Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

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What they found was sobering. In the geo-engineered world, maize yields did increase by 6.3 percent due to cooler temperatures (compared with the climate-changed world). But they decreased by 5.3 percent due to the reduction in light. When accounting for a few other side effects of geo engineering, there was essentially zero benefit.

I never thought of sulfate albedo enhancement as specifically about increasing agricultural yields. I always thought of it as a band-aid measure to jam a dangerous feedback loop of thawing tundra, ice cap loss, loss of stored carbon from soils => even lower albedo, even more GHGs in the atmosphere, even higher temperatures. Meanwhile humanity pokily gets its act together about cutting emissions and deploying slower-acting CO2 countermeasures like accelerated silicate weathering. I hope.

Knowing that crop yields don't get any worse with sulfate albedo enhancement is better news than I expected. (If you were expecting to lose a whole leg, hearing that the doctors just have to amputate the foot is good news. My bar for good news about climate change is set pretty low nowadays.)

Agree that this isn't that bad of a result. I find that nearly every article on geo-engineering is unnecessarily negative, always stressing the downsides and trumping up the 'unknown' side-effects.

Is there anyone left who can do a neutral cost-benefit analysis?

From what I've read, it should be welcomed as a miracle that there happens to be a simple, cheap technique that will decrease global temperatures, which has already been tested naturally with volcanoes, has minimal effects other than reflecting sunlight, fades out on its own over time, and can be precisely regulated by the amount of particles injected.

I agree we need to be careful of other effects of deflecting the sunlight, but, come on! The results so far are quite amazing.

It's this human bias against modifying our world (similar to the bias against GMO's or improving IQ by tweaking genes) that has delayed geo-engineering science by decades already. It's finally turning into a real field, and the only mainstream articles are ones that report mostly negative results.

Meanwhile humanity pokily gets its act together about cutting emissions and deploying slower-acting CO2 countermeasures like accelerated silicate weathering. I hope.

The situation is rather similar to formulating a plan to maintain the sobriety of an addicting who's still shooting up as one speaks. More tools for replacing fossil fuels appear each day even various interests make it clear that the ability to stop using oil is never going to be enough.

I sort of suspect a portion of the media is trying to shout the population into awareness of this stuff. In ways worthy but it seems to be going nowhere given the many active, powerful interests not in the population but decision-making capacities.

I've only scanned the article but another factor that might come into play is crop nutrient content. There's some research that suggests that plants growing with more CO2 around contain less nutrient content relative to their weight - see e.g.

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/24/17384110/rice-vitamin-nutritio...

Im more of a fan of the active space mirrors myself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_mirror_(climate_engineer... Complete control.

That certainly makes sense to me.

What's sobering is that we find ourselves in this situation.

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