea of studying how to block sunlight from hitting Earth's surface as a way to limit global warming in a congressionally mandated report that could help bring efforts once confined to science fiction into the realm of legitimate debate."
But again, the report endorsed the idea of studying it — to further understand the risks, and also help prepare for "possible deployment of SRM by other public or private actors." Politico emphasized how this report "added a degree of skepticism by noting that Congress has ordered the review, and the administration said it does not signal any new policy decisions related to a process that is sometimes referred to — or derided as — geoengineering." "Climate change is already having profound effects on the physical and natural world, and on human well-being, and these effects will only grow as greenhouse gas concentrations increase and warming continues," the report said. "Understanding these impacts is crucial to enable informed decisions around a possible role for SRM in addressing human hardships associated with climate change..."
The White House said that any potential research on solar radiation modification should be undertaken with "appropriate international cooperation."
It's not just the U.S. making official statements. Their report was released "the same week that European Union leaders opened the door to international discussions of solar radiation modification," according to Politico's report: Policymakers in the European Union have signaled a willingness to begin international discussions of whether and how humanity could limit heating from the sun. "Guided by the precautionary principle, the EU will support international efforts to assess comprehensively the risks and uncertainties of climate interventions, including solar radiation modification and promote discussions on a potential international framework for its governance, including research related aspects," the European Parliament and European Council said in a joint communication.
And it also "follows an open letter by more than 60 leading scientists calling for more research," reports Scientific American. They also note a new supercomputer helping climate scientists model the effects of injecting human-made, sun-blocking aerosols into the stratosphere: The machine, named Derecho, began operating this month at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and will allow scientists to run more detailed weather models for research on solar geoengineering, said Kristen Rasmussen, a climate scientist at Colorado State University who is studying how human-made aerosols, which can be used to deflect sunlight, could affect rainfall patterns... "To understand specific impacts on thunderstorms, we require the use of very high-resolution models that can be run for many, many years," Rasmussen said in an interview. "This faster supercomputer will enable more simulations at longer time frames and at higher resolution than we can currently support..."
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a report in 2021 urging scientists to study the impacts of geoengineering, which Rasmussen described as a last resort to address climate change.
"We need to be very cautious," she said. "I am not advocating in any way to move forward on any of these types of mitigation efforts. The best thing to do is to stop fossil fuel emissions as much as we can."
The report's executive summary seems to concede the technique would "negate (explicitly offset) all current or future impacts of climate change" — but would also introduce "an additional change" to "the existing, complex climate system, with ramifications which are not now well understood." Or, as Politico puts it, "The White House cautiously endorsed the idea of studying how to block sunlight from hitting Earth's surface as a way to limit global warming in a congressionally mandated report that could help bring efforts once confined to science fiction into the realm of legitimate debate."
But again, the report endorsed the idea of studying it — to further understand the risks, and also help prepare for "possible deployment of SRM by other public or private actors." Politico emphasized how this report "added a degree of skepticism by noting that Congress has ordered the review, and the administration said it does not signal any new policy decisions related to a process that is sometimes referred to — or derided as — geoengineering." "Climate change is already having profound effects on the physical and natural world, and on human well-being, and these effects will only grow as greenhouse gas concentrations increase and warming continues," the report said. "Understanding these impacts is crucial to enable informed decisions around a possible role for SRM in addressing human hardships associated with climate change..."
The White House said that any potential research on solar radiation modification should be undertaken with "appropriate international cooperation."
It's not just the U.S. making official statements. Their report was released "the same week that European Union leaders opened the door to international discussions of solar radiation modification," according to Politico's report: Policymakers in the European Union have signaled a willingness to begin international discussions of whether and how humanity could limit heating from the sun. "Guided by the precautionary principle, the EU will support international efforts to assess comprehensively the risks and uncertainties of climate interventions, including solar radiation modification and promote discussions on a potential international framework for its governance, including research related aspects," the European Parliament and European Council said in a joint communication.
