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Comment by cmews | Hacker News Reader

My prediction is that geo-engineering will be done when a certain death/disturbance threshold will have been reached (too many climate refugees for example and western world can't achieve a closed border, or too many weather disasters that hit the western world and populations are convinced it is because of global warming). However I don't think we will reach it in the next 5-10 years, but maybe after that period.

Also curious if the earth maybe has some tricks (last one I can recall was more clouds were causing more cooling than expected in the climate models) that will invalidate the current climate change models.

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I'm not ready to predict, but based on what I saw in Europe in 2015[0] and how things[1] are developing[2] lately[3], I see this as a very plausible outcome.

The US and EU countries get more migrants than they can handle; resentment grows; attempts to solve the problem with bureaucracy and policing fail spectacularly; calls for outright violence grow louder; and the well-meaning citizenry agrees that Something Must Be Done!

Geo-engineering is something, and it will be done.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_European_migrant_crisis

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/10/us/migrant-crisis-massach...

[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-us-mexico-border-cr...

[3]: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-migration-pol...

So we basically have two possible futures ahead of us:

- we make an AGI or find a human genius that figures out a way to make it work, in which case we're all good

- we try it with known methods, it fails and we possibly go extinct faster in the worst case scenario

Fun times. No pressure.

On the bright side I suppose it only makes sense to plan for success though, since if we fail then we're dead anyway.

Why would you think we have tricks up our sleeves? What’s that mean “geo-engineering will be done when…”

The whole problem is we aren’t capable of doing what we know needs to be done.

When we can burn fossil fuels to impact the atmosphere that cause climate change then we can also pump other gasses that will have a cooling effect. We aren’t doing much at the moment because there aren’t economic incentives to do so, but that can change if we have policy changes.

We aren't doing it because pumping gases into the atmosphere does more than just reduce temperature. Sulfur compounds, for example, dissolve in the clouds and make them acidic.

So does the CO2 itself. The oceans are getting more acidic already, killing shellfish and throwing off food webs.

Throwing additional geoengineering on top of the geoengineering we're already doing will almost certainly cause as many problems as it solves. It would be so much simpler, cheaper, and more effective to just stop digging carbon out of the ground and putting it in the sky.

I read somewhere that fine water mist sprayed into the atmosphere may have the same reflective effect as sulphur from the shipping industry without the negatives.

I’m fairly certain we will resort to this type of geo engineering soon - cutting down energy consumption is not a viable path, it’s just not going to happen. Quite the contrary, humanity’s energy consumption is likely to grow a lot.

I agree with you about keeping carbon in the ground - but it will only happen for economic reasons in reality (ie. solar being cheaper than oil and gas) and the transition will take decades.

I hope we don’t hit irreversible feedback effects in the next couple of decades!

I know every generation feels special - the pinnacle of humanity, a special time - but this time around it really feels like what happens in the next 20-30 years can have make it or break it consequences for later generations (not just climate, also chemical pollution, risk of nuclear/biological weapons use and possibly AI - though that could also solve a lot of our problems)

No one knows what fine water mist sprayed into the atmosphere would do. Good god let's not bank on these ridiculous massive-scale hail Marys that may just as well cause more damage than good.

I agree with you - but I have a feeling it will be done anyway by one state actor or another

This was basically the plot of that movie Snowpiercer; we accidentally geoengineer a second ice age.

We're far more likely to pump a bunch of sulfates into the air than we are to stop driving pickup trucks everywhere. Humans aren't rational, and this is the kind of irrationality that democracy in particular cannot solve.

Climate change is an unintended effect of roughly two centuries of growth and development.

It seems much easier to have unintended effects, than to get exactly the effects you want with from a global geoengineering campaign on the first try.

> global geoengineering campaign

You're still being quite optimistic...

This plays out with a country like Bangladesh or India, under duress, ignoring everyone else and attempting to do it themselves

> My prediction is that geo-engineering will be done when a certain death/disturbance threshold will have been reached

People seem to be accepting "the new normal" very fast. I'm not sure geo-engineering will be popular, since the status quo bias that's currently preventing us from reducing fossil fuels, will also stop any "artificial weather manipulation".

But let's be fair - "reducing fossil fuel consumption" and "artificial weather manipulation" are on completely different levels in regards to dangers. Nothing bad will happen if we suddenly stopped all fossil fuel consumption and replaced it with renewable energy. We don't know what kind of bad things can happen with artificial weather manipulation, because we haven't really done that before, and you can't really test the impacts in a closed experiment.

I think it's not really clear that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now. It would be pretty massive perturbation on a complex system. I think we should still do it because the alternatives are even worse, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking there are risk free paths out of the pickle we are in.

