Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures
twitter.com
twitter.com
I would like to point out that this is not something we're just figuring out "this week" as Hank Green seems to want to frame it.
There's no need to sensationalize. There is no conspiracy here. This is well known. It's good to educate people, but it sucks that even good educators have to crawl in the click-bait mud to reach people.
[0] https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1444679408573419520
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
But global warming is a very major political issue, and those who determine what will be done about it - voters and politicians - have on average zero clues about it.
When we’re the ClimateGate emails? Do you think the industry got itself together after that?
This is a big problem and requires serious political will, whether to pull off mass cloud seeding, make more sun/nuclear energy or reduce the usage of something important like air travel or heating.
The fact that vulcanologists have no evidence of this eruption doesn't seem to trouble anyone on the "climate science" side. So much so, they _insist_ the volcanologists are just "missing" it. They also need it to exist, because it is their only explanation for widespread temperature anomalies around this time period. Whenever the model fails to predict something, they go searching for a volcano, seemingly. It helps because it has high levels of atmospheric distribution, other sources of SO2, obviously, do not.
And, on the back of this wholly incomplete work, they would like to purposefully put high levels of man made SO2 in the atmosphere to try to interfere with the climate. We should do our best to positively impact the climate. I have strong doubts about all of these radical SO2 ideas.
https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/2953/there...
No.. just bad climate science all around.
> CO2 is rising faster than the sun can become colder.
You are, at this point, just shadowboxing.
> We are in a solar minimum and yet we somehow break temperature records?
We broke records everywhere on earth simultaneously? We did nothing to change our measurement strategy or equipment in the past 150 years? What annoys me is everyone finds their favorite justification for austerity and then just runs with it. It's not serious and it's not particularly good science.
Thankfully YouTube is not the only way of educating people.
I have many many opinions and very few of them would benefit from my strongest advocacy.
To be clear, I'm not saying that you should strongly advocate for other people to strongly believe things that you only weakly believe. But you should strongly advocate for other people to weakly believe those things. Furthermore, I don't think strong advocacy implies closing your mind to differing opinions. You can be a strong advocate for your current viewpoint while also being willing to change your mind.
The linked tweet was also the first in a thread which went on to establish the rest of what people are discussing. Twitter only shows the first tweet if you're not logged in though, so you may have reasonably thought it didn't continue beyond that.
So it seems the sulfur was removed for the obvious season that it's not good for respiratory health, but it may be a necessary evil for sometime ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
The thing is, this is not a one time solution. We would have to do it continuously, or else the temperature would quickly rise again. And we would have to increase sulphur injection if the CO2 level keeps rising. It could be a temporary solution though, e.g. until all countries switch to nuclear energy eventually and reduce CO2 emissions.
Sulphur at least is more natural, as it's also released by volcanoes.
https://extension.psu.edu/sulfur-fertility-management-for-gr...
I'm not sure what to take from the natural comment or if it's serious... Natural things can be profoundly bad for the earth and things that live on it, like poison... Or volcanos...
Also salt water, incredibly natural it turns out.
Thankful that there’s no real emergency yet, but I suspect governments will drag their feet long enough that there will eventually be one, and then emergency relief will be deployed anyway, but it will cost way way more than 5bn.
Stratospheric sulfur is much more efficient, per kg, at reflecting sunlight, so we could replace the cooling effect of surface-level sulfur with stratospheric sulfur, and if we choose to, go even further to cool the planet more.
That said, we won't stop fossil fuel exploration and the related emissions, so yes, it's temporary.
Cover Greenland in a reflective blanket?
Sounds like it is time to panic...and actually do what needs to be done.
> Cover Greenland in a reflective blanket?
Ha! I want to see a study on this now. Greenland already has high albedo so it wouldn’t be that effective; it would protect the ice sheet but also be covered by new snow, if any.
I'm confused. CO2 will still be in the atmosphere warming the planet once emissions stop. So we'd still need to be constantly emitting sulfur.
How? Where does the carbon go?
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-....
His statement was essentially that: right now, were effectively seeding clouds with sulfuric acid. The sulfuric acid is bad but if the cloud seeding is actually good, we could instead seed them by spraying sea water into the air.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
Most of the dimming effect was from massively polluting coal burning. I'm sure you understand why we had to stop that. CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere and stays there for thousands of years.. This sulfur that causes dimming stays for a year or two.
It's not fundamentally different from burning coal, and coal obviously had to be stopped too, I don't know why it's really a question that we need to avoid harmful pollutants even if they have a fringe benefit.
The more necessary evils we depend on, the more things that can fail and further perturb the system.
Stopping now helps nudge us back towards the stable equilibrium we had.
Was it Leon Simons? https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8
There was also an underwater volcano that put a lot of water vapor in the upper atmosphere that could be a culprit. (On top of the ongoing trend of warming of course.) https://www.carbonbrief.org/tonga-volcano-eruption-raises-im...