And it also "follows an open letter by more than 60 leading scientists calling for more research," reports Scientific American. They also note a new supercomputer helping climate scientists model the effects of injecting human-made, sun-blocking aerosols into the stratosphere: The machine, named Derecho, began operating this month at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and will allow scientists to run more detailed weather models for research on solar geoengineering, said Kristen Rasmussen, a climate scientist at Colorado State University who is studying how human-made aerosols, which can be used to deflect sunlight, could affect rainfall patterns... "To understand specific impacts on thunderstorms, we require the use of very high-resolution models that can be run for many, many years," Rasmussen said in an interview. "This faster supercomputer will enable more simulations at longer time frames and at higher resolution than we can currently support..."
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a report in 2021 urging scientists to study the impacts of geoengineering, which Rasmussen described as a last resort to address climate change.
"We need to be very cautious," she said. "I am not advocating in any way to move forward on any of these types of mitigation efforts. The best thing to do is to stop fossil fuel emissions as much as we can."
Better have an undo button handy (Score:5, Insightful)
Any systems admin worth their salt always keeps an undo button handy for every significant operation. If you want to artificially darken the sky, then fine, but you'd best also have a handy and proven way to undo it on your tool belt. Otherwise, once you fuck it up worse that you already did, but now in the other direction, we'll be headed straight for an ice age with no recourse. If you think making the whole world into a topic-zone is bad, wait until you make it all a snowy tundra instead.
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Indeed. Or make it tropical first and then snowy tundra to kill of all the plants that survived the first change.
I think anything without continued fine control is just going to make things even worse. On the other hand, anything with fine control is probably out of reach of human tech for the foreseeable future. Hence reducing greenhouse gas emissions is still the best option.
Re: Better have an undo button handy (Score:2)
I thought you were going to mention adding a Klingon or two to your snowy fire desert planet.
No it isn't. (Score:3)
The view of third world countries is that everyone at the top got their chance to pollute. None of them are going to stop, regardless of international agreements. Sure, they'll hold the West up for money, but in terms of damaging their nascent economies through lack of energy - no fucking way. Since energy generation via burning fossil fuels still remains cheaper and easier in the short run, this is NOT the easier path. Unless fighting pointless wars over energy production is your idea of 'progress'. I
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I guess that means that we're FUBAR. Because if all fossil fuels need to be burned before we stop, it essentially means that we'll have a carbon level that matches the time when these fossil fuels were still roaming the earth alive [eos.org].
Re: No it isn't. (Score:2)
Technically, since these fuels are an aggregation of the total sum of carbon sequestered as fuel starting from any arbitrary point in time, the total amount of CO2 released burning all available fossil fuels would result in CO2 levels far higher than they were at some prehistoric level.
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5 degrees more and 10 meters higher sea levels is already bad enough, did you really have to pile on?
Of course you're right, but ... ok, we're screwed. I'm glad my country is at about 150m above sea level.
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The view of third world countries is that everyone at the top got their chance to pollute.
The first world spent trillions developing solar energy, efficient batteries, wind turbines, LED light bulbs, nuclear reactors, etc.
The 3rd world doesn't have to spend the R&D to develop any of that stuff.
There are advantages to developing early but also costs.
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You appear to have skipped over, the 2nd world, who had the chance to look at every mistake or wrong decision the 1st world made & decided to repeat every one of those wrongheaded decisions on a far larger scale.
Hint: look at your moniker.
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Chine is investing a lot into renewables, nuclear power, trains and EVs. Not enough (and they're still building coal plants) but then who is doing enough?
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Chine is investing a lot into renewables, nuclear power, trains and EVs. Not enough (and they're still building coal plants) but then who is doing enough?
Their actions now doesn't erase the vast & unnecessary harm they've done to themselves, the region & the world.
There were more than a few who raised the specter of China's emissions surpassing America's & they were widely ridiculed, until 2006 when they caught up & continued rocketing up until reaching DOUBLE America's GHG output.
So...progress??
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It depends how much we want to enforce our patents on the tech.
Also for developing nations, nuclear is of little use. They would have to develop an entire nuclear industry and regulatory system, secure a supply of fuel, figure out what to do with the waste, and deal with the immense cost.
They will use renewables or fossil fuels, so we have to make sure that renewables are the more attractive option.
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Developing countries don't develop their own nuclear industries.
They buy reactors from the West, Russia, China, or Korea.
Re: No it isn't. (Score:2)
third world countries get monetary aid, tech, medicine, charity from first world, no right to complain. People living in huts in uganda have cell phones.
