The Scoop on Solar Geoengineering | Hacker News Reader

The Scoop on Solar Geoengineering

technologyreview.com

43 pointswallflower39 comments

I think it's weird that people react so negatively to geoengineering when the status quo is that we're changing the climate adversely just by thoughtless inaction with respect to reducing CO2 emissions.

I do agree with the sentiment though that solar radiation management doesn't actually solve anything in the long run. We need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere in large quantities and raise the pH of the ocean, and SRM does neither -- it just buys time for modern civilization.

I think we should study SRM because we're going to do it anyways eventually -- I don't see a plausible future where we don't. At the same time I feel like we don't have the moral authority to smash the snooze bar one more time unless we're actually doing as much as we can to cut back on CO2 emissions. Maybe a fair policy is to have an international treaty that says: no country is allowed to do SRM or have any say in how it's performed unless they've actually become carbon neutral. But then maybe that's too rigorous a standard and no one will meet it.

I'd have a much less rigorous standard that I'd bet is still too rigorous for the project to go ahead - everyone actually working on the project would need to be able to demonstrate understanding of 'fat tail' risks to the satisfaction of Nassim Taleb or someone he designates.

I'd bet that anyone who can do so wouldn't want to work on the project, except possibly as a grift. Which I'd honestly be fine with, given the people choosing to fund it.

>I think it's weird that people react so negatively to geoengineering when the status quo is that we're changing the climate adversely just by thoughtless inaction with respect to reducing CO2 emissions.

One of the problems with deliberate geoengineering, as opposed to accidental geoengineering (CO2 release), is that it's a lot easier to assign responsibility.

There will be countries that benefit from climate change. Particularly likely cases include Russia, where winters become milder and growing seasons longer, and Saudi Arabia, where precipitation will significantly increase. There will also be major losers, like Mexico, where precipitation will decline and coastal heat will become lethal.

In addition, there will probably be countries disproportionately affected by the side-effects of geoengineering. Decreased sunlight will affect agriculture — the largest players being US, India, China — and sulfur deposition likely will as well.

The world can hardly agree on such obvious necessities as "don't catch all the fish in the ocean".

Deliberate geoengineering will probably be designed to be faster effect then our accidental emissions. We’ve had generations to notice that we’re changing the atmosphere and that this may have noticeable affects. Geoengineering will probably leave less time for adapting to any its consequences.

Yes, but there may be huge differences in how it is done that may allow for rapid change. E.g., orbital reflector systems could be "turned off" within hours, or rapidly degrading reflective atmospheric pollutants could be reversed at the rate of decay, perhaps months. Of course, the advantage of any solution that will not degrade for decades is lower maintenance costs, but...

Seems the ability to reverse or tune any solution should be a critical factor in selecting a geoengineering project.

I think you can trace that weirdness all the way down to the act/omission doctrine underlying Judeo-Christian ethical systems; in most situations it is considered way worse to cause harm by action than by inaction.

I do like the “we are already doing geoengineering” angle, it flips the narrative a bit. But I think people will still find the cases to be very different; at the end of the day nobody’s goal with emitting CO2 is climate change, it’s just a side-effect. Vs the explicit goal of (positive) climate change with geoengineering.

CO2 has been a constant part of the atmosphere at 0.01-0.05% forever.

The atmosphere is sensitive to small changes. So what might introducing new particles to the atmosphere do?

What could possibly go wrong with this irreversible experiment?

> “Stratospheric Aerosol Transport and Nucleation,” or SATAN for short

Nice branding.

The kind of Solar Radiation Management technology that we need is for containerships. New low sulfur blends for fuel oil are ironically increasing warming because the ships no longer produce reflective soot. Also, the cleaner fuels also reduce marine cloud brightening effects (ship tracks).

We urgently need research on solutions where ocean water can be aerosolized behind containerships to support cloud brightening. This could significantly reduce ocean warming for a low cost. Alternatively, adding chemicals to fuels. But the later is likely to freak people out, whereas aerosolized ocean water is very palatable to the public.

> > “Stratospheric Aerosol Transport and Nucleation,” or SATAN for short

I'm sure there are 33 reason why this name is better than anything they could have thought up.

I find the whole idea that we shouldn't study something because of imagined consequences repulsive. "If we knew these facts, people might behave badly, therefore we should enforce ignorance."

Such a hideously dystopian idea. Yeah, let's allow (probably the US) government or some billionaires to start blotting out the sun instead of scaling back our dependence on fuels that were always pretty dreadful environmentally, socially, and politically.

My prediction is that a big, unauthorised experiment will happen, probably go wrong, and the backlash will be enormous. People see the earth as a shared resource, and they will hate this. Especially if it is a divisve rich person trying to play the hero.

It’s not dystopian. It is needed to move slowly before we get forced to move quickly.

In the case that there was some earth wobble that caused more solar radiation, should we just allow the climate to naturally get hotter? Or should we involve ourselves in the natural feedback loops to try to keep things temperate for ourselves and existing ecosystems? This isn’t a rhetorical question.

Solar geoengineering is not just a way to avoid polluting. It is a way to improve our dynamic stability.

It seems like polluting more on purpose not avoiding polluting.