Watching politics in the U.K. and the rest of the world I’m seeing politicians realise that they can tap into the populist idea that anything green is “the elites trying to control and tax you”.
All they care about us short term election prospects.
Populism is basically a slur for an impotent and chaotic democracy, but the media that planted this idea in your brain never take things to their logical conclusion and critique the so-called democracies themselves for some reason.
It's an interesting observation but I would want to know if bunker emissions from ships matched coal emissions from high sulfur coal or diesel emissions prior to the around year 2007 transition from low sulfur diesel to ultra low sulfur diesel had as much of an impact. Remember there was a huge concern for acid rain in the 1980's and 1990's and cutting atmospheric SO2 pretty much eliminated it.
Not discounting that coal is terrible for lots of reasons but there's a ton of variability on types of coal. One of the core reasons the coal industry pulled out of Appalachia is there were lower-sulfur deposits out in Wyoming... Some gov data: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37752
EDIT: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/emissions-of-... Transportation is a small % of emissions compared to energy generation. There's been a regional shift though as North America moved to sulfur controls earlier for energy generation (1990) than Europe, and Asia has begun to climb as these regions went into decline.
Usually posts with little evidence and the use of the phrase "may be causing" result in flagged posts, but not when it fits a certain narrative?
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/changing-clouds-unfo...
It still lacks scientific models, though it is too recent a phenomenon for us to have an accurate modelling. Even then, in the last three years we had La Nina which kept the temperatures cold, while this year it's el Nino which is increasing the effect.
Leon Simons presented his findings in front of aerosol society.
I also wanted to ask, what is the certain narrative it fits?
This is not surprising to me. It started years ago when scrubbers began to be installed on coal power plants and continued with low sulphur diesel requirements that started 15 years ago.
Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships has reduced masking of global warming
The word 'cause' in current title seems wrong.
The current title is precise, the tweet chain is about sea surface temperature and the cause-effect of sulfur emission on the temperature. While it is related to global warming, and there might be other causes to sea surface warming as well, that is not what was discussed.
Less shade however can cause solar heating well above air temperatures.
If the Sulfur emissions policies were known for >5 years and discussed for >10 years why aren’t they part of mainstream climate models?
The best answer I could find was essentially that models use a proxy for aerosols and so including the new policy might cause “double counting” of this forcing. This ‘conservatism’ caused this effect to be left out of the models.
So the story is basically that current mainstream models underestimated warming due to them ignoring this effect. But if they are missing this forcing, what other “insignificant” forcings are missing? Are they positive or negative? Are there other observations that don’t match the models?
This has really shaken my faith in the climate science community. I’m starting to think ClimateGate wasn’t the nothingburger the media made it out to be.
Feedback loops like methane release are likely also hugely understated, as another practical example.
A large amount of this is due to political manipulation and pressure. Researchers are afraid of the way the issue has been politicized, and generally don't want to go out on a limb for fear of personal reputational damage or consequences to the field of study as a whole. Even just 15 years ago, in the 2000s, conservative-dominated media was begging for someone to step over the line so they could cancel them Dixie Chicks style and pronounce the entire field of study as discredited.
People spend way too much time on "but what if the models are overstating the problem" and they don't, actually they aren't even centered on the actual rate of increase, we pre-manipulated the model by building in all these stabilizing assumptions and even the pessimistic scenarios are actually quite optimistic. And then people apply additional optimistic "cheater factors" on top of that, and we still can't get to a situation in which the climate is not drastically deteriorated in a hundred years.
As I said, we have blasted through the most pessimistic assumptions on a yearly basis, the models are very clearly not aggressive enough about the temperature rises that are going to happen this century.
Why do you assume the missing effects will make the situation worse?
If the model is missing positive forcings, what makes you so sure that they have included all the negative forcings?
> If the model is missing positive forcings, what makes you so sure that they have included all the negative forcings?
I don't think they have included all the negative forcings, but I think that's irrelevant because the observed evidence is that the unincluded positive forcings are significantly larger than the unincluded negative forcings.
All that matters is the net balance, and the fact that the climate is systematically exceeding the most wildly pessimistic predictions our model provides, shows that the model is not neutrally-calibrated with the present assumptions. There is a significant positive net balance (including any negative forcing) that our model is understating.
At any given time that could be a lot or a little, but, right now it seems to be "a lot". And the fact that it's been that way for 30 years, says that this isn't a short-term thing. And in fact the rate of departure from the model is accelerating too - the second derivative and third derivates seem to be strongly positive. We are not just getting farther away from the model, we are getting farther away faster and accelerating as we do it.
Could that all change tomorrow when some other effect kicks in and plunges us into a nuclear winter or whatever? No, probably not, but that's the kind of hope that conservative media has been selling people for 40 years.
When scientists give a neutral "well, anything could happen but..." response, all the public hears is "you're saying there's a chance". Nope, we're blasting through all the guardrails of the model on a yearly basis, we're pretty fucked.
