Mexico cracks down on solar geoengineering
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
> Luke Iseman, a serial inventor and the former director of hardware at Y Combinator ... he started tinkering with releasing sulfur dioxide particles into the atmosphere with balloons, raised venture capital to fund the startup, and brought on co-founder Andrew Song to manage sales.
Why did they choose Mexico? They couldn't get away with it in the US, so it's ok to do experiments with the atmosephere of the people of Mexico? After they were forced to stop,
> In a mea culpa blog post published on Wednesday, the startup acknowledged it had barged forward.
> "We appreciate the Mexican government's concern for protecting communities and the natural environment and support their call for scientific expertise and oversight of climate intervention activities. We also appreciate their concern for national and local engagement and regret that we had failed to take this into consideration sooner," Make Sunsets said.
Who believes that? Who would guess that the people of the community and country might want to control experiments in their atmosephere?
> Why did they choose Mexico? They couldn't get away with it in the US, so it's ok to do experiments with the atmosephere of the people of Mexico? After they were forced to stop,
We chose Mexico as our initial launch site because deployment in the tropics have greater cooling per gram via increased particle residence time [1] (another source)[2]. Luke also bought land in Mexico a year ago prior to starting Make Sunsets to build his primary residence. The company was incorporated in October 2022. The US/Mexico does not have a ban on deploying sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, if there was, all commercial air flights would be banned as well. Here is the original press release from the Mexican government: https://www.gob.mx/semarnat/prensa/la-experimentacion-con-ge... and our response: https://makesunsets.com/blogs/news/mexico
[1] https://presentations.copernicus.org/EGU21/EGU21-12131_prese...
[2] https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/Sensitiv...
[1] https://makesunsets.com/blogs/news/the-secret-weapon-to-figh...
Without your intervention, I would have kept some speculations as reasonable opinions.
We deeply respect what scientists have been sounding alarm for years, but more people are worried about putting food on table than catastrophic weather events that might happen in the future.
Totally open to hearing another way to slow down global warming that isn't as fucking crazy as dimming the sun, but we're all addicted to burning dead dinos. Unless we put the environment over profits and scale up CO2 sucking tech, our children will have incredibly shitty lives.
> We deeply respect what scientists have been sounding alarm for years, but more people are worried about putting food on table than catastrophic weather events that might happen in the future.
The problem is political, and the fundamental political problem is certain segments of the US who have long insisted government and politics - and even democracy - are hopeless. And they also fail to do their essential part - it takes everyone - to make it happen, politically.
The correlation is powerful. Others can and do come together and get things done democratically. Other countries do it; parts of the country where the GOP isn't in power do it, including cities and states which pass environmental laws.
The rhetoric is self-serving or at least egocentric, that somehow only SV can save us, and that we should give SV more money and power. Isn't it transparent?
The problem is that rhetoric, which also spreads ignorance and despair to others - they are powerless. A powerless people is certainly not the legacy of the United States that was given to us; it's not at all what global warming deniers think. Instead of that rhetoric, let's hear you stand up for people coming together and getting things done, in Congress. It doesn't take decades.
There is a land war in Europe, what makes you think the world can "come together" if we should or should not experiment with stratospheric aerosol injection? Most likely what will happen is the US or some other developed nation will unilaterally decide we need to do this without any governance, and they will choose us as the deployment partner.
>Instead of that rhetoric, let's hear you stand up for people coming together and getting things done
So far our customers have been law profs, SW engineers, IT professionals, accountants, retired pharma exec, students, and other white-collar jobs. This supports my theory that only the people who have time to worry about global warming is a privileged class, and this comment thread further proves that we have the luxury to discuss such topics.
Fusion is unfortunately not in sight yet. The Livermore PR indicates they are not even close to sustaining a fusion reaction:
Heat generated by the reaction significantly lower than electricity required to power the laser (although it is significantly greater than the power emitted by the laser). Even if laser efficiency were improved to achieve parity, another factor of roughly 2x is needed to make up for losses in heat to electricity conversion. Once that achieved, they will have a facility that can sustain fusion with its own power.
After this point, they must be competitive with electricity generation facilities powered by natural gas, oil, or coal. If, per mega Joule of electricity generated, a gas-powered facility generates X amount of heat directly, Y amount of heat indirectly from atmospheric radiative forcing, and Z amount of heat from processes of carbon fixing 100% of its CO2 emissions, then a fusion power plant cannot be only slightly better than break even in order to be competitive. It must generate that 1 megajoule of electricity while emitting less than X+Y+Z amount of heat.