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The third world countries are the ones that are going to get fucked over the most by climate change. So it's in their interest as much as anyone's to try to mitigate it.
It's also not necessary to "damage their economies through lack of energy" - solar is pretty cheap and the "global south" is actually best suited to take advantage of it [researchgate.net]. Oil & gas on the other hand is only going to get more expensive as cheaper to exploit reserves run out.
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If humanity is going to take over control of the planetary climate and overpower the Milankovitch cycles to hold 1950's climate forever then it's definitely going to take some fine controls both up and down.
We are still not as warm as we were 6000 years ago, but we are 6 degrees C warmer than 20,000 years ago, that is a serious turn of the thermostat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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True.
From you're first link:
Comparison to current temperatures: In terms of the global average, the 2021 IPCC report expressed medium confidence that temperatures in the last decade are higher than they were in the Mid-Holocene Warm Period.
And from the explanation of the graph:
The most recent period is on the right, but the recent warming is seen only in the inset.
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Indeed. Or make it tropical first and then snowy tundra to kill of all the plants that survived the first change.
I think anything without continued fine control is just going to make things even worse. On the other hand, anything with fine control is probably out of reach of human tech for the foreseeable future. Hence reducing greenhouse gas emissions is still the best option.
That's pretty much it. Problem is, we don't have that fine control. As well, many of the so called solutions require projects that create more problems.
There are big problems with the idea of purposely injecting aerosols to cool the earth. If people haven't considered what happens if we are in th emiddle of this process, and Tambura erupts and causes some "years without summers" like it did in the early 1800's, then that are not thinking. That was bad enough at that time - just imagine how many people wi
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What we have to do is consider that we've screwed up, and could easily screw up again or even worse by attempting global remediation with things like aerosol injection and make it worse.
And then you look at the fuckups that _still_ claim everything is just dandy. And these will be the fuckers that cry for something to be done when they finally cannot deny the unfolding catastrophe anymore. Think these people are capable of that insight? I do not.
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What we have to do is consider that we've screwed up, and could easily screw up again or even worse by attempting global remediation with things like aerosol injection and make it worse.
And then you look at the fuckups that _still_ claim everything is just dandy. And these will be the fuckers that cry for something to be done when they finally cannot deny the unfolding catastrophe anymore. Think these people are capable of that insight? I do not.
But you can bet they'll blame it on Liberals.
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But you can bet they'll blame it on Liberals.
They will blame whoever they think they are not. Because the major reason for their lack of understanding is that for these people, _they_ are never to blame for anything and hence they do not learn from mistakes.
Re:Better have an undo button handy (Score:5, Informative)
They're constantly washing out of the atmosphere at a high rate.
The undo button is to stop putting them up there, which you will have to do on a continual basis to keep the effect active.
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And we'll probably do it by spraying salt water into the sky from large ships at sea... burning fossil fuels to power the jets.
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Funny, I'm not sure I like the idea of betting our planet's climate on "generally".
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Generally speaking, albedo increasing solutions like aerosols are self-limiting. They're constantly washing out of the atmosphere at a high rate.
The undo button is to stop putting them up there, which you will have to do on a continual basis to keep the effect active.
Well yes - after a while, the resulting acid rain stops after it washes out. At that point, we won't get doused in pH 4 acid (roughly wine vinegar level)
Every one of these "solutions" tends to just cause other problems. I remember as a kid in PA, the Coal plants in Ohio ended up dumping acid rain on the area. Not good, BTW.
Problem of course, even if this works, carbon Dioxide and m
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We screwed up big time
Sure did.
we're likely to just compound it.
Hand-wavey mysticism.
The only sane course is to stop injecting CO2.
That's likely not even enough. Hence why we are here. Putting your head in the sand makes you no better than those who got us here.
Aerosols have an atmospheric lifetime of around 2 years, as opposed to millions for CO2.
Acid rain is a well understood phenomena.
It causes a small, but noticeable impact on crop yields, while shifting climate zones will wipe them out entirely. The choice is mind-numbingly simple.