And yes, there's also the possibility that we've unintentionally been geoengineering something for a while and when we stop ships from putting out sulfur (because it causes acid rain) that we suddenly jump even higher.
Getting to the "disease, famine, endless wildfires (way too many to keep under control), storms with the power to level cities and blot out the sun" portion of the Toby Ruins It For Everyone video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc1vrO6iL0U
And yes, it is absolutely too late to stop and the best we can do is try to limit the impacts... which will continue to worsen until we do (and then for about another 20 years after we cease net emissions). Which is why the conservative media will jump right from "it's not real/it's not human caused/it's not bad enough to do anything about it" right to "wow it's too late, let's do nothing". Which is the same thing they've wanted us to do all along, ofc...
This doesn't seem historically true. They seem more or less on point with some overshooting and some undershooting: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...
I’d be interested to see a new comparison for this years heatwave. I don’t think models would fare as well.
Are you kidding me?
Activist climate scientists (like James Hansen) have warned for decades that IPCC reports are likely too conservative, because they represent broad consensus of climatologists.
Yet climate deniers continued to decry IPCC (also for decades) as too radical, political organization.
And now that the conservativism of IPCC is finally coming to public consciousness, you decide to side with the deniers, as if they were right all along?
I’m not siding with anyone. I’m criticising a particular groups models which they have admitted to not contain critical effects and thus don’t match recent observations. I don’t deny climate change, I deny that the IPCC models are good.
"No, you think fox news would really do that? cherry pick data?!" :)
Why do you believe that they are not?
How are these even in the same galaxy, let alone the same thing?
This seems very similar: models missing data and forcing but not being criticised when they miss a once in a century confirmation event.
Literally no one promoting that bullshit believed that models were underreporting the effects and causes climate change.
Scientists are sometimes politically motivated and will resort to lying to push their point. This romanticization of scientists and scientific institutions as inherently above lying and fraud is mythological. I see it happening on engineering research that has zero political relevance, imagine research that does.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering#Maintenan...
Snow Crash (3)
The Diamond Age (1)
Anathem (2)
Cryptonomicon (3/4)
Baroque cycle (2/3)
Seveneves (2)
Reamde (2)
The rise and fall of D.O.D.O (9/10)
Fall or Dodge in hell (1/2)
Termination shock (1/3)re-reads for me:
Diamond Age (4) (I'm an educator), Cryptonomicon (2), Baroc cycle (2)
However i plan to re-read Anathem in paralell with my second re-read of Russels A History of Western Philosophy. Really looking forward to this one.
Is there a name for this phenomenon of harmful actions because by an "increase" of understanding of the underlying system?
I imagine there are similar outcomes in many areas, politics, economics, code bases. Kind of like requiring helmets (protect personal health) for cycling leading to less cyclists (poorer health outcomes for a population)
Cold acidic oceans, or warm sulphur free ones?
*Cough*seveneves, fall or dodge....those are the only ones I could stand more than a few pages. Sorry I just cannot bear to read anymore of his novels. The first few pages of Anathem I can hear him building a house in his own anal cavity. We get it, Niel, you know some big words. We all do.
It is true that we have been slowly geoengineering for ages (initially unwittingly, recently with eyes wide open) and it is also true that our modeling abilities increase but this is quite far from making us experts in geoengineering.
For the short term future (decades) the only strategy that seems to make sense on the face of epistemic uncertainty is to refrain from aggravating the situation while studying ever more deeply the system we are now perturbing so much.
Our biggest mental deficiency when handling complexity is that we cant think holistically in practical ways. Isolating individual factors and applying linear thinking has worked wonders in isolated problems but it is not cutting it here.
Most people here on HN are rationally capable of understanding the challenges humanity faces right now.
What many aren't capable of is accepting the conclusion that we all have to change the way we live and quite possibly even the way we organize society in order to mitigate the irreperable problems our way of living has already caused.
Deep down they might suspect this is necessary, but it is much more comfortable to believe in a solution that is only technological and go on as we did. That is why discussions around such technological silver bullets are always toxic: people want to believe.
On the flip side, some people reject technological solutions on principle because for them, it's not about solving problems, it's about atoning for the sins of humanity.
What does the alternative future look like where we solve the climate crisis by changing the way we live and organize society? Personally, I would prefer to continue having electricity, heat, running water, sewage treatment, shipping, transportation, and the internet. It seems to me that if we really wanted to, we could keep these things around while putting a substantial portion of GDP into building nuclear reactors and removing carbon from the atmosphere. But that's not a satisfying answer for people who have made the climate crisis into a religious issue.
But do we really need to be able to order some bullshit plastic shit from China for 2 dollars? I think it is only fair to give up that for local production, even if that costs 10 dollars for the same thing. Similarly, do I have to eat argentine beef in Europe? Sure, make it available for a hefty price for the rare occasion, but it really should not be generally available. Fruit that is local and is out of season? Don’t import it from Peru, simply wait for it to be in season, or buy some product that was made locally when it was in season, like jam. Strengthening local production would already massively decrease the number of ships we need for minimal inconvenience (hell, it might just be beneficial for the local economy). Do I even have to eat meat each day?