Lastly, I agree with you that the right time to have gotten started in these efforts and to stop driving around dinosaur sized SUVs was decades ago when Al Gore urged us to heed the impending 400 ppm CO2 milestone with great concern. That was almost two decades ago. I believe around the time of the impending neocon Iraq invasion and occupation.
I'm also a little disappointed in the bureaucratic development (while I know little about it, it seems to me that the sulfur dioxide emitted is not all that harmful if at all, especially at these small amounts).
Lastly, a question I and others are asking, would these small amounts released have any measurable effect, and if so, roughly how much.
Yeah I'm not sure that's how the atmosphere works. Surely this stuff would diffuse and affect the atmosphere globally.
That means that it affects people locally, not globally.
(It's about 1kg of materials released.)
[For clarity I don't particularly disagree with this stance, but my mostly-overlooked point is that:]
If people really think this, why is it that (on HN in particular) we overwhelmingly hear this point made in the context of geoengineering, and not for regular old pollution? Isn't that a double standard?
The general debate has become extremely irrational, to the point that your intent is all that matters.
You probably are just not living in an area of concern.
Unfortunately it is not my impression that this is happening. (Also two neighboring countries - poland and czechia - of Germany have an even higher share of coal and one - the netherlands - is in the same ballpark.)
Which is ridiculous on its own, Poland has been ordered for years to shut down the Turow open-pit mine on the border to Germany and Czechia, they refused and were sentenced to 500.000€ per day of continued operation [1], got 15 million € in EU disbursements held back [2]... the size of that thing is insane [3].
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/polen-tagebau-turow...
[2] https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/polen-eu-kommission-behaelt-n...
[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagebau_Tur%C3%B3w#/media/Date...
In February 2021, the Czech Republic sued Poland over the mine at the European Court of Justice, the first time that an EU member state had sued another one over an environmental issue.[10]
In May 2021, Poland defied an injunction by the court that ordered the immediate closure of the mine, claiming it would have an adverse impact the country's energy system and lead to the loss of thousands of jobs.[11]
Because Poland had not ceased lignite extraction activities at the Turów mine, on 20 September 2021, the Vice-President of the Court ordered Poland to pay the European Commission a daily penalty payment of half a million euros,[13] but the Polish government refused to comply.[4]
I wonder what Americans would do if other countries worked together to put every single state apart from Alaska and half of Texas underwater in the next generation.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/80-of-maldives-could-b...
You could literally dredge up land 100x faster than sea levels rise for the Maldives.
There are many nasty consequences of global climate change, sea level rise is an irrelevant distraction from things like India heating up and ocean acidification.
We are maybe not saying that in one voice, but many people, including myself are saying exactly that since quite a while. Same with polluting the groundwater, or the ocean.
One has to differentiate, of course and it is scale that matters. One coal fire is neglectible, but powering the economy with (maybe even unfiltered) coal plants is not. Yet most nations still do it, so it will take a while, before this will be seriously considered a punishable crime.
... a balloon releasing under a pound of SO2 is an international outrage?
My concern is exactly that we don't have a proper sense of scale on this issue.
But yes, most people are not good at math or basic science, to understand the proportions.
Same goes for oceans.
There are many international treaties and conventions that recognize this, but they clearly don't go far enough, and we run into the "fear of a world government" issue here.
Worse: if your intent is to externalize costs onto everyone else, that's fine and dandy, but if your intent is to fix those externalities then you're the asshole, because reasons.
It does seem to be a common thread - not just on HN, but HN does attract entrepreneurs and aspirants thereof, who in turn tend to skew religiously capitalist, so it's unsurprising that it's a bit more pronounced here. The sort of attitude on display transcends climate denialism and jumps straight to what seems to be climate hostility: "I have a God-given right to harm everyone around me to make a quick buck and fuck you for daring to do anything about it".
The reaction to geoengineering is consistent with reaction to ecoactivism: hostile, and demonstrating an absense of self-awareness. Yes, geoengineers and ecoactivists alike can be misguided sometimes; no, that does not mean they're in any way the "bad guys" for daring to at least try to do something about the Cult of Capital destroying the Earth in the name of the Holy Profit.
