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Comment by tathougies | Hacker News Reader

According to USA today (https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/science/2018/01/22/creat...), scientists want to spray Sulfur oxide into the atmosphere to stop global warming, so all I'm taking from this article is that we need to cruise more?

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Whenever an article or person says "scientists want to..." or "scientists say..." it usually means that somewhere there is a team who has written a paper with that opinion, and that it is nowhere close to a consensus opinion. I'm quite sure there are many other scientists who will say doing so would be disastrous.

So, in short, try not to be swayed too much by what one researcher says, as filtered through the attention grabbing filter of a lay newspaper.

So as someone trained in the sciences, I'm well aware of this. The fact is that sulphur oxide is not a contributor to global warming, and I wanted to post an accessible article expressing this fact for those who are swayed by similar articles, like the one posted

As a scientist you will be aware that the devil is the in the detail. SO2 contributes to aerosol formation which can either warm (through absorption of solar radiation on dark particles) or cool (from forming cloud droplets and reflecting radiation) the atmosphere. SO2 emissions at ground level are usually classified as indirect contributors of warming

The article you posted talked about SO2 in the stratosphere - where cloud formation occurs. Cruise ships typically operate at sea level.

Does it pollute in the sense that it damage ecosystems, introduces toxic material into food supplies? Microsplastics, for example, don't cause global warming, but they pollute and harm aquatic life. The topic of "global warming" was introduced exclusively in the comments, and now I fear we'll go down a rabbit hole of arguing about something that we think is on-topic but is actually a tangential-at-best point that was never made by the author.

In this case, a small scale experiment is being planned: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/as-planet-warms-scientists...

Yeah, I usually interpret headlines like that as ultimately stemming from a press release from some lab. It’s a really sad commentary on the state of current journalism.

I'm guessing there is a big difference between spraying Sulfor _Dioxide_ into the stratosphere and ejecting Sulfor _Oxide_ from boats at sea-level.

Sulfur oxide broadly refers to any combination of Sulphur and Oxygen, of which Sulphur dioxide is a component. The article conveniently left out what exactly is being claimed to be emitted.

But, sulphur oxide is not the name of any chemical in particular, and obviously the gases have different properties. Sulfur monoxide, for example, is not stable and decomposes into various other gases

Before I clicked on that link I was worried it was another one about how we should be the ones in action to cool down the planet, but I'm glad to see that it talks down on doing that, and also stays neutral.

"Polluting", meaning adding non-existing gas to the air, to combat pollution seems completely off to me. In so many cases, people talk about how a simple action can solve problems and yet so many times, people underestimate the complexity of the situation.

Tax laws have to be a great example of this, where changes leave loopholes and people are smart enough to get around them. I'm sure people won't like that comparison, but it almost seems like the atmosphere is more complex than tax laws, and simple solutions wouldn't work there either.

I don't know where these stories come from, or how much the media is taking studies and framing them in their own way, but I can't see how spraying sulfur dioxide to artificially cool the planet is in any way a good idea.

IQ2US debate series did an episode on the merits of looking into Geo-Solar Engineering. Highly recommend.

https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/engineering-so...

Long story short: down low, its bad. up high, it can reflect energy. Also: politics are complicated.

It’s the same issue as with ozone. It’s something you want in the upper layers of the atmosphere. Above 18.5km altitude but don’t quote me on that.

And this, or some means of capturing C02 with solar powered flyers is the only way we have, short of some massive tech break through, of reversing global warming. I'd personally prefer capturing CO2, breaking it into oxygen and carbon, then releasing the O2, and dropping the carbon off at a base for industrial reuse. But, whatever works.

Where are you getting this fanciful notion of CO2 capture with solar powered flyers? That sounds very expensive and I'm highly skeptical. Are you aware of the energetics needed to split CO2 into oxygen and carbon, btw? It's massively expensive to do without a plant, which we are systematically destroying in jungles across the world.

No one thought many things were possible until they were. But we can keep hoping we reduce our fossil fuel use instead.

Personally, I’m in favor of CO2-eating unicorns, but that doesn’t make actual solutions worthless.

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