Similary, why don’t we ban most kinds of single-use plastics? How often do you buy milk that you plan on drinking while you walk somewhere? Couldn’t it be stored inside a container you have to bring back to the shop the next time, or buy again if not? Hell, most liquids meant for drinking could easily come in a few sizes of these reusable bottles. We have goddamn shops that can auto-subtract your bought items simply by camera imaging, don’t tell me we don’t have the tech to safely and hygienically refill containers, something we had 100 years ago.
As for societal change: do my parents have to live in a separate house with way too much space for them, having them see their grandchildren only occasionally (making parents having to pay for babysitters)? Only so that they can later be cared for by some random person? Sure, not everyone has parents worth living together with, but this tendency that it is somehow a failure to not move out of your parents home is imo very harmful to everyone involved - parent not having enough self-time, grandparents being alone, slowly deteriorating mentally, children not seeing grandparents enough (also, parents having to figure out parenting from zero).
These are not big sacrifices, but we will do them, one way or another. The question is, do we want to do it with self-agency, or let nature run its course?
The first thing takes years and we still don’t have feasible technology for the second. Not to mention that we would still have a lot of emissions from transport, manufacture, and meat consumption.
A technological silver bullet would be cool but the reality is that we don’t have one and there’s nothing in the near future. But reducing our consumption is something we can start doing now.
Never encountered that. Maybe it exists but it's extremely rare and irrelevant.
> putting a substantial portion of GDP into building nuclear reactors and removing carbon from the atmosphere
Spending lots of money, to produce lots of energy, to solve a problem we created by using too much energy...
What people don't get is that environmentalists just want to solve the problem in the most cost effective way, and that is to stop destroying the environment we live in.
> having electricity, heat, running water, sewage treatment, shipping, transportation, and the internet.
Where in the Paris Agreement did you read we shouldn't continue having those things?
> Personally, I would prefer to continue having electricity, heat, running water, sewage treatment, shipping, transportation, and the internet.
Incredibly tone deaf, frankly, when most past humans had none of those things and yet dealt with it, living actual full lives. We've basically forgotten what we are, what we came from, and believe we deserve Saturday morning cartoons.
So, the first one taking decades and the second one being a meme """solution""" for the science illiterate?
This is either dishonest or ignorant. We can make a huge difference by moving faster to solar, eating a lot less meat, living in denser settings rather than suburbs, living in smaller houses, switching to heat pumps, not driving huge trucks and SUVs, avoid so much waste particularly in food, driving less, etc.
Complete with language about believers and non-believers
Your solution to this problem involves Universal Agreement and Cooperation Among Humanity. People can't even agree not to murder each other.
Any solution which requires UAaCOAH might as well have unobtanium as its focal point. It's just not going to happen. We can't agree on metric versus imperial, on language, on such weirdly silly things like an afterlife, on oppressive things like what women should be allowed to wear (in the face of the collapse of the biosphere, right now, you can find interviews with men who have chucked acid onto the faces of their wives because their peers taunt them about said wives wearing modern and "immodest" clothing: a real top priority for civilization). We can't agree on who owns what rock and we can't agree on how to govern, and our governance can't agree with its populace on little things like not lying to them about practically everything.
We are a divisive, fiercely independent species with our own thoughts about everything, however trivial, whether or not it is good for us.
Forget three nines, ignore a couple of standard deviations, getting even four-fifths of humanity to suddenly snap on to an agenda which will be personally uncomfortable to them is too much to ask. Any plan which requires that level of agreement is absolutely doomed unless you've got some kind of high-level AGI in your pocket with just one priority: stop the oncoming several catastrophes valued over the preferences, choices, comfort, even reproductive lives of each person on the planet ... and some way of enforcing it. Lacking Forbin and his Colossus, we will not unite on much of anything besides "we all want to do what we individually want."
Once you realize this, it's going to be the small (in terms of populace) projects which do not require universal consent which might have any shot whatsoever, rather than getting the bulk of humanity together, for the first time in history, to cooperate.
I sometimes worry that the pyramid of infrastructure and labour required to create that flat is not scalable
Meets your criteria and has fiber installed. We have at least 2 neighbors that will sell you eggs and I would let you garden.
*have chosen EV charger the ev share will have to wait for full occupency.
The only thing unsustainable about the first world lifestyle is the fact that we don't have the political will to invest in real solutions like nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, etc.
That sounds an awful lot like a long con.
Most rational people have arrived at the very reasonable conclusion that the more extreme the danger is, the more justified we are in attempting cutting edge countermeasures. So when the response we get back is "oh no, you can't do that, anything but that!"... the more it sounds like it was a grift all along.
This requires no conspiracy, by the way. Large groups of people can subconsciously coordinate in these ways without even realizing they're doing it. Just takes a bit of groupthink and a small dab of neuroticism.