I think we’re being way too cautious when it comes to geoengineering, at a time when we should be aggressively testing hypotheses to get some actual options on the table.
also sulfite isn't within the usual meaning of 'toxic chemical', it's a common antioxidant food additive, although like acetic acid it's corrosive enough to have killed people in high concentrations
the last time I inhaled a bunch of it, it was not an enjoyable experience
Who decides where that point is? Some people with money or the people of Mexico?
(though as another user points out this would diffuse globally, but still be concentrated locally)
Replace "experiments" with the more general/relevant "atmosphere modifications," which includes pollution for amoral profit motive.
What makes "experiments" special? Is that reasoning morally justifiable, given the many millions who will die in the "business as usual" case?
Throwing a dead battery into a dump -> Battery acid gets dragged by the rain -> Polluting a river -> Flows polluting a sea -> Currents polluting all oceans.
Of course effects become smaller as scope grows, but still in many instances it's measurable, see Fukushima.
It's in Mexico's right to stop experiments on the global atmosphere from their country.
I think it’s also in Mexico’s right to authorize prototype experiments that could be potentially scaled up to have a material global effect.
As for the rest. I fully agree with sokoloff's reply.
The GP was clarifying the context. You refused to talk about the meat of their argument and instead opted to be pedantic about how the atmosphere diffuses.
Let's back up for a second. What percentage would you say this experiment has in being correct?
The point of the question is to ask whether you think this has 100% chance of not causing issues.
The next step of course would then be to say, okay if it isn't 100% safe then do you support Mexico's right to say, "hey this could cause us or the world harm, stop it".
But what I'm asking them is.. do they believe it's in Mexico's right to ask a person to stop experimenting on the atmosphere (global or otherwise) from their country.
In other words, do you think it was right for Mexico to stop this, or do you disagree with their actions?
Do I want this to be the state of affairs? No. Can I change it? No. So it doesn't matter.
So why comment in the first place if you think it doesn't matter?
What I think is... your thought was challenged so you backpedalled then just gave up and said the topic "didn't matter".
To show how it doesn't matter.
> What I think is... your thought was challenged so you backpedalled then just gave up and said the topic "didn't matter".
You know, what you think also doesn't matter.
It's counterproductive to talk about something that doesn't matter to you.
> You know, what you think also doesn't matter.
That's subjective. And it mattered enough for you to reply, and for countless others to read, and for me to write.
I believe the Willamette Valley in Oregon, which grows most of the grass seed for NA, as well as exports, officially told GMO researchers that they could fuck right off.
So it's okay to do experiments with the atmosphere, as long as you re-brand them as "pollution" instead of as "experiments"?
(and of course, organizationally separate the scientists performing the data collection/analysis steps)
I believe your question is insinuating that pollution is branded as such and is really an experiment? I don't follow.. can you expand on that or clarify?
But first please answer their question before shifting the conversation.
People care, but we do it in such a backwards way that the rule is apparently "you can hurt (for amoral profit), but don't you dare try to help!"
Clearly, if anything, the move is to re-brand geoengineering as "normal pollution". It wouldn't even be hard: every 737 emits 500 grams of SO2 in less than 100 miles, and not a peep!
And I dispute, "but don't you dare try to help", since you it's not known it helps.
These experiments / solar geo-engineering / terraforming may hurt.
There's justifications for Mexico to stop these experiments, do you agree or disagree?
> And I dispute, "but don't you dare try to help", since you it's not known it helps.
The critical word is "try."
Apparently, the rule is that your intent is all that matters. If you're trying to profit, it's pollution and it's fine. If you intend to help, all hell breaks loose.
Exxon can burn down the world, but utter the words "geoengineering" and you can't so much as swat a fly.
I'm not saying this is logical or correct. I'm just saying that these appear to be the rules as constrained by (not always rational) public opinion.
> There's justifications for Mexico to stop these experiments, do you agree or disagree?
There are justifications both "for" and "against" (like any complex real-world issue), but the public debate has been extremely skewed.
An experiment is limited in time, serves no purpose but knowledge acquisition, and can fail. When you burn coal to heat your people, you're not gonna fail, and people are gonna last one more day, they can accept the compromise.
A foreign startup trying something before saying "sorry lol didnt work, good luck" is not gonna convince many to try.
> A foreign startup trying something before saying "sorry lol didnt work, good luck" is not gonna convince many to try.
It won't seriously deter them either. The public outcry over even the attempt is a more concerning deterrent.
> When you burn coal to heat your people, you're not gonna fail
Tell that to Texas.
> people are gonna last one more day, they can accept the compromise.