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You're off by a few orders of magnitude on the CO2, from what we know now it's less than 1,000 years, but your point is still valid. And since we aren't talking about completely stopping the injection of CO2 into the atmosphere, and the ocean's ability to absorb CO2 is being used up, sooner or later you may be right.
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You're off by a few orders of magnitude on the CO2, from what we know now it's less than 1,000 years
The technically correct answer actually requires a lot of nuance, since how long CO2 lasts in the air is impacted by the CO2 in the air (it's non-linear)
As an example, if you were to burn all the coal known to man right now, it would take on the order of millions of years for atmospheric CO2 to drop down to what it was.
It is correct that in the case of non-climate-altering amount of CO2, the lifetime is around 1000 years. But we're well, well past that.
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It is correct that in the case of non-climate-altering amount of CO2, the lifetime is around 1000 years. But we're well, well past that.
Just as a query, give us a back of the envelope description of how these aerosols will be produced, distributed, and deployed, and the amounts needed to return the earth to a particular "correct" level of average global temperature. It's pretty difficult to find much of a global nature before 1850.
But from 1880 to present, we're looking at around 1.1 C surface temperature increase, the Oceans around 1.09 C. Probably best to settle on that as a guideline.
The Mount Tambora eruption of 1815 lowered the ave
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Just as a query, give us a back of the envelope description of how these aerosols will be produced, distributed, and deployed, and the amounts needed to return the earth to a particular "correct" level of average global temperature. It's pretty difficult to find much of a global nature before 1850.
First off, one doesn't propose putting the Earth back to a "correct" average global temperature.
Aerosols are treating the symptom, not treating the disease.
However, symptoms can still kill.
Aerosols become worth considering at the point where the crop yields of the major world bread baskets begin to fail.
Worst case estimates are 5.4C increase by 2100.
So let's say the worst-case goal is to shave 3c off.
Tambora isn't a great example (nor are most volcanic eruptions when taken individually).
Measured re
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You're off by a few orders of magnitude on the CO2, from what we know now it's less than 1,000 years, but your point is still valid. And since we aren't talking about completely stopping the injection of CO2 into the atmosphere, and the ocean's ability to absorb CO2 is being used up, sooner or later you may be right.
This "plan" doesn't remove CO2, just injects aerosols into the atmosphere which rain out.
Guess where they end up. If you are concerned about the buffering effect limits of oceanic water on CO2, what is your viewpoint of the many thousands of years of Sulfuric acid we would put in the oceans continuously along with the CO2.
I'm as concerned about this issue as anyone else. But people can occasionally conduct a mono variant analysis of a situation. Acid rain has a lot of problems for humans and animals,
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We screwed up big time
Sure did.
we're likely to just compound it.
Hand-wavey mysticism.
The only sane course is to stop injecting CO2.
That's likely not even enough. Hence why we are here. Putting your head in the sand makes you no better than those who got us here.
Aerosols have an atmospheric lifetime of around 2 years, as opposed to millions for CO2.
So here you have it - in order to restore temperatures to whatever you decide is the proper level, we're gonna have to inject aerosols for millions of years.
Acid rain is a well understood phenomena. It causes a small, but noticeable impact on crop yields, while shifting climate zones will wipe them out entirely. The choice is mind-numbingly simple.
Any mind numbingly simple solution, is great if you have a numb mind - ordinarily, I'd not use that term, but you claimed I had my head in the sand. You usually do better than that, so can it, por fovor. Let's reset this without your acrimony.
Acid rain leaches aluminum out of rocks in creeks and rivers, which is toxic to fish and other aquatic wildli
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So here you have it - in order to restore temperatures to whatever you decide is the proper level, we're gonna have to inject aerosols for millions of years.
Well, no shit.
Obviously this isn't a long term solution. The long term solution is industrial scale carbon capture.
This is the stop gap to slow down the collapse of civilization so that we may actually implement a long term solution.
Acid rain leaches aluminum out of rocks in creeks and rivers, which is toxic to fish and other aquatic wildlife. At pH 5, fish eggs will not hatch, and a number of plants will die. And it can go as low as pH 4.
Acid rain isn't a large concern for acidification of water.
Nitric acid in the water cycle dwarfs anything we'd be able to drop in.
I.e., it's readily broken down and used.