This seems like a euphemism for "a lot of people 'have' to die" - when phrased that way it becomes obvious the reason that many will search for active measures to take to try to prevent that.
The amount of cognitive dissonance with regard to environmental concern continues to amaze me.
Many people seem to have strong concerns about their environmental impact but few acknowledge just how damaging (relative to others) certain activities are.
The obvious example is driving. People know it is bad but few seem to be aware of just how much co2 is produced per litre of petrol used (about 234g - so about 1kg every 5km traveled). Let that sink in. At an average of 20,000km per year that is about 4,000kg. Per capita co2 emissions in the US is 14,000kg.
Sorting your recycling is so much easier than acknowledging that.
While there might be a way to produce 84% of the energy currently used without involving fossil fuel, it would not reasonably be implemented in the next decades.
So, we might have to change the way we live. The sooner we adapt, the less painful it would be. If this is not for the climate, it would be as we reach peak oil/gas/coal.
That's because this has never actually been shown. So many people think it has, but almost none have ever seen an actual attempt at a QALY calculation for no climate change mitigation. If you've actually seen one I'd love you to link it!
Mostly it's lots of handwaving, but attempting to quantify things is actually important so we can know what measures are worthwhile (e.g. if climate change was an existential risk this century then threatening with nukes any country emitting CO2 would be reasonable).
It is negligently irrational to believe the entirety of the human race can be convinced to do, in perpetuity, what you suggest.
The conclusion to accept is the cat's out of the bag. Two weeks won't stop the spread. Nuclear weapons will never be uninvented. Etc etc etc.
And, like, yawn. This has long been obvious. We'll adapt in some manner whatever the horrors. I would bet against a human but not against humanity.
The appeal of geoengineering is you can nudge specific systems slowly into another direction. You can start small and observe expected effects and unwanted side-effects.
Reduction of sulfer emissions by ships is an interesting starting point to learn something.
So in the worst case: small input, giant irreversible effect.
Of course that’s impossible to do since the world itself is doing things like erupting volcanos, shifting plates, melting glaciers, and redirecting ocean currents.
> to refrain from aggravating the situation
Easier said than done. What makes you think this is going to be achievable?
Why are you assuming the HN community isn't acknowledging the complexity and not taking a holistic approach?
I used to think this way, but after years of trying I don't think getting people to change their life habits is going to happen.
At this point I think geoengineering is necessary. At the very, very least, carbon sequestration at scale is a fairly safe form of geoengineering if we can pull it off.
The lesson being. We as humans aren't simply animals occupying a rock floating in space. Us being powerful means we have to take responsibility no matter how much it makes our internal naturalistic fallacy emotions winge.
Sometimes perfect is the enemy of good. If climate change really was going to kill a billion people then taking the risk with some geoengineering would be better than just letting it happen.
Geoengineering is an act of desperation. Its like your laptop is on fire, so you throw some water on it.
Is it a lithium fire? I think this might be a very good analogy.
But it might just be a simpler fire.
But if smothering isn't an option, you take the lowest risk choice, which is the water.
I personally think in the future this idea will be severely dated but it’s in vogue right now.
There are methods of geoengineering that you can stop doing at any point, at which point they stop having an effect.
The one proposed in this twitter thread, marine cloud brightening by spraying seawater in the air, is one of those.
- if all emissions stopped tonight, we’d still be on track for temperature rises over the next several decades
- some places would get hotter, others wouldn’t. Similarly changes in rainfall would not be evenly distributed. It may be that Europe’s climate doesn’t change all that much, for example (due to changing ocean currents cooling the North Atlantic)
- some of the facts that drove rhetoric 20 years ago have since changed, for example the cost of renewable energy has dramatically decreased such that certain kinds of subsidies or sacrifices are less necessary (on the other hand, the power/km^2 density of solar / wind in some places may still imply land uses that people would find unacceptable were they to become dominant)
- in the grand scheme of things, geoengineering (like pumping SO2 into the troposphere or dispersing silver particles in the atmosphere) is cheap and could be performed unilaterally by many countries were they to feel sufficiently threatened by climate change.
I think one reason to care about this kind of geoengineering is that it might just happen. I think it’s also useful to consider that we’re currently doing the ‘geoengineering’ of pumping more and more CO2 into the atmosphere and I think we should be careful to avoid treating ‘planned’ geoengineering asymmetrically from the side-effect kind.
Good News Everybody! (hey, every little bit counts) That was the thinking in 2007.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-st...
https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-cl...
However, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years.
Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many, many centuries.
There is a time lag between what we do and when we feel it, but that lag is less than a decade.here's one: stop writing random bits to the BIOS hoping it will fix things
Eg. The odds of blocking out the sun not cooling the earth are much lower than the earth's temperature magically stabilising at current levels despite more co2 emissions.
