Hacker News Reader

The article failed to mention a really important idea - Sulfur Dioxide is not the only aerosol that can be injected, and there are other options that seem much more promising. For example, using Calcium Carbonate may actually help restore the Ozone layer while also reducing the temperature.

> Source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/harvard-group...

> "The chemists think the solution could be calcium carbonate — the stuff of chalk, limestone, marble, and seashells. It may be less harmful to the ozone, and it’s not a big health concern. The team is studying how the substance affects chlorine and nitrogen oxides, which also exist in the stratosphere — largely due to man-made emissions — and speed ozone destruction. The researchers think the calcium carbonate might help to lower levels of these gases."

And we might end up reducing atmosphere humidity and having torrential rain.

Yes, and so that's why we need to study these things now. These aerosols dissipate - you need to continually add them to the atmosphere every few months. The point here is that this a temporary measure to bring down the temperature to prevent additional deaths caused from global warming. If it ended up causing more harm than the co2 alone, this could be stopped. However, when faced with the impossible situation all of humanity is in now, applying a tourniquet to stop the bleeding buys time for decarbonization to happen.

>prevent additional deaths caused from global warming

How would one even begin to make such an assessment? Natural disaster is less likely than ever to cause death with a higher than ever population. Damage dollar cost increases from weather have increased as a result of development, not increasingly severe events.

>the impossible situation all of humanity is in now

Compared to the current resurgence in desire for nuclear war, war and diminishing diplomacy? We are not in an impossible situation because of weather. This is alarmist and completely predicated on climate models being accurate, despite that they have always proven to be inaccurate.

"Whelp, no issue there, those were the old models. We've got new, accurate models now!!"

Climate models are generally inaccurate in the opposite direction of what we want though. Things are progressing faster than predicted.

But I assume nothing will change your politically motivated opinion that climate change is no big deal.

>But I assume nothing will change your politically motivated opinion that climate change is no big deal.

The fact that you disagree with someone does not make the other person's analysis a "politically motivated opinion" any more than your disagreeing with them makes your analysis a "politically motivated opinion."

Either party in a disagreement can always choose to stoop to insults and ad hominem attacks. That doesn't mean stooping to insults and ad hominem attacks is the path to the best or desired outcomes.

Come on. They're conflating climate and weather, downplaying the effects, and calling people who are concerned about the ongoing mass extinction alarmists. This is good old climate change denialism, there is nothing here that's worth taking seriously.

Feel free to engage any of the points I brought up.

Or don't. You are hyperbolic and provided nothing of value to the conversation thus far.

I don't deny climate change. I question the appropriate response and the motivations of those that intend to place themselves in positions of authority unsubstantiated. You fall into the latter category if not the former.

I'm 100% for challenging how the powers that be react to climate change! But you're saying we should be taking it less seriously than we already do. That's completely bonkers and the complete wrong conclusion. You're not challenging authority, you're supporting their destructive profit seeking behaviour by downplaying the negative effects.

Speaking as someone who is unequivocally of the view that climate change is the greatest threat to human survival, I will say that the manner in which you are attacking your opponent is far less effective rhetorically, logically, and substantively than you believe it to be, because you are bringing so many pre-conceptions about "the other side" that you are hearing the other party say all sorts of things that they aren't actually saying and framing your argument with them around things you believe they believe but that they didn't actually say.

By pulling your own emotions into check and responding to the actual concrete points the other party has made you make your own points far more effective because your words speak directly to what the other party is saying, not to a mental straw man you've built in your mind of what you think the "other side" says and believes.

The ad hominem attacks and attacks on things the other party didn't say (but that you believe they believe) don't strengthen the effectiveness of your words, they weaken it. I'm not disagreeing with you as to the importance of climate change, I'm saying you have the capacity to be far more effective in how you chose to make your points, and given the importance you attach to this topic I'll advocate you owe it to yourself and to the world to bring your A-game to debates and actions on a subject you feel is this important.

I appreciate the criticism. I suppose I was hoping that Hacker News would in general be more on the side against the end of civilization, but I might be over-estimating. It seems like people are all too happy to view repeating oil lobby talking points as "challenging authority". This website is a mess.