Sulfuric acid is more of a problem, but ultimately we would have to treat the atmosphere for thousands o
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And ultimately, as far as desperate measures go, aerosolization of the atmosphere is a ridiculously minor one. It is a truly tiny additional stress on a system that is actively collapsing before our eyes, and that tiny additional stress can stop the effects of what IS causing the system to collapse. This is how engineering works, when it comes to trying to keep that dam from collapsing after it has failed. This is why its geoengineering.
How many ecosystems do you want to destroy in order to accomplish whatever the heck it is you want to accomplish?
You call it engineering - I call it blind panic Anyhow, you do you, and may we be raining acid on your parade this time next year.
It's so ironic, back in the 1970s, we were having problems from acid rain, people were being injured, fish killed. Who know that this very thing is going to save us? 8^/
But for someone claiming engineering, there is an overriding emotional content to your posti
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How many ecosystems do you want to destroy in order to accomplish whatever the heck it is you want to accomplish?
Look the fuck around you.
We aren't discussing destroying ecosystems, we're discussing slowing down the rate of their destruction.
We're talking shoring up a wooden frame, and you're complaining about the reduction in structural integrity due to the holes put in for the nails.
You call it engineering - I call it blind panic Anyhow, you do you, and may we be raining acid on your parade this time next year.
You have a narrow perspective- worrying about the trees for the forest, and you call my reaction blind?
It's so ironic, back in the 1970s, we were having problems from acid rain, people were being injured, fish killed. Who know that this very thing is going to save us? 8^/
lol. I lived through it, in one of the greatest affected areas on the planet. ;)
Wasn't that bad
But for someone claiming engineering, there is an overriding emotional content to your postings.
If you're trying to imply that engin
Re:Better have an undo button handy (Score:4, Interesting)
I hope the climate deniers are totally right. Sincerely, 50 years from now, I truly and sincerely hope the Tucker Carlson / Trump / oil company crowd are laughing at the liberal and educated people, all the way to the bank. But our best science tells us that the heating is gonna hit, and its gonna hit HARD because we’re doing absolutely zero mitigation. If the heating vaporizes the ocean clathrates and we hit a heating feedback loop, we will have to geoengineer with whatever best tech we have at the time. And we may or may not have an undo button.
Scientists and engineers need to be ready with geoengineering solutions. We’re going to need them.
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We might not have the option to do it slowly and carefully
We have always had the solution for AGW, we just choose not to do it. And geoengineering isn't a solution, it is a dangerous way to mitigate the problem which won't go away unless we stop lying to ourselves about how energy should be generated. And your side's press is just as wrong as the other side's press, just in a different way. In fact, they are really both on the same side, the current state of the climate debate is about distracting and confusing the public so they don't demand real solutions (wh
Re:Better have an undo button handy (Score:4, Insightful)
Scientists and engineers need to be ready with solutions or our species will follow the natural chain of events that occurs when a species of animal faces a massive ecological collapse. I dont like it. But that’s where we’re headed. There’s goong to be a LOT of collateral damage and future generations will study this as a textbook example of what happens when we deliberately stick our collective heads up our collective asses.
We are going to NEED geoengineering
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ALSO burning every single kilo of coal, every single liter of oil
You are only doing this because you shutdown your nuclear plant. Decarbonization hasn't worked because trying to replace fossil fuels with solar is wind is something the laws of physics voted against. And instead of realizing this, you have stubbornly doubled down on stupid. If you want to end extraction, make energy prices low, not high. Extraction naturally stops when energy prices are too low. But every single major environmental group pushes for high energy prices. Replacing baseload power with Re
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Greenhouse gas emissions in the US peaked in 2007 and are down 20% since then.
https://www.c2es.org/content/u... [c2es.org]
Coal mining and burning has dropped way off in the USA and in the EU. Burning natural gas for electricity is dropping about 2% per year in the US, and the EU is trying hard to move away from it by necessity.
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The problem they are citing is that the third world has more than made up for what we've cut hence global emissions still increasing https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com] . It's great we've cut emissions in the first world but we still have more of a problem than we had a decade ago and I havent yet heard a single good idea that would be practical to implement for limiting this dramatic uptick in fossil fuel burning in the third world.