Anything we choose to do will require geoengineering. We can continue dumping CO2 into the air, which is geoengineering. We can try to make our atmosphere more reflective, which is geoengineering. We can try to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, which is geoengineering. We can try to completely stop putting CO2 in the air, which is geoengineering. We need to change the state of Earth, which, pretty much by definition, is geoengineering.
It reflects the gravity of the situation. What I find incomprehensible is a reluctance to consider investigating such steps when the extremes of climate model forecasts are so horrific.
Ooops... bricked it :(
We have "aggravated the situation" (as you put it) beyond recovery. Doing nothing will now surely lead to an unacceptable outcome. We are going to have to fix it, or resign ourselves to a huge shrinking of the habitable region of the planet, with the hunger/famine/war that will accompany that.
Obviously we can always make things worse. But when doing nothing is unacceptable, we have to start taking risks.
Up until the point climate change is becoming an existential threat, which it isn't yet, we shouldn't go doing anything too drastic. There is plenty of evidence that we can still avert the worst of it without resorting to geoengineering.
This is absolutely untrue.
The mechanisms of how SO2 in the stratosphere cools the planet are well understood and empirically observed.
This includes the fact that it breaks down in ~2 years, making it self repairing, should something unforeseen happen.
We already have once in a lifetime climate event every month and the carbon locked-in of the past decade still hasn't kicked-in. I'd argue the complete opposite, there's a lack of evidence of other options.
And zero evidence we will...
You're the proverbial boiling frog
In this sense, continued emissions only accelerate and compound the current process unfolding. Global warming as it exists today cannot be stopped passively.
That was the previous poster's point. We can infer that their unstated objective is the end of global warming in the near future (i.e. in the next few centuries), the achievement of which necessarily requires active intervention.
I might infer that your unstated objective is not the end of global warming, but the end of ongoing human interference per se. That's an entirely different objective, albeit no less legitimate.
If I'm correct (and I'm confident in my assessment wrt to the previous poster), then you two are talking past each other.
How big? 1%? 10%? 50%?
This matters.
At the risk of stating the obvious: we need to measure every weird idea we try, and do our best to isolate the variables. Easier said than done. But we broke it, it's our problem now.
Talking about humility: an excess of humility leads to fatalism. Some is good, but not too much if you want anything to happen. We're talking about fixing the ecosystem of a planet, of course it's ambitious.
It’s cool to analyze but it can paralyze us into observation and this situation benefits from the former because the consequences of being wrong is so profoundly dire.
Generally agree with you, but why not be conservative when it comes to issues like global warming and species extinction and avoid catastrophe if it turns out to be as bad as it could be?
That takes linear thinking and action now. We should also analyze, but it’s logical to take action too.
Probably akin to "testing in production". But, as is in computing, it's still done all the time despite the dangers.
Also I object to the use of the term geo-engineering. Engineering supposes we know exactly what the outcomes will be following centuries/decades of experience with similar systems. Including many failed experiments. Thinking we can geo-engineer a predictable change when there is no way to experiment, fail and learn safely because we only have one shot at this is massively stupid. Anyone that claims "but we've been geoengineering for decades with our greenhouse gas emissions etc" is simply wrong. No, we haven't been "geoengineering". Engineering implies conscious intent. Humanity didn't start burning coal to increase co2 content in the atmosphere. Confusing these two things are akin to finding a victim of a vehicle accident and doing a roadside open heart surgery by a random bystander. "Hey, the guy is already sliced open, we've already started the surgery so we may as well continue right?" No, wrong. That is insane.
The biggest lie today is that we comprehensively know how climate works. We don't. We don't even measure the earth's temperature properly. We extrapolate huge amounts of data. If we _really_ wanted to learn how climate works it would require not just arrays of sensors covering the entire planet's surface, but also ocean depths and the the entire thickness of the atmosphere. No, satellites are not a replacement. Anyone that knows the limitations of satellite sensing knows we can measure a lot, but reliably measuring temperature, humidity, and wind direction across the entire thickness of the atmosphere is not something we can do. We can roughly approximate some measurements across the entire thickness, in theory in good conditions we can narrow it down to certain attitudes and on this basis we make conclusions on the entire state of the system pulling the missing data from our "models". If we discovere the models are wrong? We just tweak them to match the historic data. We might know the measures in this particular place and time, but we use our "models" to "approximate" everything we are unable to measure.
This is one of the major reasons why we cannot reliably predict weather for next 3 days, and why our attempts at making climate predictions are laughable. We know a certain number of principles so we can make some conclusions like more co2/h2o/ch4 = more temperature, but even in this we have to accept there are processes (positive and negative feedback) we have zero idea of.
Furthermore, our planet has shown us huge climatic variability in the geological record. Within that variability the most dangerous to human life are periods of excessive glaciation (ice ages). We're "just" in the warming period after the last one. Is humanity taking part in accelerating the warming? Yes, is it a licence for stupidity like attempting to "stabilise" something that is inherently unstable and periodic(climate) risking we overdo it and find ourselves in a "mini ice age"? No.