Yes, people tend to overvalue immediate visible benefits and undervalue long-term costs (like the climate 100 years hence) or invisible benefits (like gaining scientific knowledge by performing insignificant-scale geoengineering tests).
People are irrational. This is known. We should strive to be less irrational.
Are you sure? That claim doesn't appear in the linked article.
Here's the official list of projects in the US:
https://library.noaa.gov/Collections/Digital-Collections/Wea...
So if project A does something, what if it influences project B?
Also, they do these on a small local scale, like spraying this morning to boost the rain this afternoon.
Let's not pretend that releasing 500g of sulfur dioxide there has any impact on people on the ground.
Does releasing 500g of co2 have any impact on tbe people on the ground?
Sounds like the setup for a dystopia.
500 grams of SO2 is released by a 737 flying less than 100 miles.
Your semantics game is the "straw man." The atmosphere doesn't care what we call it, only what we dump in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34529944
>calculated to be scaled up on a global level
You say that like polluting industries don't try to scale up to a global level.
There's that word "try" again...
My exact point is that the atmosphere doesn't care about intent. It cares about emissions.
Humans care about intent. That's fine, but apparently the rule here is that you can hurt people (for amoral profit), but don't you dare try to help people!
My argument is that maybe we should rethink this ethical schema.
>> apparently the rule here is that you can hurt people (for amoral profit), but don't you dare try to help people!
The average 1-percenter who participates in this forum will probably see nothing more than a few tourist destinations changed, need to crank up the AC a bit more, less options for skiing in winter, and price of exotic fruits increasing.
The combination of climate change, loss of wildlife habitat, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, etc, could very well be a threat to our existence as a species, yes. Climate change is only one of them, and the injection of SO2 in the atmosphere only solves this one, with unclear and potentially negative consequences on all the other planetary boundaries.
The whole scheme is harebrained regardless of the amount, what depends on the amount is the harm it can cause, in the range <totally harmless, with perhaps some barely detectable rain acidity local increases ... Venus-like global catastrophe>.
Since we already have SO2-induced acid rain on a warming planet, and there is no real motive to believe such intentional releases will be confined to the upper layers of the atmosphere, it follows that such climate engineering attempts will have a measurable effect on acid rain.
So the point is perfectly valid even if you won't follow it through to the logical conclusion. Just like these clowns here.
This is the mechanism in Neal Stephenson’s _Termination Shock_. The book’s plot depends on a future US government which is non-functional, thus no one can shut them down.
These folks were planning to release 500g of sulfur dioxide — that’s completely insignificant, right? Just a POC?
(I wouldn’t recommend the book. Even compared with his later work it’s unfocused and dull.)
- "Mount Pinatubo’s violent eruption [in 1991] injected about 15 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The resulting sulfuric acid aerosols remained in the stratosphere for about two years, and cooled the Earth’s surface by a range of 1 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit."
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/2018-s-biggest-vol...
Looks like they're about 10.5 orders of magnitude short (of globally significant effects).
Yes, that is a practically undetectable addition of SO2.
For reference, the US emitted approximately 2M tons of SO2 in 2019; that's about 1.8 billion kg. The 500g here is approximately one part in one billion.
If the startup added 500g of SO2 every single day for the next 10,000 years, they would add 1% to the total SO2 emissions of just 2019.
If we're going to release those millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere anyway, maybe it makes sense to release it into the stratosphere instead, to duplicate the cooling effect of the volcano. Although that's not so easily done.
Also, apart from a cooling effect, what other effects did that volcanic release of SO2 have?
> The powerful eruption of such an enormous volume of lava and ash injected significant quantities of aerosols and dust into the stratosphere. Sulfur dioxide oxidized in the atmosphere to produce a haze of sulfuric acid droplets, which gradually spread throughout the stratosphere over the year following the eruption. The injection of aerosols into the stratosphere is thought to have been the largest since the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, with a total mass of SO 2 of about 17,000,000 t (19,000,000 short tons) being injected – the largest volume ever recorded by modern instruments (see chart and figure).