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The claim was that we are "burning every single kilo of coal, every single liter of oil, and every single cubic meter of gas that we can get our hands on". Obviously not true.
Here's a list of greenhouse gas emissions by country;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
About half of it comes from the top 4; China, the US, the EU, and India. Much of the rest comes from countries that are not actually 'third world'. Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, etc. There's no reason they can't move to the cheaper wind and solar electri
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itâ(TM)s showing NO SIGN of stopping
Well that's not quite true.
Every country is on a curve, where emissions increase as they industrialize, reach a peak, and then decrease back towards net zero. Developed nations that industrialized long ago are on the decrease side of the curve. Emerging economies are on the increasing side.
China is often cited as an example of why we should do nothing because they aren't, but actually they are 5 years ahead of their pledge and due to peak sooner than expected, and then fall back faster than developed nation
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"humanity simply wont stop putting carbon in the atmosphere."
Fixed:
"humanity simply cant stop putting carbon in the atmosphere."
'cuz if we do, millions will die from lack of resources to support their lives. We need the fossil fuels to make everything work until we don't. Yeah, furiously aim at not needing them, but until we don't, we use them to avoid killing millions, starting at the poor and working our way up.
OBTW, you can see it again, the evidence... that "climate change" is a hoax simply designed
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They don't need to bother with that.
If I've learned one thing about the IPCC and their followers over the last 20 years, it's that they are UTTERLY CERTAIN that they're right.
You know, like masking and quarantines and the origin of COVID.
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Crank magnetism in action, it's a powerful force...
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Are you asserting that masking and quarantines were effective, then?
You know, like the oft-repeated insistence that getting the vaccine(s) would prevent the spread of COVID?
Because let's be honest: it's pretty much the same pack of people pushing both piles of nonsense.
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The sun is currently heading towards a solar maximum in the next 1-2 years, and then it goes from getting more active, to calming down. If you're selling geo-engineering, I guess you're going to be getting paid to make it cooler when it's getting hotter, and then when it starts cooling down, you'll get paid again to make it warmer.
That's the business plan.
I think it's weird that the sun blasts the earth with a CME, and scientists claim that doesn't really heat the earth up. We can feel the heat from the s
Re: Better have an undo button handy (Score:2)
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Foretold by Simpson (Score:2)
And they thought Mr. Burns' Sunblocker was a good idea :)
Going forward without consent (Score:3)
Any action done to the planet at large needs the assent of all the effected people. Sure, you can say emitting CO2 didn't receive that consent, but the outcomes of chemical aerosols in the atmosphere are far less understood. Unanticipated, far flung side effects could result.
Before we go experimenting on the whole world the majority of the world should be asked if they agree to have their sun blocked out by some know-it-alls. And in this case trial run are still likely to end in global dispersion of whatever is tried.
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Foretold by the Matrix (Score:2)
And now we're talking about doing something to the sky to lessen the amount of sun that can get through.
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Nice Matrix reference.
So let me get this straight, you're citing a fictional universe in which humans are used as batteries (a genuinely stupid idea) as a means on casting doubt on aerosols being used to limit global warming?
Anything we put up there is going to come down. This is something we would need to continue to reapply until we figure out a permanent solution.
Solution anticipated (Score:2)
Volcanic winter (Score:3)
Re: Volcanic winter (Score:2)
I remember when back in the day it was theorized that us putting carbon particulates in the air was leading to a darkened sky that would block the sun and lead to greenhouse gas effect followed by significant global warming.
Which was after the 70s and 90s news article after news article about global temperatures being the lowest ever recorded and extreme cold events happening world wide, same cause, emissions blocking the sun and the hole in the ozone layer would cool the planet.
Since that didnâ(TM)t p
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How about we donâ(TM)t fuck with the weather or the atmosphere
Unfortunately it's not 1840 and we've been fucking with the atmosphere for a couple centuries now.
Now that doesn't mean this is a good idea but technology got us into trouble it's not unreasonable it can help us change things in our favor.
Ughhhhhhh (Score:2)
"...and One Supercomputer"
Less than a year of ChatGPT and "AI" everything (even when just referring to an algorithm) and we are back to talking about computers like its the 1950s, are we?
"One Supercomputer" says nothing. Someone programmed a supercomputer and read the results. Stop referring to computers like they're (already) full fledged people.