You make some great points, but I fear you are wasting your 'breath'.

I'm glad to hear reasonable discussion that is willing to at least acknowledge some inconvenient and fairly concerning aspects of climate change science. Ideologues don't require any scrutiny of the facts because they've been told what to believe and do so obediently.

There is substantial political interest and monetary incentive for both sides of the climate debate.

To make wild assumptions and then speak in imperatives about the future, as if we all agree about those assumptions, is putting the cart before the horse

No, they are not. Models vs observations:

https://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-90-mod...

Even the modellers themselves admit this. When they felt a need to re-declare victory a few years ago in response to graphs like that one, even then, their argument was "if we re-calculate the original models with better data then they aren't so inaccurate anymore". It wasn't that the original predictions were correct.

Now look at a graph of temperatures as measured by satellites:

https://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/

Notice that it has long periods where it moves sideways, despite continuing emissions. Models don't predict these apparently arbitrary pauses.

"But I assume nothing will change your politically motivated opinion that climate change is no big deal."

This is a thought terminating cliché. The default non-political position in any discussion of what should government or society do is always "do nothing". It has to be - think about it. It's always the people agitating for change who are engaged in the process of politics, because it's via the process of politics that change on the level of government policy is enacted.

What's happening here is the opposite; the people saying "default to nothing, we think the need is unproven" are the people taking the default non-political position. It's the people demanding massive enforced changes to people's lives that are engaging in politics. And unfortunately, history teaches that people who insist on totally upending society for long term abstract goals must always be treated with suspicion because that is power, power corrupts, and the ground is full of the skeletons of people who died due to the dreams of despots. What they advertised as concern over some abstract ideal (justice, equality, nation, etc) rapidly became a mere tool to enter and stay in power.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer

> Dr. Roy Spencer, Ph.D.[3] is a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a crank with a major persecution complex. His favored form of pseudoscience is global warming denial, though he has also become known as a proponent of Intelligent Design.

Is that meant to be a rebuttal? You realize that I'm citing data, not even personal opinions?

It's hilarious that the website is called "rational wiki" by the way. Replies like yours are why we must not geo-engineer the earth. The sort of people who insist it's necessary can't handle data and fall back to ad-hominem, so should not be listened to.

Thanks for that reasoned reply

Is that sarcasm? That's a 100% oblivious reply.

Yep, it is a rebuttal. Climate cranks and their misuse of questionable data should not be taken seriously. Relying on them in your arguments, quoting and defending them is likewise an instant credibility fail.

Rational wiki are well known cranks therefore you should not cite them for anything. There, done, you have no possible answer to that. Do you now wish to address the actual data?

> Rational wiki are well known cranks

Incorrect, they do not fit the criteria. Their pages are extensively sourced and annotated, as is the about section of their site, and the Wikipedia article about them

and while we're at it:

> Spencer holds contrarian views on climate change and intelligent design. These views are rejected by the scientific community.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(meteorologist)

I disagree, they're clearly cranks. It's ad hominem all the way, they're authoritarian sandwich board wearers.

But really, so what? We can't agree on that because it's so subjective, and who cares what some rando Wikipedia editors think? They've got no credibility. That's why you have to drill down to the data, the science, in order to resolve disputes. Spencer provides extensive sources, like the raw data I cited already, he has a long career in publishing scientific papers on climatology. If you think the data I cited is wrong, step up and argue that.

Just face it, you're totally beaten here. Faced with data and evidence compiled by an actual expert, you retreat to "I found some website that tells me to ignore him" because you can't handle the complexity and worldview challenge that comes with the truth: climatology is as far from settled as can be, its central theories are contradicted by actual data (which is why they have to constantly rewrite the history of global temperatures), and the people telling you otherwise are lying to you. It sucks, I know. It sucked for me too when I found this out. But it's true, and sticking your fingers in your ears yelling "wiki says no" won't make it go away. Those are the tactics of children.

> who cares what some rando Wikipedia editors think? They've got no credibility.