> Satellite measurements of ash and aerosol emissions from Mount Pinatubo This very large stratospheric injection resulted in a volcanic winter, a reduction in the normal amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface by roughly 10% (see figure). This led to a decrease in Northern Hemisphere average temperatures of 0.5–0.6 °C (0.9–1.1 °F) and a global decrease of about 0.4 °C (0.7 °F).[21][22] At the same time, the temperature in the stratosphere rose to several degrees higher than normal, due to the absorption of radiation by the aerosol. The stratospheric cloud from the eruption persisted in the atmosphere for three years. The eruption, while not directly responsible, may have played a part in the formation of the 1993 Storm of the Century.[23]
> The eruption had a significant effect on ozone levels in the atmosphere, causing a large increase in the destruction rate of ozone. Ozone levels at middle latitudes reached their lowest recorded levels, while in the Southern Hemisphere winter of 1992, the ozone hole over Antarctica reached its largest ever size until then, with the fastest recorded ozone depletion rates. The eruption of Mount Hudson in Chile in August 1991 also contributed to southern hemisphere ozone destruction, with measurements showing a sharp decrease in ozone levels at the tropopause when the aerosol clouds from Pinatubo and Hudson arrived. Another noticeable effect of the dust in the atmosphere was the appearance of lunar eclipses. Normally even at mid-eclipse, the moon is still visible although much dimmed, whereas in the year following the Pinatubo eruption, the moon was hardly visible at all during eclipses, due to much greater absorption of sunlight by dust in the atmosphere. It has also been suggested that excess cloud condensation nuclei from the eruption were responsible for the "Great Flood of 1993" in the Midwestern United States.
So while no effect on plant growth is mentioned, it may have caused a major storm, a major flood, and enlarged the hole in the ozone layer. Sounds like a bad idea overall. Especially since that reduction in temperature was only temporary. For this approach to have any long-term impact, you'd have to keep injecting SO2 into the stratosphere every year.
If it turns out to have unforeseen bad effects, just stop doing it, and it will be gone.
It still seems a useful tool to have in reserve, if you later decide you want to halt a runaway feedback loop linked to temperature. E.g. an albedo feedback from melting sea ice [0], or methane clathrates thawing from a warming ocean [1]. Temporary changes can leave permanent effects.
It'd be nice to R&D this stuff sooner, and not really need it, then delay and debate and suddenly there's a black-swan planetary apocalypse and the one tool you need right now isn't available.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice%E2%80%93albedo_feedback?us...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis?usesk...
It also breaks down in 1-2 years.
Tl;dr: a ton of confusion.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ton#English
Disagree. I do recommend it.
Just don’t expect a Snow Crash or Diamond Age. Everything in the book uses contemporary technology.
[0] https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/williemcnabb/status/115804530...
The scary thing is so many of the predictions he makes in his books have come through!
I would recommend his books to people who like going off on tangents and want to spend a bit of time in characters and less in plot progression.
There are lots of reasons to read books.
If we start sending up sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere and it fixes the problem. What do you think we’re going to do? Stop caring about global warming entirely, and pump way more green house gases… why wouldn’t we? We can just fix it with more sulfur dioxide. Then you send up more and more and more. And eventually something breaks. Now for some reason a countries balloon pops somewhere else and we get acid rain.
I don’t think we should be messing around with the earth until we can actually say that all parties are working towards the same thing. I don’t truly believe all of humanity gives a care about much beyond themselves. Sadly I think we need some kind of global disaster to wake us up. Postponing the problem for years and years has been our solution for everything.
If we get to a place where everyone can agree on a set of rules or principles we can proceed. Until then this is just going to end up with giant oil companies going look we’re not the problem it’s the sulfur balloons we need them! While they frack and drill the earth till there is nothing left.
Same opinion for things like firing missiles into tornados or removing every mosquito from the earth.
But I’m probably in the minority here.
That's not even considering potential side effects of therapies, medicines, etc. Any action has a balance of good and bad, both directly and indirectly.
1. Industrial civilizations have been using the sky as an open sewer for emissions. Before that it was soot and lead (TEL).
2. No quick fixes with solar shades, adding chemicals, or fractioning air gases (good luck with scaling that). Get the carbon out of the air by growing stuff and sequestering it at the bottom of the ocean.
Typically spreads through the atmosphere even.
Most primarily we're more sick than ever because of two things that have absolutely nothing to do with "curing symptoms":
* We're so good at curing diseases and conditions that used to be fatal that people get a lot older than they used to, and old people get sick far more often.
* Automation and increased productivity make a sedentary lifestyle possible and even incentivize it.
Show your work.
Since it’s impossible to reverse the predicted temperature change through behavior, if you want to limit or reverse the temperature change then stuff like geoengineering is the only way to limit temperature change while the world takes a century or two to go from industrial to renewable.