Does not mitigate ocean acidification (Score:4, Informative)
pH is dropping in the ocean due to carbon dioxide absorption and blocking sunlight will not mitigate that. We need t cut back on carbon dioxide.
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^Very important point. All the SRM in the world won't stop an oceanic mass extinction. The safest and most direct-acting forms of geoengineering that can be used to reverse our centuries-long unplanned geoengineering experiment in adding CO2 to the atmosphere is direct-capture carbon sequestration, from the atmosphere and oceans.
satellites (Score:1)
seems it would be safer to use Sun blocking satellites, we only need to block maybe 2% of the solar radiation to stop and to start reversing the warming, a million satellites, each equipped with a solar shield with the area or 1Ã--2 meters, spread evenly on the sunny side (shouldn't be on the night side to prevent radiation coming from Earth from bouncing back to it). Here is a good reason to build off Earth manufacturing.
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/. is so fucking stupid, it doesn't understand the multiplication symbol... 1x2 meters.
Re: satellites (Score:2)
right, block the energy that powers photosynthesis that makes our oxygen and food supply. fucking genius.
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You are in a story that is talking about using aerosols to block the Sun, so why is my comment bugging you more than the entire article? Secondly, we only need to decrease the power input by about 1-2%, we don't need to block the Sun completely, just under 2% will be sufficient to stop and reverse global warming. Thirdly, using satellites for this is much better than aerosols because the satellites can be controlled to keep on the sunny side of the planet, while aerosols cannot and we need the heat to rad
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Again, we don't need to block the Sun completely, we only need to diminish the power input by about 1-2% and it will be fully sufficient at 1% to stop the new warming and at 2% to start reversing the warming trend.
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The level of your stupidity in being willing to tamper with oxygen and food production on this earth is beyond belief. The satellites might not be removable in the future.
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the aerosols too, like your idea, are too utterly dangerous and stupid to contemplate. Blocking 2 percent of the energy that drives oxygen and food production on this world is idiotic.
Humans are do stupid it hurts. (Score:1)
Lets spray a bunch of shit into the air, that'll help!"
PREDICTION 2075 (Score:3)
"Scientists propose releasing worlds supply of R-12 into the atmosphere to combat the global eclipse currently killing all life on Earth"
There was a documentary about this (Score:2)
Highlander II: The Quickening [imdb.com]
unhinged (Score:2)
right let's partially block energy which drives photosynthesis that make oxygen and food for this earth. I propose instead any politician or scientist advocating such a thing be incarcerated for inciting crimes against humanity.
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I'm just going to go out on a god damn limb here, but I think scientists who want to research this (as a last resort as they stated) are aware of photosynthesis - and they'll take that into account in their calculations.
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I just going to go out on a limb here and point out plenty of scientists have maimed and killed when they confidently made things that didn't work properly. This has happened with everything from nuclear weapons with unexpected huge yield, to bad firearms design, to drugs and preservatives that turned out to be deadly, to chemical plants that have killed thousands.
In short, only an idiot would have faith that a group of scientists seeking to tamper with the Earth's insolation, our source of food and oxygen
They made a TV show about this once... (Score:2)
I seem to remember a TV show about this, something to do with a giant train...
reduced photosynthesis ? (Score:1)
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You should look up what happens to plant nutrient content as atmospheric CO2 concentration increases. Make sure you're sitting down first.
embrace it - terraforming starts at home (Score:2)
and we're going to get to a point (if you believe current science) where we won't have a choice.
suck it down.
Oh, *those* kinds of aerosols... (Score:1)
In-situ studies are being done (Score:2)
already in operation (Score:2)
Sun-blocking aerosols are already in operation. They currently go by the vernacular appellation of "clouds."
As the world [allegedly] heats up, more water enters the atmosphere, where the altitude temperature gradient causes clouds. This creates a negative feedback process for warming. Where the equilibrium lies, no one knows.
There was an SF story a while back where one day everyone wakes up to discover that the atmosphere has changed phase into one giant cloud covering the entire earth. Maybe not ficti
truly messed up ! (Score:2)
Whatever they say, science has no "monolithic" answers here.
Ffs. (Score:1)