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Comment by cmews | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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