Has it ever stopped us before? No. Anyone interested in results of previous "geoengineering" efforts should read up on the soviet attempts at it and what catastrophe it wrought on the region including the Sea of Azov. People in the entire Black Sea region can consider themselves extremely lucky they haven't implemented more than few percent of their plans. It is generally accepted today had more of Soviet attempts at geoengineering been implemented it would've had same horrible consequences we see near the Sea of Azov far and wide.
And yes, if the alternative is an extinction-level event, for example a runaway greenhouse effect turning the earth into Venus, then stomping on the brakes with anything whatsoever is a perfectly valid proposal. And doing something comparable to a volcano doesn't come close to "anything whatsoever", because, as I said, we have records of how this plays out, and it happens all the time anyway.
And if you are saying that this isn't an acceptable way to proceed, which is a perfectly valid position, then very obviously the alternative cannot be an extinction-level event such as a runaway greenhouse effect that will turn Earth into Venus.
What you cannot have is have it both ways. Which is where a lot of people currently seem to be positioned. As in "we are literally destroying the planet AND geo-engineering is unacceptable". Nope. Pick one.
Furthermore, injecting SO2 into the atmosphere is easy enough that it is well in reach of pretty much every state actor whose population is going to be most severely affected by climate change, in particular "wet-bulb events". So the question of whether we want this to happen or not really isn't relevant. It almost certainly will happen.
The point about climate variability is a stock denialist talking point.
In reality climate predictions have been extremely accurate. There is absolute no mystery or ambiguity here. We've been improving our CO2 models for over a century now, and in recent decades the modelling has been extremely good - although if anything it's been too optimistic.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...
The problem isn't the science, it's the politics. We have a planetary culture that puts profit and political ambition - naive uninformed personal indulgence and status seeking, mixed with sanctioned reality denial - over collective intelligence and awareness.
While we have individual intelligence - in varying degrees - we still have herd-animal politics and economics. Our management systems have barely changed for millennia, the same issues and tendencies to self-harm keep recurring, and they're completely unsuitable for dealing with the kinds of problems we're facing.
Darwin is remorseless. If a species is maladapted to its environment, extinction - cultural and eventually physical - beckons.
That's where we are now.
If the models are too optimistic, that still means they are wrong, right? Genuinely confused about this.
“The situation today is more dire than our previous models predict and the same models predict an even worse future so we need to take them extra seriously” doesn’t strike me as very reasonable. Not in a super non-linear system with tons of complicated feedback loops.
Any pointers to in-depth explanations of how these models work and how they are benchmarked? Definitely want to learn more.
Black sea indeed had a catastrophe but that one predated humans.
But emitting some sulfer oxides is not.
Geoengineering is a very broad term, yes there are things that are in the category of "geoengineering" that could make humans extinct, but none are proposed as a solution to global warming.
Geoengineering is the only solution.
Its an insane strategy. Predicated, among others, on the impossibility of getting back into the control room and charting a non-collision course (which among others will ensure we can better handle any future sustainability challenges). I would challenge that assumption (but with a caveat).
The obstacles you mention are real and in a sense currently as complex to model and work through. Its the difference of socially engineering the complex system that is human society versus biophysically engineering the complex system that is the Earth's biosphere.
Social change is intrinsically easier and far more comprehensive insurance: There is a lot of precedent of purposeful social change and the enormous historical diversity of socioeconomic structures points out to very flexible systems. The obstacles you mention did not even exist a few decades ago. There is nothing deterministic about the current state of the world. Its all in our freaking brains, a lot of it just inane over-consumption because for a while the answer was... why not.
The caveat is that a minimum amount of social change needs to be truly global. This is something unprecedented. We are living through a historically unique moment where the random walk of political and socioeconomic evolution folds onto itself: its canvas is now a finite manifold. Cherished behaviors, power games etc may no longer be part of the solution space.
Remains to be seen how our complex system will adapt.
Politicians can't tell their constituents the truth -- that their lifestyles are destroying the planet and are unsustainable. They'll be replaced be politicians that tell voters what they want to hear or scapegoat others.
One thing that we should not refrain from is applying 10x, 100x, 1000x the brainpower to understand objectively (as in: not captured by short-term interests) what sustainable biospheres look like and how things can go wrong.
The capacity and orientation of the scientific apparatus (universities, research centers etc) is a WIP that has been shaped by momentous historical events (WWII in particular) and societal choices. I think the sustainability transition is of far greater importance but it has not yet had a visible impact. There are a few new fields (e.g. industrial ecology) but its a slow process.
If we don’t understand all the variables we’re probably going through make things worse. Given how complicated weather and climate are and how are models are not perfect, that seems inevitable if we embrace geoengineering.
The idea to inflate space foam reflective bubbles to reduce incoming sunlight is one of the saner geoengineering proposals:
* It can start small and grow to measure incremental effect,
* It's orthogonal to any unintended effects as it happens in isolation and isn't deeply coupled to things unknown in the same sense as aerosols and atmospheric chemistry is.