If the idea is to make everyone suffer for their sins, or fantasize about Armageddon, then we can prohibit all geoengineering.
There are difficult trade offs and stuff like changing the atmosphere to cool down has negative effects as well. But it may be better than 3 degrees warmer in 2100.
I think these ideas have been explored, pretty realistically, in recent sci-fi books by Neal Stephenson and Kim Stanley Robinson.
It'll never be the case that "all parties are working towards the same thing". So the actual choices are between continuing on the current trajectory or trying to change things for the better.
And honestly the track record of the latter (e.g. electricity, heart transplants, campfires) is more good than bad, even if it is always a mix.
This is precisely why there are such immense amounts spent on geoengineering research - the big polluters do everything they can to keep making money out of fucking over the planet.
The solution to climate change is not waiting for some kind of "tech miracle" (be it carbon capture, sulfur dioxide, H2 electrolysis, nuclear fusion, ...), it is to get rid of fossil fuel usage.
These aren’t exclusive options and it’s odd to see them in opposition. Wouldn’t it make sense to geoengineer while we get rid of fossil fuel usage?
I expect it to take 50-100 years to stop fossil fuel usage. If there’s a sudden stop then I think the wars and chaos will result in people who pollute a lot killing off and stopping the people who don’t.
No it doesn't because even the perspective removes the incentive on fixing our unhealthy dependency on fossil fuels.
Even if we stop using fossil fuels, models still show a temperature change. What do you propose about that?
That's interesting. What's the best-funded example of this?
[1] Mt. Pinatubo
I mean, these arguments seem to apply to pretty much any problems.
"Unattainable perfection of human nature must be achieved before we can even try fixing something."
Xkcd already debunked this type of argument.
How long until we "truly understand every possible outcome"? 10 years? 15?
When you speak in absolutes, you don't even need to move goalposts. Since we will (obviously) never understand everything, if we follow your criterion then nobody could ever start anything.
This weird double standard is only ever applied to geoengineering, but never regular pollution. Based on the relative conversational noise levels, apparently it's fine that we pollute as much as we want without "truly understanding every possible outcome." (cue the "I sleep/Real shit" meme image)
I also never said I support pollution, but if I support going to mars I must because a rocket is a lot of pollution.
My main premise is I tend to think we’ve messed up so much so fast (in regards to the earth), I don’t think trying brand new studies that are based off words like “presumably”, “promising makes sense.
Wikipedia says
> However, as of 2021, there has been little research and existing natural aerosols in the stratosphere are not well understood.
And
> It is uncertain how effective any solar geoengineering technique would be, due to the difficulties modeling their impacts and the complex nature of the global climate system.
Do you think based on those words we should just be firing up balloons and see what happens?
I’m not saying at some point in time with studies done, and people agree we cannot proceed. But this doesn’t seem like sound science just yet. And I prefer sound science before messing with the environment.
> Do you think based on those words we should just be firing up balloons and see what happens?
> I’m not saying at some point in time with studies done...
How can we possibly gain enough scientific confidence is nobody is allowed to perform a single experiment (aka do X "and see what happens")?
This all sounds rational on the surface, but underneath it's a paralysis-inducing catch-22.
Asking endlessly for "more studies" is a classic delay tactic, with a long history of use (you surely don't intend that, but the effect is the same). Unfortunately we've run out of time for further delay.
Unpopular as it is to say, "move fast and break things" will lead to the least overall damage and death. But we'll never be able to show it, because of paralysis by these curious Reverse Good Samaritan / Reverse Hippocratic Oath attitudes.
We comfort ourselves that it's about stopping harm, but with the pervasive geoengineering-vs-pollution double standard the de facto rule is "first, attempt no good."
I'll go first: murder, rape, war, torture, and genocide are bad.
This isn't sarcasm.
For example, "Acme Sulphur Dioxide Corp" may not have the same goals as scientists, governments, or the general population.
> We agree that there are no alternative technologies that replace the need to reduce emissions to remediate climate change.
Smells like dogma. Anyone know what’s going on?
- "The statement said, "The opposition to these climatic manipulations is based on the fact that there are currently no international agreements that address or supervise solar geoengineering activities..."
And international diplomacy and world treaty bureaucracies, in turn, are paralyzed with indecision (or indifference). Insist on getting sign-offs from higher authorities, who you know in turn will do nothing. This is stuff straight out of the CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944).
Why do we prioritize moral shortcomings of a person/character over the effectiveness of the work when discussing politics?