Sadly, this is where we are on the modern internat. People can pick their truth and if it's a ... ah, "a niche truth" then it's easy to dismiss other interpretations with "clearly Wikipedia is mainstream fake news!!" etc.

> sticking your fingers in your ears yelling "wiki says no" won't make it go away. Those are the tactics of children.

For some people, every accusation is a confession.

Why are you linking to one guy's wordpress blog? I think this is the kind of research that might take more than one person. And is his data only coming from satellites? Wouldn't it make more sense to get a variety of sensor data?

> Why are you linking to one guy's wordpress blog?

One particular guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(meteorologist)

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer

See particularly Wikipedia:

> "Spencer holds contrarian views on climate change and intelligent design. These views are rejected by the scientific community."

Which, if you translate back from the dry language that Wikipedia uses, says "this guy's a nut".

Because that's where I happened to find the graphs? Go right ahead and find the papers if you like. The research in question is simply plotting old model projections on a graph along with satellite temperatures.

"Wouldn't it make more sense to get a variety of sensor data?"

By all means, try it. You'll find that satellites and weather balloons disagree with surface level temperature history. The reason is, climatologists keep editing surface temperature databases to create new 'versions' that create warming trends where none were previously visible. This is not scientific, of course. You're meant to fit your theory to the data, not data to the theory. The satellite data presented there is much less tampered with.

How do I know the satellite data wasn't tampered with?

Good question! In fact some satellite datasets are tampered with. There's a good example documented here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOHrYY3yAGE

The RSS dataset showed no warming for nearly twenty years - a problem, it's not meant to show that. Once the data was released, people with experience with how climatology operates (like Dr Spencer) predicted the data would soon be revised to show warming, somehow. That's exactly what happened. The original data used confidence intervals that widened over time, to reflect degrading instruments and orbits. In the new data the CIs were gone and the new trend line was simply the uppermost value allowed within the CI for each point. Because the CIs were widening, this trick created an appearance of warming where previously there hadn't been any.

Generally, the only way to be sure something isn't being messed with is to review the methodologies. The tampering is public, it's not a secret and they don't hide the fact that they do it, they just don't mention it to the general public and rely on the media to not report what they're doing. It works: awareness of this problem is incredibly low. Still, you can compare the different 'versions' they release over time to see the enormous magnitude of the changes, or you can read the occasional reports that surface in outlets like Nature when really massive revisions occur, and then you can remember that scientists aren't meant to do that. They're meant to add error bars if they have doubts about their data and propagate that uncertainty through to their final graphs and predictions. Climatologists don't do this. Instead they argue that they know temperatures should be going up, so if it isn't, there must be something wrong with the data. Nothing a quick model can't fix.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700

"An apparent pause in global warming might have been a temporary mirage, according to recent analysis. Global average temperatures have continued to rise throughout the first part of the twenty-first century, researchers report on 5 June in Science. That finding, which contradicts the 2013 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is based on an update of the global temperature records maintained by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The previous version of the NOAA data set had showed less warming during the first decade of the millennium."

Yes, but how do I know the original data wasn't faked to begin with?

You don't but this is a classic problem to do with proving guilt vs innocence, isn't it. You have to look for explicit evidence of tampering, instead of trying to prove a negative. That is, start from the assumption that the various actors began in a well meaning place, and then react to evidence of wrongdoing, rather than assume wrongdoing from the start and then try to prove innocence. Otherwise you can never bottom out.

This statement is just false.

As of yet, the outcomes have been on the lower end of modeling, i.e. less severe, until the models are revised to be more conservative in their estimates. Convenient because then the models can come back with elevated outcomes by comparison to the predicted average. Ah! See scientism at work?

It's the persistent, politically motivated science that causes the hesitancy and disbelief

> I think it is quite possible that humans attempting to “fix” nature is what will ultimately lead to the extinction of the human race.

