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Comment by hkt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.'

>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..

"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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!)

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 seems like polluting more on purpose not avoiding polluting.

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

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.

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

"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)

For some, more. For some, less.

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