For hundreds of millions of years, animals have walked our Earth. We are a cosmic blip on our planet. What spectacular hubris we have to think we are so special that we can 'manage' our climate and have the authority to do so.

It takes more hubris to believe, as cosmic blips, that we have no responsibility to mitigate our outsized effect on the long-term direction on the ecology of the planet.

Any geoengineering efforts we undertake will also be a blip on cosmic timescales. Particles we put into the stratosphere will decay and either escape to space or fall back to earth. Structures we put in orbit will succumb to drag and eventually burn up in the atmosphere. If our civilization collapses in the next 200 years, the most notable thing we will have left behind is earth's sixth mass extinction event (the one we call the Holocene extinction, but ofc that name will be long forgotten in a million years).

Reducing the impact of the extinction event we are causing doesn't seem like hubris to me.

if there’s no one stopping you then how do you not have the authority

There's no one "stopping you" from robbing a person you've cornered in an alley, do you have the authority to rob them?

The other person, the police, the law... my point is that no one's going to stop humanity from geoengineering the planet, in fact we already have.

There are no mechanisms preventing humanity from having this authority. We will do it, just as we have done it.

It's not hubris, it's just reality. The "how dare we" argument is a waste of time and will not stop it.

I'll explicitly spell out the other assumptions of the scenario since you chose to miss them.

If you've cornered someone in an alleyway, you have overpowered them, there are no police or bystanders to physically interfere, and "the law" isn't going to manifest as Captain America and beat you like a mook in some comic strip. You would get away with what society calls a crime. Nothing is stopping you from robbing that person. Do you have the authority to?

It would only be natural for a sapient creature to try to stabilize the climate and prevent a mass extinction.

It’s happened many, many times before. (The climate change, that is!)

We're the first animal that can form a computational model of the climate. We're also the only chance for terran life to survive the death of our sun.

Sulfur dioxide has a pretty short lifespan in the stratosphere. If an experiment does go "horribly," and honestly I can't imagine how an experiment, as opposed to a full scale geoengineering project, could really go that badly, it should be easy enough to just stop.

I agree. But there is a novel called Termination Shock written by a fairly well known author about the danger involved in just stopping. Don't understand it myself

The "termination shock" in Stephenson's eponymous novel is that (in the novel) a successful large scale effort to change the climate is underway, and people don't want to turn it off because they like its effects (though others don't like its effects).

The termination shock was speculated and unknown, the people who wanted to turn it off were the ones who suspected were getting the short end of the stick because the monsoon being weaker or non-existent was one of the possible outcomes of that method of geoengineering.

I was trying to avoid spoilers.

"I watched Snowpiercer, and now I'm anxious, so we shouldn't do this."

Is it more or less dystopian than living on a fiery cinder?

For some, more. For some, less.

"Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice."

(Robert Frost)

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted, probably the tone.

> My prediction is that a big, unauthorised experiment will happen, probably go wrong

I think it'll be authorized (by who?), but lets be real people; we're dealing with magnitudes of scale that have never been dealt with before. Plus we don't have a stellar track record for accounting for all the details and there are always unintended consequences. We've messed with wildlife, plants, and water tables/drainages to varying degrees of 'whoops, guess we didn't think that all the way through.'

"fuels that were always pretty dreadful environmentally, socially, and politically."

Other than civilizational level abolishment of slavery, the car, the airplane, abundant raw materials, plastics, cambrian explosion of manufactured goods, modern food supply chains, heat in our homes, what did fossil fuels ever done for us?

>Yeah, let's allow (probably the US) government or some billionaires to start blotting out the sun instead of scaling back our dependence on fuels that were always pretty dreadful environmentally, socially, and politically.

The billionaires would be happy to sell everyone EVs. One of them already is. The problem is all the regular voters who demand huge gas-guzzling SUVs to drive around in. As for social effects, just look at what happens when politicians try to do the pro-environment, pro-social thing by putting in bike lanes: the voters get mad and demand they be removed and used exclusively for cars (see Calvert City, California recently).

If you want to save the planet, leaving it to American voters isn't going to work.

>People see the earth as a shared resource,

Yeah, that's why they all love their gas-guzzling SUVs.... /s

> If you want to save the planet, leaving it to American voters isn't going to work

Well, I didn't expect HN to give tacit approval to enlightened dictatorship today! I didn't expect the case to be so persuasive, either..

IDK seems like a situation where you have vested national interests/individuals that hold hostage the rest of the world with some significant ripple effects that we can't possible model. Even if they started out of goodwill I can't imagine it staying that route.

Look at the internet for anything that started good and has really degraded over time. Our environment is already pretty degraded - can't imagine politicians controlling the levers to bring any good value to the table here.

It is after all modeling weather which is one of the hardest challenges that we have yet to figure out.

What could possibly go wrong?

Reflecting the sunlight to get less of it?! I'd very much like the opposite — please reflect a shitload of sunlight at my city. We barely get any, especially in the winter. Besides, there's zero practical benefit of the temperature going below freezing in a city anyway. It just makes people suffer and the snow creates more work for municipal services.

tl;dr It exists, here's one thing that happened.

I find it encouraging that small scale initiatives seem to work as per this. The idea of big government’s cooperation seems naive and that is gloomy.

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