Whore, drink and murder all night for all i care, if the individual can prevent ecologic collapse and economic collapse during the day, thats still a good deal, even if i would be among the murder victims.
If the discourse around problems is so slanted towards "unimportant" topics, who can we remove from the discourse culturewise to refocus it? Can we build a social platform that punishes distractions from importance and reward contributions, according too global prioritys? A synthetic algorithmic clutch, focusing human attention away from the gossip..
Imagine a politics, without the person, only there legal actions being reviewed and percieved. Could been even annonymized as just a Nr.
This is too simplistic due to second order effects. E.g. visibly doing those things makes it far more likely other people in slightly lower positions of power will try it on, many crossing the boundaries of what they can get away with. Then the corruption starts along those fuzzy boundaries until it infects everything else.
We are worser of then that now, because the politics and the law production is corrupted.
And to reduce that a start would be to focus on the law generated, to have that uncorrupted. If there is laws that forbid politicians from taking money, classic corruption might even reemerge.
Oh yes we do. In face of an ongoing global catastrophe we have solved the problem of how to not care. Fossil propaganda at this scale is an engineering and social challenge which has been successfully solved, with massive investment and violence.
many people prefer spending economic surplus on local stuff (housing, education, healthcare, sewage treatment facility, storm drains, roads, smart phones, cars) then all of this has upkeep.
it seems democracy with a developed economy, and capitalism, and these huge corporations optimize for short-termism, carving up the pie and not for growing it bigger. (there's a basic setting of "1-2 percent growth per year, and it might trickle down")
basic research funding is laughably low (and its quality is also unfortunately low), state capacity has been outsourced, there are no serious large scale publicly funded efforts (which is would have the chance of reaping the benefits of automation/industrialization, economies of scale), no effort to actively counteract the negative effects of globalization (disadvantaged regions can become corporate towns at best, trailer park fentanyl hell at worst), and of course cities are completely Pikachu surprised that urbanization continues and more housing is needed, and more density is needed, etc.
That's the problem. If you blame something else because you don't want to be 'partisan', you are diverting us from a solution.
I know of academic groups fighting to ban research in this area.
The plan might be defended as just a pure research project maybe. But otherwise, government might not be the best representatives of the broad populations' view but they're better than one random startup.
And "the economy" is fighting to keep the climate change going to the last breath, because taking any tool from the chest (and we have an overflowing chest right now!) that is effective and working would 'hurt the economy'.
Expensive hardware required, lots of capital investment, easy to miss something and mess up. If NASA cannot do it, your rinky dink startup probably cannot even more so, though we still need to try. And NASA is also effectively underfunded plus has slightly different goals than terraforming Earth.
We could use like half of the oil dig and weapons budget plus expert manpower to actually devise some actual quick and effective policy solutions to the hot mess grandpa and dad dealt us.
Industrial scale CO2 and SO2 production might be how you get to Venus.
We have much better agricultural technology now, but:
1. Is there even any research saying we can counteract the reduction in solar light by "planting smarter"?
2. Agricultural technology is very unevenly distributed. If solar light gets reduced globally, Europe and US might be fine, but Africa, Asia, and South America could still face catastrophic reduction of crop yield.
I don't want say that it's a stupid idea, but boy, surely sounds like it is.
There is already around -0.9W/m2 of radiative forcing due to shipping (sulphur in shipping fuels) which is massive compared to volcanos.
> We have much better agricultural technology now
Yes and no, "modern" agriculture depends massively in fossile fuels and mining so it is not sustainable.
> 1. Is there even any research saying we can counteract the reduction in solar light by "planting smarter"
I read some research saying we can absorb a significant amount of CO2 by regenerative farming. The best however is to plant forests where cows are grazing.
> Agricultural technology is very unevenly distributed. If solar light gets reduced globally, Europe and US might be fine, but Africa, Asia, and South America could still face catastrophic reduction of crop yield.
Unstable climate AND heatwaves are much worst to this regard IMHO. But yes, geoengineering is bad.
It follows then that the effort to clean up ocean freight will backfire by accelerating global warming unless we do deliberate geoengineering to replicate the unintended forcing.
It seems likely that any reduction in solar energy will impact those at higher latitudes where the available solar energy is already lower, so I'd expect the equatorial regions to fare best (including large parts of Africa, Asia, and South America).
Although obviously there would be lots of unintended consequences, large areas in those regions may far better with a more temperate climate and lower energy atmosphere.
