There seems to be a current attempt to get this kind of dangerous nonsense accepted as 'normal'. No doubt the next step is to go for some public support from a 'celebrity' en route to a fully funded trial. Awful awful awful.
Prediction: Americans will make it a Dems vs Reps thing. Pro and Against alignment will largely only depend on who first tweets about it. The other side will just blindly look for arguments against it (regardless of accuracy), even if we found out it performs well.
Now, I don't know if this is a bad or a good thing myself (out of my depth here), but I see why experts would be concerned with this, as I imagine it's got far reaching consequences
Some people think that Mhyrvold's approach to climate-change-mitigation has already been implemented rather than just being an idea.
Pretty, let's say, optimistic without any scientific proof. If it wasn't for the YC angle, I would call it a scam. Know what, I'd say it is one regardless of YC, after all they funded a start-up that attempted to mate the gig economy with organized smuggling (forgot the name of that fun idea of paying traveling students tu transport all kinds of things past customs in their luggage).
He’s been bouncing around the TEDx circuit (i.e. open mic night for wannabe influencers) for awhile with half thought out environmental/subsistence farming ideas for years now. He’s apparently a good bullshitter for some of the VC crowd, but when you watch him, he’s thoroughly unimpressive. Nothing moves beyond hobby level — nor could it.
Here’s a video of him showing around his projects from a few years ago. Container hydroponics and rocket stoves.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HWIJc144mgQ
After watching this, I’m not afraid of him or Make Sunsets at all.
If you watch him, and then read his interviews about the fallout of Make Sunsets, he says what he did. He put some spoonful of sulfur into a helium balloon. That’s it. He even says, he didn’t measure anything. He doesn’t even know where the balloon ended up. (All those viral videos about launching a cell phone to stratosphere collected more data!) There’s literally NOTHING of use here beyond a press release. He could have accomplished the same by just saying he launched a balloon.
To be perfectly honest. I don’t think the former Director of Hardware for Y Combinator is smart enough to move the climate at all. It’s just selling party balloons and calling them carbon credits.
Now, someone else might be able to do it, but it ain’t this guy.
Once it seems sort of OK for anyone to do it, it'll become a massive free-for-all, with geoengineering schemes that overlap or compete with different goals. We could easily end up with unintended consequences — dueling programs with net near-zero result but massive new pollution, mutually reinforcing programs that massively overshoot, etc. Then a bigger program to fix that one, and another to fix that one...
I deeply feel the urgency to get started yesterday, and there's an initial feelgood rush reading this. But thinking for a few seconds on the cascading results of allowing rogue efforts and it turning into a free-for-all — sure, let's just play "move fast and break things" with the entire global climate.
No thanks.
We'd be better off choosing to play Global Thermonuclear War (it'd be over in ~48 hours and the global effects would be more brief).
> There seems to be a current attempt to get this kind of dangerous nonsense accepted as 'normal'.
"The scariest thing about this proposition is that models suggest that many of the people who could well be most harmed by these technologies are already disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Imagine this: North America decides to send sulfur into the stratosphere to reduce the intensity of the sun, in the hopes of saving its corn crops — despite the real possibility of triggering droughts in Asia and Africa. In short, geoengineering would give us (or some of us) the power to exile huge swaths of humanity to sacrifice zones with a virtual flip of the switch."
The problem is Geoengineering is not a zero sum game - if India decided to try and engineer the next ice age for example, to get access to the shallower parts of the Indian Ocean.
Those are real, important issues to be worked through, and to your point, and they are better served by a multi-stakeholder approach that values climate justice.
There is research and work needed both on policy and the technology aspects of this.
> We are all going to die from climate change in 12 years anyway, right
We aren't there yet, that we know of.
Rightly so - this type of intentional pollution of our shared environment is simply not acceptable, even as a scientific study.
You can't run a controlled experiment by releasing gases in the upper atmosphere, so it's very hard to understand what scientific value there could be to this anyway.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/446759.The_King_the_Mice...