* It's reversable as bubbles can be popped and no longer exist to reflect and have an effect.
> This should not be some VC funded endeavor.
Yeah, on this we can agree- a high degree of global nation state consensus is what's called for with most climate action .. like the 1970s UN agreements that got effectively sunk by unending Koch et al oil bro's negative media campaigning and lobbying.
'Lone' capitalists do seem to have undue sway in matters that impact billions.
How would it be VC funded? Where would the return on investment hypothetically come from? If you could produce localised effects while being able to turn them on or off then maybe you could charge for it as a service, but is that at all realistic?
the oversimplified explanations of "this gas bad" are finally worth collapsing because nothing only ever does just one thing.
on the bright side, if this cloud seeding business helps keep everything cooled, i suppose that's a good takeaway.
Also, the same site shows nuclear as about 10% of the electricity generation mix worldwide; unless there's about 5x as much coal being used for steel-making and other non-electricity purposes, then the numbers would be around 5x instead of 20x.
Now that Vogtle 3 & 4 are complete or almost so, there is essentially no new nuclear power plants under construction in the United States.
Europe? The long-delayed Flamanville 3 and Hinkley Point C1 and C2.
Canada? Nothing.
Australia? Nothing.
There won't be any additional new nuclear plants built in any of those regions before 2040 (which is only 17 years away)
We will have to almost completely decarbonize our electricity grids by 2035-2040 if the world is going to get net zero by 2050 (which is probably not enough to avoid the need for geoengineering anyway).
How many square miles of solar reflector could each Starship launch carry to a stable-ish region near the Earth-Sun L1 point?
What a time to be alive.
We broke the planet.
But hey. “Needs more study.” and academics are living large, unlike the poor billionaires.
We're not headed for +8C, but we're never going to see +1C or below again in our lifetimes. Maybe in the 2300s they'll have it under control.
Carbon capture doesn’t work. Even if you did manage to capture it from a coal plant, that’s not enough. You have to suck it from the air, and a scalable technology doesn’t exist, and even if it did, we’d need massive amounts of power to do it, because you’re literally up against the second law of thermodynamics.
And even if you did have all that stuff today, you’d have to deploy it faster than exponential growth!
I’m aorry, but you can’t just yell, “SCIENCE!” and expect it work. It ain’t magic, and the clock has expired. If we listened 50 years ago, and started then, yeah, maybe we’d be in a fighting chance. It’s sure as hell like we didn’t know that check was coming due. Now acting like we can just reverse a century and a half of exponential growth in a weekend is naïve at best, and “thoughts and prayers” level of “fuck you” at worst.
Not possible in the timescales required.
> carbon capture technologies
Don’t exist.
> geoengineering strategies
Unproven and potentially catastrophic.
Humanity is just one of many lifeforms the planet had, has, and will have over the course of its vast existence transcending any human sense of time.
Yes. Very wise.
Also, just what a dumb name.
If you have an opinion about Science, maybe “10 massively under reported things about science you need to click on now” is more about clickbait and driving people to your YouTube channel than actual science? The last tweet in this thread is literally a link off to some YouTube thing to earn those sweet sweet ad $$$.
Does 20000 likes on Twitter mean people are listening to you?
… or just self satisfaction from being upvotes by bots?
Since posting on X now actively excludes real people (Ie. Anyone not logged in), it seems kind of stupid as a place to post science news these days?
Even if it does reach a wider audience, do they care, and act, or just <3 and move on?
It’s just easy and lazy to post to X.
I find it hard to take people selling their shit on X seriously.
It is 100% nothing to do with science.
The single letter "X" is brimming with symbolism and implications. Without further explanation we may never know why the rebranding was necessary.
> Tonga's Meteorology Department said on Friday that the Pacific island country is experiencing unusually cold weather, with cool days and cooler nights, and climate is leaning towards El Nino conditions.
> According to the Matangi Tonga news website, a low of 9.3 degrees Celsius, recorded at the end of July in Tongatapu island where the capital Nuku'alofa is located, was the lowest on record for the island country of this year.
But because it goes against the hysteria of the "world is boiling!" this didn't get posted in here, nor was it taken by the major Western news sources (I cannot find it on the BBC website, for example).
It's the COVID hysteria all over again.
[1] https://english.news.cn/20230804/c739b0bc8f684fe9991e5c02610...
Even parts of Antartica are currently cooling down, that's very well known and even expected according to climate models. But no, that's not evidence against global warming.
No-one was commenting that when the news piece about record high temps in the Andes was posted in here recently, I could ask myself rethorically why did that happen but we both know the answer.
Either way, I’m sure going to copy-paste your suggestion on all such future discussions related to “local events” that will only help fuel the hysteria. It won’t do any help, as the recent pandemic has shown that there’s no real remedy against localized hysteria, but I can try.