No, this is not a long-term replacement for bringing down carbon emissions (not least, because carbon also acidifies our oceans), but if you look at the horrible effects climate change is already causing now, imagine how a world will with average temperature raised by 1.5° or 2.0° Celsius.
What are those "horrible effects"? And how do you know the cure won't be worst than the supposed "horrible effects" it is meant to make disappear?
(think more draughts, much more intense wildfire seasons, intense rain events, nature's rhythm which is depending on temperature being disturbed).
And I don't know if the "cure" will be worse, that's why for now, I'm only advocating for research into solar geoengineering. (But as the stratospheric release of sulphuric aerosols is also a natural occurring phenomena -- think volcanoes -- it is not something completely new we would be doing here.)
It gets very overhyped by campaigners but global climate change is still going to be very expensive to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars and tens or hundreds of millions of premature deaths.
Is that enough for any observable effect?
I'm not sure they're trying to impress you, but they have a feedback form if you want to let them know.
Funny, how due dilligence seems to have gone right out of the window in the last couple of years, only to be replaced by having the right connections.
> Luke Iseman, a serial inventor and the former director of hardware at Y Combinator, believed all of that research was not happening fast enough. So he started tinkering with releasing sulfur dioxide particles into the atmosphere with balloons, raised venture capital to fund the startup, and brought on co-founder Andrew Song to manage sales.
I'm not sure I'm ready to join you in outrage that someone started a business for the purpose of earning money.
To the order of ~600g of SO2 and ~90 tonnes of CO2 over the average vehicle's lifespan.
It's weird how, as mentioned in other parts of this thread, nobody gives two figs[1] about the atmospheric geoengineering we're all doing with our cars and our natural gas power plants. The Paris accord came and went and we are solidly on the worst-case do-nothing track.
[1] We are, at most, taking steps to consider thinking about taking steps fifteen years from now.
Good but irrelevant question. My point still stands: one is legalized, the other is not.
But we worked very hard to remove sulfur compounds from our fuels, after all nobody wants acid rain. What if we acted too soon, what if those same sulfur compounds would mitigate global warming, perhaps we should have left them in?
The primary problem with this action the that the sulfur is in the wrong place, too low in the atmosphere. Perhaps the solution is high sulfur jet fuel.
Personally I think that is was global engineering that got us into this mess and it will be global engineering that gets us out of it.
But the "cure" is likely to be as bad as the illness: Retaining individual freedom as the confined domain of our planet sees ever more powerful technologies is a highly non-trivial challenge.
We can keep iterating the vacuities of yesteryear or evolve the drastically new thinking and behaviors that will help us get to a sustainable place.
“ Make Sunsets was planning to…release anywhere between 10 and 500 grams of sulfur dioxide in January”
I hope it doesn’t take years for someone to test the theory with a few tens of grams of this substance unless even that amount can cause harm.
"Should we?" is increasingly a more important question than "Can we?", and the way to manage those issues is social/political, not technical. Despite immense technological progress in recent decades our social and political systems have been degrading, which is a scary path to be on.
How about the "move fast and break things" SV type bros go to jail for a bit and, after they serve their sentence, all's forgiven? Except the criminal record, of course. That stays.
So we have 2 options: Geo-engineering OR catastrophic climate change.
Choose.
dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere is geo-engineering. it is just unintentional.
saying that climate change (of the anthropocentric CO2 caused variety) will necessarily be catastrophic is scientifically unsupportable. there is a possibility that it will be catastrophic, but definitely not a certainty.
humans are very capable of adapting to the scientific consensus worst case estimates for temperature increase. if those worst case estimates come true the adaptation will be messy, but mostly for social and institutional reasons, not biological ones.
even if humans could prevent climate change now we would almost certainly face climate change on a similar scale that we couldn't prevent at some point in the future so working on our capacity for adaptability is a better long term survival strategy in either case.
I live well above that and I'll gladly be closer to the sea.
We are lucky to live in such a time of heat. Actually that's the main reason so many of us CAN be here in the first place. In reality world what we shall fix is pollution and co2 isn't one. What we need is abundant, extremely cheap energy.
But don't fret, the sun will teach you a lesson or two...
the human race could certainly adapt to 20m sea rise with zero impact on the long term survivavility of the species. we already adapted to much greater sea rise only 10,000 years ago.
will societies and institutions built on the supposed "value" of waterfront properties survive? probably not. but that is a social and institutional problem, not a biological one.