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> But if every fraction of a degree matters, shouldn't we also be at least continuing if not scaling up these these albedo-increasing changes?

Acid Rain is also a bad thing with bad consequences.

While I'm not necessarily that opposed to cautious attempts at some geoengineering, I don't think "scale up the sulfate emissions" is a viable solution.

Acid rain _was_ bad, and I'm not trying to ignore it. However, my understanding is that we've already brought down sulfur emissions by an enormous amount over the past 30 years, and the 2020 value was a very small fraction of our peak sulfur emissions [1]. The IMO change took place in 2020, and it's my understanding that the IPCC statement about 0.5C of cooling coming from sulfur emissions is relatively recent. I think our current level of sulfur emissions is closer to being acceptable than our current warming trend.

I'm not pretending that cooling via sulfur emissions is without costs -- but e.g. if living at 2018 levels of sulfur emissions (which were already 90% down from peak) can give us 0.5C of cooling, that's a deal I'm willing to take, especially in light of how hard it is proving to reduce carbon emissions. It especially seems like we're hitting a number of tipping points with warming, and if sulfur emissions (or any other albedo-increasing intervention) can keep us from crossing those lines, we should, in my view. Would we be better off with 2014-level sulfur emissions? 2008? At _some_ point, trading sulfur emissions for cooling becomes a bad deal, and we shouldn't scale up without limit. But is it a good direction to move from where we are now? I think so.

[1] https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/07/09/whatever-happened-acid-...

The argument the OP was really making was, could we at least not scale down sulfur emissions

I don't think it's that simple. Sulpher, causing acid rain, was a big deal and caused a lot of damage. Whole forrests died, public structures and art was damaged, etc... Also, sulpher contributes to ocean acidification.

The point is that the earth is a really complex systems, and it's not always clear what technical fixes to use, Let alone getting the political will to implement them.

It also causes ozone damage.

The calculus changes. One day it might look very attractive to ecologists

The macro challenge is that we have already overshot and the IPCC appears to be massively understating the current state. According to Hansen et. al.'s Global warming in the pipeline [under peer review], "Equilibrium global warming including slow feedbacks for today’s human-made greenhouse gas (GHG) climate forcing (4.1 W/m2) is 10°C, reduced to 8°C by today’s aerosols. Decline of aerosol emissions since 2010 should increase the 1970-2010 global warming rate of 0.18°C per decade to a post-2010 rate of at least 0.27°C per decade." For context, this 10°C is over the next 1500 years, but it does imply at least 4.3°C of warming by 2100.

> But if every fraction of a degree matters, shouldn't we also be at least continuing if not scaling up these albedo-increasing changes?

Humanity is running the experiment in real time with a sample size of one. Aerosol dimming is good but acid rain is bad: we have a bad vs a worse choice so someone will be harmed, thus any project has liability and the default of doing nothing happens.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04474 if you want some light reading.

I completely agree with this sentiment. We should either remove the sulfur scrubbers from ships, start solar dimming around the poles, or both. It's an emergency and we're feeling the shocks right now.

Another example, the war in Ukraine is accelerating the clean energy revolution in Europe, cutting down on air pollution. How's that going to help their drought? Will the EU act on national interests?

"Another example, the war in Ukraine is accelerating the clean energy revolution in Europe, cutting down on air pollution."

Maybe in the long run it helps, but right now, not really:

"European coal-fuelled power generation climbed last year as countries scrambled to replace Russian gas, but the increase was smaller than feared as renewable energy helped to plug the gap, ...Outright coal generation in the EU increased by 7%, or 28 terawatt hours (TWh), in 2022, pushing up power sector CO2 emissions by nearly 4%."

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-coal-rebound-smal...

This is likely season/already out of date

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/06/11/crossover-solar-wind-po...

Also tanks get bad gas mileage.

But the Ukrainians seem to have a lot of fight in them, and we are willing and able to support them solo from the US. So, I suspect the fastest path, of the options that the EU can actually pick from, is: maximum support, get it over with.