Do you feel similarly about freezing CO2 out of the air in the interior of Antarctica and burying it as dry ice? The natural temperatures are within spitting distance of the freezing point already (supposedly there have been occasional natural CO2 snows, although this is dubious because of the low partial pressure). Seems like it would be much less intrusive overall, although it would undoubtedly cost trillions to accomplish at scale.

https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-12-0110.1

Not the person you're replying to, but I think these two things are very different. I expect that the results of injecting substances into our upper atmosphere in large quantities are essentially impossible to model with high degrees of accuracy, and the consequences if things go wrong could be catastrophic. This freezing CO2 in Antarctica thing presumably does have some failure modes, but I imagine none of them are as comprehensibly terrible as if we were to screw up the atmosphere.

I have come to the conclusion that most or at least a significant amount of human engineering is to solve problems caused by other human engineering.

> I think it is quite possible that humans attempting to “fix” nature is what will ultimately lead to the extinction of the human race. It is pretty fitting too since we are the ones who helped accelerate the mess we are in.

I think what will kill the human race is the "climate engineering" humans fighting with the "no nuclear, no engineering" humans while the "fuck you, I got mine" humans deliberately egg them on. Nothing gets done and the bulk of humanity dies from runaway temperatures that make significant parts of the world unlivable, drought, and rising sea levels ravaging coastal cities.

I think the "fuck you, I already live in a part of the world that was developed on the back of cheap energy and it's really too bad that you will never be allowed to develop like I did" humans will kill more humans than the status quo ever will.

The “fuck you, you developed on the back of cheap energy, and want us to keep living in huts” humans will do plenty to move the needle. There’s 1.5 billion Indians, Bangladeshis, and Pakistanis with sub-1.0 tons of CO2 annual footprints who want to live like Texans. (My cousin just moved to Arlington, TX and she loves it. “Look at all this elbow room!”)

I have mixed feelings about Texans ;-) but I'm glad that your cousin is living a better life and expending an order of a magnitude more energy than she presumably used to.

We are talking about the same people.

> Who gets to make the call

An excellent question. I'd be just as skeptical as you are about all this. And this seems to be a US effort, not a multi-national one? I would hope the US government wouldn't unilaterally decide to do something like this without getting buy-in from... well... literally the entire world. But presumably that would be impossible to do, so it would never get done if they chose a consensus-building approach. Which... might not be a bad thing.

That ship has sailed. Spraying chemicals into the atmosphere to modify the weather happens around the world already, including in the US.

Weather modification in the US has been underway for a long time.

Haven't asked yet

Absolutely agree.

In fact, I think it is deeply ingrained colonialist thinking that nature would need guidance from humans.

Rather, it's the other way around: as long as we don't see ourselves as part of the ecosystem and take our assigned role instead of constantly trying to patronize everyone else in the ecosystem - we would actually have a chance of survival.

The best strategy is to adapt. We are part of something bigger - but just a part and not the CEO of it.

Our natural place in the ecosystem involves being parasitized by a dozen kinds of horrific worms and predated on by lions. No, thank you.

This reminds of factory farming and how it encourages the growth of bacteria that make both animals and humans sick. To solve this problem, instead drastically changing the way we grow livestock we just opted to abuse antibiotics to both enlarge the livestock and keep them from getting ill resulting in antibiotic resistant superbugs

There is a long way from “we don’t fully understand the side effects” to the “extinction of human race”.

Sure depends upon the side effect we didn't understand, doesn't it?

I really did miss hearing about acid rain in the 90s

The US is a democracy. So after the planet is doomed we can vote in someone else to doom it even more.

The US is a democracy, sure, but the atmosphere is much bigger than the US

Wouldn't be so sure.

Regarding the democracy bit, I'd grant

It would be disastrous if this went ahead.

Failing to draw down atmospheric CO2 ensures increasing ocean acidification, threatening the basis of the whole ocean ecosystem.

Doing solar radiation management as a substitute for drawing down CO2 would be disastrous.

But we're starting to see various positive feedbacks kick in, where rising temperatures cause the planet to release CO2 and methane of its own. We see evidence of this in geologic history too, where a modest temperature increase due to an orbital variation causes greenhouse releases that tip the planet into a warming cycle.

