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Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

This kind of experiments should be done only by people with previous experience culturing corals. I see at least two possible problems here.

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I would be happier if nobody did these kind of experiments. I have the feeling that playing with the weather may be our last and most stupid failure. Doesn't have to have crazy consequences after the first, second or third time. But at some point it will just turn everything to sh*t.

Humans have been playing with the weather ever since we started cutting/burning down forests faster than they can grow back.

That doesn't read like an endorsement of planned geoengineering.

The only type of geoengineering I would endorse without much hesitation is sucking CO2 back out of the atmosphere. But I don't think that the weather system is sensitive enough that we can't try nudging it with measures that are easy to stop and whose effects only last a couple of years (e.g. injection sulphur into the atmosphere).

AdrianN was responding to a comment about "crazy consequences" to messing with the weather. His point was that thus far there haven't been any, despite centuries of human-driven weather changes.

> thus far there haven't been any [crazy consequences], despite centuries of human-driven weather changes.

which obviously is not true, right?

Australia has been seeding clouds since the 1960's uninterrupted. Maybe just give us the benefit of the doubt here.

> Australia has been seeding clouds since the 1960's uninterrupted

So... can we conclude yet that it does not work for saving the coral reef?

and yet most of the Australia is still a desert.

Can't tell if that comment is tongue in cheek, but the goal was never to change the desert. Cloud seeding is mostly used to supplement already arable land for crops and hydro power I think.

It's good to hear from an Australian that environmental policies like fire management and cloud seeding have made ecological disasters a thing of the past in your part of the world /s

It was a lack of application of known fire management policies, due to reduced spending, that escalated the impact of the fires.

I see many issues with weather modicifation. I would love to see the coral reefs, and it starts a lot closer to the ground.

Weather modicifation has been a dream military tool, with some unprecedented applications. They are as far away from saving the environment as you could get.

> it starts a lot closer to the ground

Climate change will harm coral at higher latitudes, at a slow enough rate they will migrate southwards, the rampant agricultural runoff will keep going regardless of the climate though and it has just as much a negative impact. Talking about fertilisers flowing into the reef and farmers causing much of the damage is a quick way into political suicide. It's not an easy issue to solve in a country with a 24 hour news cycle full of ever more outrage.

Everyone running a fossil fuel engine is engaged in their own little bit of weather modification...

Orders of magnitude should matter in an insightful conversation.

The coral reefs are in trouble because of how many of those car engines there are. Each one is orders of magnitude smaller than this proposal, but together? I think that’s relevant in this case.

Why would coral culturing specialists like Madeleine van Oppen be the best at testing atmospheric alterations? Do you mean that the ultimate effects on the corals are important, rather than just a reduction of insolation?

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