It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now. The ecosystems on our planet have only had fossil fuel emissions added for around 200 years, and in that time these emissions have had a very negative effect on the whole system. If we stop adding these we return to the normal which has been ongoing for millions of years. It's not a perturbation, it's stopping a perturbation.

By what mechanism would you expect something bad to suddenly happen?

By the mechanism of starvation. You can't produce (and distribute) the amount of food that we need without the use of fossil fuels.

Up-thread, you said "and replaced it with renewables", but we can't do that right now.

Bluntly, if we hard-stop the use of fossil fuels today, a large chunk of the human population are going to die.

Yes, if you change the parameters of my hypothetical, the results change. What's your point?

I thought I was adequately clear. If you need me to make my point more clear, here you go:

> > > It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now.

For what most people mean by "right now", something bad happens - many, many people die. You chose that phrase; I didn't. So within the normal meaning of the phrase, you are very wrong.

And I thought I was adequately clear when I initially specified:

> Nothing bad will happen if we suddenly stopped all fossil fuel consumption and replaced it with renewable energy.

Do you really need me to repeat this for every subsequent reference to the hypothetical? You yourself acknowledged it in your first comment, so you obviously understood it.

But if you need me to, fine, replace the sentence you quoted with:

> It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now and replaced it with renewable energy.

Right. (I was actually coming back to edit my post to acknowledge that you said that.) But...

We can't actually do that right now.

When can we? 10 years? With all the combines, and all the tractors, and all the semis having to be electric? Can we even do it then? We maybe can in 20...

If it's 20 years from now before we can do it, that's not "right now".

The problem with the way you said it is that it makes it sound like we could do it now (for reasonably normal values of "now"). We can't.

That's the neat thing about hypotheticals: they let us talk about and consider situations which aren't real. I can say crazy, insane things which have no basis in reality without said things affecting reality in a negative way! It even lets me construct arguments that work under specific preconditions, even if those preconditions aren't met.

It's incredible how rabid people get when talking about phasing out fossil fuel. In your eyes, I haven't stated clearly enough that the hypothetical (which you keep telling me is impossible) is a hypothetical. Now, any normal reader might see that and think "Hm, if that's not possible, he's surely talking about a hypothetical". But not you, you keep going about how I haven't made it clear enough that it's a hypothetical. You even jumped at the opportunity of me not explicitly repeating the complete hypothetical the second time, even though you understood it the first time. Have you stopped to reflect on why you're acting the way you are?

OK, hypothetically, if we had all the electric infrastructure and vehicles ready to go, sure, let's switch now. Hypothetically, that would be fine. But as you said, that doesn't affect reality. So, OK, you win the point. But in the real world, so what? In the real world we can't do it now, so what good is your hypothetical? Maybe we would be better served by focusing on things that actually matter in reality?

Hypothetically my initial point stands: reducing fossil fuel consumption by replacing it with something else, and artificially manipulating the weather, are in completely different ballparks regarding danger.

What are you trying to argue about?

I dunno, weather modification has been going on since at least the 80s and it’s pretty unnoticeable. I don’t see how we can peacefully stop China and Africa from burning coal, so I’m more interested in unilateral, noncoercive solutions.

Really? How have we been manipulating the weather to reduce climate change since the 80s?

It’s not uncommon in places with droughts.

In which places with droughts have we used weather manipulation to reduce climate change? I'm not talking about increasing rainfall, I'm talking about reducing climate change. Please share a specific example where we've done so since the 80s.

The whole point is that it is hard/impossible to predict, and I am even hesitant to list some ideas because they sound like climate denier conspiracy theories. But just as a hypothetical example, there may be effects from aerosols ejected along with CO2 when burning fossil fuels, which act on shorter time scales in the opposite direction, which could lead to overshoot.

> The whole point is that it is hard/impossible to predict

But it certainly seems much easier to predict compared to the results of further CO2 in the atmosphere. We've lived through the transition period from lower CO2 to current CO2, so it's reasonable to assume we'll see the same effects in reverse. We haven't lived through the period of current CO2 to higher CO2.

> and I am even hesitant to list some ideas because they sound like climate denier conspiracy theories

Understandable, no worries!

> But just as a hypothetical example, there may be effects from aerosols ejected along with CO2 when burning fossil fuels, which act on shorter time scales in the opposite direction, which could lead to overshoot.

Sure, it's possible, but it seems much more likely that continued increases in CO2 will have worse unpredictable effects.

> Sure, it's possible, but it seems much more likely that continued increases in CO2 will have worse unpredictable effects.

I completely agree.

The 2030s is when I think things are going to start getting serious.

I think 2-3 years, tbh.. it's a doom spiral.

some crazy person or country will bring the reckoning closer (or render it moot) by leveraging the unrest and fear, by blowing things up.

As is tradition. Honestly if that's what does us in then humanity as a whole officially get the final Darwin award.

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