What’s the implied EU national interests here? Start some geo-engineering projects unilaterally?

Yes

It's pretty easy to predict how and how quickly "reduce emissions and begin effective-but-insufficient-on-its-own geoengineering" becomes "only do geoengineering."

It's relatively much easier, especially politically. And the entities most poised to begin it are exactly the behemoths who benefit from fossil fuel use in the first place. It'll rapidly become another money-and-PR funnel for the same couple hundred individuals who got us here in the first place.

This baffles me too but it is the way of things. Smart people refuse to support action unless they're 100% sure no one will dislike it. Meanwhile morons wreck things without pause or consequence. I don't know what it is but I think it will doom our species. You see the same thing from climate change to deficits to wars.

This isn't really the case. The people who study climate are having to censor themselves from the loud idiots who took the bait and turned a scientific concern into a creed.

In the 21st century if you have to frame your solution as a fight against something, you're part of the problem not part of the solution. "Fighting" is now a bigger problem than the contested topic. Idiots fight and the bigger the idiot, the bigger the fight. So the contest is over two extremes that have nothing to do with reality and whomever is doing the real discussion gets labelled as the enemy by both camps because they don't belong to the extreme.

Right now, the discussion is all fake. One side insist it is not real, the other that it is and that we will do something then don't. The science is in, and we are basically entering the "find out" stage of "fuck around and find out". I wonder what will happen then? We've had the same basic problem (extreme polarisation) for 100 similar issues in the english speaking world (I'd list housing, inequality, lack of opportunity, over regulation for a start). Maybe we will enter a generation of renewal, or maybe we will sink into obscurity...

Sulfur emissions also cause acid rain, so it's not as simple as "keep the emissions as is"

Also approximates the theme of Neal Stephenson’s most recent book of the same name, Termination Shock.

Climate change is just one of the things that will get us if we don't find a way to live in our environment. We can't just fuck every other issue to solve that one problem, and hope everything will be fine.

You could include the cost of energy in your statement, and then it says nothing.

Solving climate change doesn’t require dramatic long term changes to the cost of energy. Economically it’s mostly a question of sunk costs as our infrastructure is built around fossil fuels. However, infrastructure has a finite lifespan meaning gradually changing things is vastly less expensive, though you do need to actually start changing things.

Thus ideas like increasing carbon taxation so economies optimize for efficient transitions.

Carbon taxes are unpopular because you are literally pulling future damage done to the economy, which cannot be observed, only predicted, and making people pay for it today, when the harm hasn't arrived yet. People think that this is pointless or even harmful because they don't like paying for things and expect others to bear the costs.

I have no idea how to fix it. Even when you tell people about it, they will disagree with the concept of a carbon tax plus dividend.

That’s why you want escalation in carbon taxation. The ideal situation is nobody is paying the tax because they have swapped to something else.

The point is to convince people building infrastructure to build something else because their giant fossil fuel investments wouldn’t be economically viable where green solutions would be.

Yeah, well, it's up to you to decide what's important to you.

Personally, I don't mind curbing my use, especially if that helps avoiding physical limit.

> It's frustrating that we've argued a lot about the hazards of intentional geoengineering responses without reaching a consensus that we should do it, and meanwhile the shipping industry was cavalierly doing it along-side their other emissions.

Was there a debate about this that the IMO ignored? As a layman, I have heard before that cutting emissions of certain particulates could increase global warming in the short term but I don't recall seeing any real discussion of its dangers or strong calls against it. I mean at a societal level - I'm sure there has been discussion of it within the scientific community, but what were the conclusions of that discussion and how were they communicated to the IMO and the rest of society?

I worry that this could further undermine public support for climate change initiatives. The skeptics will spin this as "they said we should cut emissions, then we did and now they are saying that cutting emissions led to climate change". You and I both know that's a flawed message but that's the story they will tell and a lot of people will probably buy it.

It was hilariously and recklessly irresponsible for these guys to basically use a regulation to put a geoengineering experiment into play that is the exact opposite of what we want to be doing right now.