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Comment by brucethemoose2 | Hacker News Reader

A group of scientists did actually come up with a "chemtrail" like plan to cool the planet... And it is horrific:

> To achieve a 2 °C result, the plan would inject 6.7 teragrams (6.7 billion kg/14.8 billion lb) of sulfur dioxide per year into each pole, calling for an eye-watering total of 13.4 teragrams (29.5 billion lb) of material annually.

https://newatlas.com/environment/sai-polar-refreezing/

The cost would be astronomical (but far more doable than other climate engineering methods) and the environmental cost of raining sulfuric acid over the arctic with an enormous fleet of planes would be unspeakable.

They clearly released the plan to illustrate how impractical climate engineering is, but I wonder if this is a seed for the wider chemtrail theory.

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29.5 billion pounds is about 13.3 million tonnes. Global air cargo is 63 million tonnes, so that's a lot, but not a physically unfeasible amount, even if you have to airlift into the stratosphere. Say 600 flights of a planes with 60 tonnes of payload per day. 300 per day per pole. That's "only" a large-ish airport's worth of flights each (about the same as Paris Orly, or half of JFK or Heathrow), and they'd presumably be fairly short-range so you'd maybe only need a few dozen planes doing Berlin Airlift-style load-fly-reload operations.

If it came to it and it was the only way, it's not that astronomical and would probably cost less than dealing with a single major weather disaster or crop failure.

Maybe it's a terrible idea for other reasons (though I would be surprised if the acidity even really registered next to existing sulphur and CO2 emissions, but then again it's all concentrated in a few places), but the cost isn't a slam-dunk "yeah, no, that's literally impossible" conclusion.

The article (and paper) go into this. Theoretically the lift capacity is not that high, but practically the costs are amplified because existing airframes are inefficient at the job.

Also, the effects are bad enough that the habitability in the aerosol zone for the "1%” of the human population living in there is a concern. That can’t be good for the local wildlife...

If this actually became necessary, I would assume we're already in a world where sea ice has been gone for a decade or more, polar wildlife is a write-off already and humanity is facing regular catastrophic climate events (storms, floods, and fires), mass migrations and famines.

My point isn't that it's an amazing idea, or even a good one, just that it's eminently within the realms of physical and economic possibility. Hell, SAC probably flew a comparable number air miles than that for decades at a time, just circling nuclear weapons near the USSR.

FWIW, the SO2 injection rate for climate engineering is about 1/10 of our current tropospheric injection rate from burning fossil fuels.

I bring it up to illustrate that we are already making consequential choices about the climate.

I'm pretty sure 'chemtrail conspiracies' have their origin in the (quite real) large-scale biological & radiological warfare tests the US government conducted in the 1950s and 1960s:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/weapon-...

> "The first Large Area Concept experiment, in 1957, involved dispersing microorganisms over a swath from South Dakota to Minnesota; monitoring revealed that some of the particles eventually traveled some 1200 miles away. Further tests covered areas from Ohio to Texas and Michigan to Kansas. In the Army’s words, these experiments 'proved the feasibility of covering large areas of the country with [biological weapons] agents.'"

Well before airplane contrails were ever associated with a plot to alter the climate, it was all about a plot to control people's minds with toxic chemicals etc.

Of course, it is entirely true that a relatively small fleet of drones could disperse enough anthrax/smallpox powder over any large American city to cause mass casualties and initiate a pandemic-scale event, which is why development of such weapons is banned under the terms of the Biological Warfare Convention, although the Soviet Union violated that treaty on a massive scale in the 1970s and 1980s, and Israel and several other states have refused to sign it - and the US government has strongly opposed anything like an inspection / verification system, so...

Almost every 'conspiracy theory' has some seed of truth hidden inside it somewhere.

But the fact that the conspiracy is true or not is irrelevant.

The problem of the "conspiracy theory" is that it is a witch trial: a group of people have absolutely no proof what-so-ever, they just "want to believe they are right".

It does not matter if they end up being right, their logic is toxic for society, and if we are accepting their logic, then it means that tomorrow you can be fired from your job because your boss just had a dream in which you were a thief. Your argument is the same as saying "well, your boss says you are a thief, but thieves exist for real, and, who knows, maybe you are in fact really a thief, so it's fine".

"a group of people have absolutely no proof what-so-ever"

Something not being provable underlies the definition of the term theory, Google this phrase, "is it required for a theory to have proof" to understand.

"It does not matter if they end up being right"

This is not a logical stance.

They have a "theory", no proof. My point is that a healthy society should not rely on "theory" to destroy other people's life, to bully them or to make societal decisions, especially if there are processes that can go further than just theory.

And, yes, it does not matter if they end up being right, the same way it does not matter if a broken clock end up being right: it is still a very very unethical and unfair way of managing a society. I can throw knives from the top of my building, and sometimes I will hit someone that deserve it. According to your logic, it's fine.

On top of that, if you learn they end up being right, it means that someone else came up with the proof, demonstrating that they were utterly useless: their "belief" did not change anything, because the proof would have appeared anyway. All they have done is being counter-productive and delayed the discovery of the proof (and sometimes ruining it totally).

It's a bit like bad cops that "get the bad guy" by breaking the rules and end up with the bad guy being released due to breach of procedure. It's just totally stupid: if they believe there is a problem, they investigate and bring proofs upfront, not start accusing without proofs.

A lot of conspiracy theorists are not like that. They are more like "My neighbor is behaving suspiciously. I have no concrete proof of wrong doing, but maybe I should start bolting my door".

I don't remember anyone behaving like that being called a conspiracy theorist.

I saw a lot of people not behaving like that, spreading misinformation as if it was fact without caring about the consequences of the person they accused, but then pretending that they just "started bolting their door", though.

And the CNN article that started this conversation is certainly not talking about these kind of people (not sure if they even would call such people "conspiracy theorists"), they are talking about people who decide to destroy their neighbor's life just because, in their book, the neighbor deserved it by doing something that they decided was suspicious. In fact, this article talks about people who attacks honest scientists just doing their job who haven't done anything suspicious in the first place.

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