If we cross that tipping point, reducing our emissions to zero won't keep the CO2 from increasing further. We might need SRM to keep that from happening. The tipping point could be as low as +1.5C, we're already over +1C, and we've made essentially zero reductions to our emissions so far.

> Who gets to make the call that these risks are okay and are not as bad as the negative impact(s) we may face from climate change? Who decides that it is an acceptable trade-off to wipe out entire species and ecosystems and potentially some percent of the human population?

Well you have your answer already: the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. If anything, it was a grand scale experiment to see how well human beings can listen to and obey Orders. How well human beings can adhere to lockdowns and mask mandates and how well they will work. How well the Government and so called "Experts" will handle the grave situation. To weigh pros and cons of dying due to the virus vs dying due to starvation and poverty.

The result is that everyone fucked up. Big time. We are extremely lucky that the virus had a low fatality rate and was not like the black plague which wiped out 60% of Europe's population.

None of these "Executive Orders" were through Consensus or Vote. We were forced to "trust" the Government and the "Experts" to do the right thing. And how many of us know anything about viruses or developing vaccines to make any sort of reasonable judgement anyways? A tiny percentage of the entire populace. We had no choice really.

Irrespective of how bad they fucked up — from flip-flopping on mask mandates to imposing extremely harsh lockdowns that caused economic distress and induced the recession we are in now — not to discount the crazy Wars going on in the World especially after a devastating pandemic. We have proven ourselves to be the most inept "superficially intelligent" species which is due for another genetic evolution — the last one being the Neanderthal extinction some 40,000 years ago [1].

We let the elites and experts take decisions on our behalf and we saw how it fucked everything up. This is going to be no different. When push comes to shove, some old buffoons, holding desperately on to power, in their 70s, 80s or 90s, with little to no cognitive abilities, will be deciding the fate of approximately 8 billion people. To support these buffoons will be those greedy good-for-nothing companies that will be looking at how best to profit from the situation... all while being on the verge of extinction.

We are royally screwed. There is no denying that. If some highly evolved super-intelligent species of the future writes a history on Homo Sapiens, it would definitely be that we were the only species to have "fought amongst each other, stuttering and stammering our way to extinction, taking with us a perfectly habitable planet".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction

The thing about a plan like this, though, is it doesn't require cooperation from the public. Getting everyone to stay home, wear masks, socially distance, and get vaccines is indeed a pretty hard problem.

But decreeing that a few hundreds or thousands of scientists and engineers are going to make a possibly-catastrophic change to our biosphere doesn't require getting regular citizens to do anything.

Having said that, I do expect public opinion to play a role in deciding what (if anything) gets done. Whether or not it'll be enough to stop something catastrophic from happening... probably not?

Humans are pretty good at following economic orders however. Almost perfect at that, given some time of weeks or months. Economic actors respond to prices in the economy in a very predictable pattern.

One very good example, of following economic orders, is the shortage of masks, at the start of the covihoax. Less masks available, orders the price to go up, because more people are bidding up masks which are of short supply. One billion masks, roughly every week, only for the US, is an extraordinary amount, which would cause the price to go ballistic, 10x, 100x or maybe even 1000x. Masks are useless of course after just one use, so everyone who follows the science and wants to be safe, is obliged to buy a mask almost everyday. We didn't see anywhere mask prices to follow this pattern, so what happened? Maybe hundreds of millions of people were lying with their mouth, but not with their money, is one explanation that comes to mind.

One other good example is the submerging of coastal lines to the sea. Here in Greece, i think we have the biggest coastline of every other nation in the world. Someone would expect coastline house prices to drop a lot, 10x easily. 2050 or something for the house to be submerged into the water, is a very short period of time, considering how long a good house can last. New housing located at coast lines, should drop almost to zero. Did we see any of these scenarios happen? Of course not! How come prices of the soon to be submerged houses are high as ever? Maybe one possibility is that billions of people lie only with their mouths, not with their sacred and hard earned money!

> covihoax

Oh please

"It is the year 8000. Humanity has joined a vast universal republic along with tens of thousands of alien worlds. All worlds agree on one thing: the search for intelligent life still continues."