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Comment by andyjsong | Hacker News Reader

Here's the science and math: https://makesunsets.com/blogs/news/calculating-cooling

Efficacy and the benefit:harm ratio is still to be determined until we scale up our deployments, but here is a lecture by David Keith, the leading researcher in stratospheric aerosol injection. Towards Quantitative Comparison of the Risks and Benefits of Solar Geoengineering (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ8TZqfwzdU&t=2247s)

TL;DW: it's 100:1 at conservative estimates.

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What you people fail to realise is you're playing with the world, not just your backyard. You have absolutely NO IDEA what the unintended consequences of a planetary scale exercise like this could be. And it could be catastrophic for a region half the world away. The trouble is, by the time you discover that dimming the sun may disrupt weather patterns in hugely damaging ways 10,000 kms away, it's going to be too late. But that's OK, right? Because you'll have made your money and turned to the next crazy idea?

The best read on this is from Naomi Klein in the New York Times from 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/opinion/sunday/geoenginee...

Heh, I was on the fence here but you single-handedly convinced me that this startup is good and justified, and should continue. Naomi Klein is all but openly using climate to advance her unrelated political agenda. She and the likes of her are anti-nuclear for the same reason, and their predecessors in the movement might be some of the main culprits of climate change, by helping bog down nuclear for 50 years. Not to mention indirectly helping prop up dictators from MBS to Putin.

Saying she is the best argument against something is to me like saying ISIS and Breitbart released a join resolution against something. About as strong argument-from-authority for that-thing as one can make.

Heh, glad to help with your due diligence. Although I'm a little perturbed that I 'single handedly' caused you to change your mind. Maybe some additional, and more reliable, sources might be worth investigating to get a full picture of the issues?

Please, do the world, and yourself, a favor and do the benefit : harm analysis before you scale up...

Remarkable that this very obvious statement is getting downvoted.

Are you not even bothering to go to the same lengths as amateur YouTube space photographers and sending up a phone with the balloons? Talk about half assing it.

Did you include any compensation for the increase in water vapour due to the Ha'apai eruption?

There are far better ways to do this btw.

Experts

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