It does seem unlikely that we'd be able to control temperatures without resorting to sulfur dioxide.
It'll probably start a war, but once natural resources start getting scarce I fully expect the affected nation to deploy SO2.
It'll probably start a war, but once natural resources start getting scarce I fully expect the affected nation to deploy SO2.
We are letting anthropogenic global warming happen because it’s cheaper in the very near term. But climate change is a real thing and will have real, life-threatening effects especially for some geographic regions.
If we accept the reality that: 1) humans often just do what is cheapest and easiest even if the long-term consequences are bad AND 2) global warming will start killing massive numbers of people from things like heat stroke, putting enormous political pressure on governments to do something,
…then The logical conclusion (combined with how insanely cheap SO2 is to deploy, we’re talking maybe $50 billion a year, maybe less) is that there is an extremely high probability that some nation will just unilaterally do sulfur dioxide. Think of a Nation like India, with a large population that will be vulnerable to heat stroke and a big enough budget and military to just unilaterally do something like this to stop the political unrest of hundreds of thousands of heat stroke deaths per yearz
The stuff isn't uranium and not much is needed. Any nation with an airplane should be able to get away with it.
But I said $50 billion per year. That’s what probably way too high. Other estimates mention $18 billion per year, I found one that mentioned $2 billion per year, and just doing the calculation by hand based on fuel and per hour operating costs, I get only like $100 million, although that depends on altitude (I think 20km is usually ideal, although most cargo jets can’t go much above 13km).
I even wonder what the effect would be of just using sulfur-rich jet fuel on regular commercial long-haul flights. The cost would be minimal or even negative (as sulfur-rich crude is cheaper). I guess in this way any nation could just decide to do sulfur-rich fuel in their long haul fleet and few would immediately notice.
It’s such a crappy solution to the problem, though, and will doubtless cause a bunch more problems. But it’d be insanely cheap to do.
Still sub optimal compared to other solutions but it’s possible we may need to try something like that.
Why disasterous?
Similar to the GERD but in the sky.
There's also the fact that you're altering a chaotic system, with fundamentally unpredictable side effects, some of which could last longer than a human lifespan. Wanna make California get monthly hurricanes? How about weekly tornados in Colorado? Bury New York city in ice?
It's not that any of those things are probable just that they're possible, and chaotic systems can drastically, catastrophically, and exponentially change configuration, and no matter how good your supercomputer simulations are, you fundamentally cannot predict the consequences.
All of human civilization teeters on the current climate configuration - geoengineering has terrifying potential. Humans have a horrible track record in attempts to predictably alter chaotic systems and ecologies. We damn well better know what we're doing before we use globally acting tools.