Comment by tremon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tremon | Hacker News Reader

So, we're well into geo-engineering territory now, with all the uncertainties that brings. Preventative measures to avoid catastrophe have (predictably) failed, so we're now having to spend our energy to mitigate the symptoms of climate change. Has anyone run the numbers on the efficacy of this approach? As in, how many MJ of energy must be spent to avoid a MJ of heat reaching the coral? Is it even possible to offset the heat transfer of an ocean current by cooling water in its path? What are the long-term consequences of salting the air? It's all fine that the water surrounding the reef is relatively still, but how do you keep the air from moving?

The team is investigating powering their operations without burning fossil fuels.

My suggestion: look into nuclear-powered vessels. Good mobility, no dependence on external energy sources (using solar panels if your goal is to increase cloud cover may not be very useful). As a bonus, using nuclear ships to protect the coral reef is sure to send Greenpeace into a fit.

Actually, yes.

Casey Handmer has done the numbers on geoengineering, and it's feasible as a stopgap measure. In the article below scroll down to the section on Solar Radiation Management.

"We should not let the Earth overheat!"

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/06/06/we-should-not-...

We're basically in an ice age.

Those suggestions (launching stratospheric SO2 and grinding up basalt rock for CO2 absorption) sound a lot more mature to me than the ideas in TFA. However, when he talks about deployment at-scale the ideas are starting to sound as fantastic as the salty clouds in TFA. And dumping the rock flour near-shore as he suggests ("shallow oceans") seems tantamount to ecocide on the entire marine ecosystem.

Maybe that's just a me-problem, or a problem of mankind in general: the volumes and scales we're talking about (2 teraton of CO2!) just don't fit in my mind, so any solution at that scale likewise is incomprehensible to me. Then again, we only needed 200 years to produce it, so given our technological advancements, maybe it's not impossible to solve it in two decades.

I don't hold much hope though. The same government/industrial forces that delayed preventative action by 40 years will also delay restorative action, by probably the same number of years. There will be unforeseen consequences, either way. And millions will die, either way.

Moreover, even if they can stop the heat, how are they planning to stop ocean acidification? Will they build a wall around the reef and manage pH within?

AFAIK, if the water acidifies even a bit more, no living organisms will be able to have any shells of any kind on them as the water becomes corrosive and simply dissolves the shells over time.

Drop baking soda.

This isn’t just engineering, it’s mainly an emotional issue

corals are sensitive to rapid and wide changes in water parameters whether it be temperature, pH, alkalinity. Due to the how large the volume of water that is in the ocean these parameters really don't fluctuate as much as you would think besides temperature. pH only dictates how fast coral can grow but corals are much more sensitive to changes in temperature and alkalinity.

Ah, what you want to say is you only care for the fast death of coral reefs and don't care for things that ensure its death but will take maybe a decade or two?

pH does not fluctuate much, true, but it drops steadily which is just as deadly to coral.

If it takes a few more decades, we could presumably find/implement better solutions.

Corals are more likely to survive a slow than a fast change as well. I don't think we know that much about how evolution bottlenecks work, but I'd think it's easier to adapt to a radically different environment in three generations than one.

> So, we're well into geo-engineering territory now,

What is geoengineering?

This is a local measure, little different from erecting a huge sunshade (and very different from blocking the sun from the stratosphere or orbit).

I consider geo engineering to be action at a planetary level, like the above mentioned stratospheric dreams or driving lots of automobiles. Something local, that can be switched on and off almost instantaneously, to be quite different.

Are he big machines that suck the atmosphere through a straw geoengineering?

Preventative measures haven't necessarily failed entirely. The renewable power and battery electric vehicle revolutions are underway, and vastly more successful/rapid than almost anyone predicted. But, they need more time. I see geo-engineering as a way to buy time for the science and engineering needed to solve the problem without austerity measures. (unfortunately, while austerity would have allowed us to attain the Paris targets, it was a political lead balloon from the start)

> Preventative measures haven't necessarily failed entirely

Depends you define it. We hadn't completely given up, so it's not a complete failure in that sense. But we have consistently failed to meet every action for the climate goals we set ourselves and have to continuously re-evalute our "best case scenario."

Electric vehicles are a failure lol.

Don’t forget increases in microplastics from heavier EVs (usually they’re about 1500-2000# heavier than ICE equivalents) ending up in the ocean https://www.plasticstoday.com/medical/tire-wear-major-source...

Also, with heavier vehicles, you aren’t going to magically be able to use less overall power to drive them. ICEs aren’t as efficient as larger power factories, but they also don’t have dozens or hundreds of miles of transmission losses and transformers to run through. All renewables combined just surpassed coal in the US (report date Feb 2023) but that’s still only about half as much as comes from natural gas: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

You can use this tool to look up the numbers for your state for total cradle-to-grave emissions for EVs vs hybrids vs ICE https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html

Public transit would still be an order of magnitude or two better. Bikeable / walkable cities would be better still.

I’m not saying EVs bad, but I am saying that EVs won’t solve climate change. We need to do a whole lot more, and I have zero confidence that we will. It’s just a matter of how bad and how soon. As someone in my 30s, I very much doubt that we’ll get to enjoy retirement with the same standards of living as the previous couple of generations, and as for our children and their children…I don’t think a Mad Max scenario is more than a hundred years away.

1) EV’s are more efficient. It’s already more efficient to burn the gasoline in a power plant to power your EV. Yes, transmission has losses, but gas cars are an atrocious 15-20% efficient. (Not that we should do this)

2) even if EVs don’t cut the transportation energy as much as we wish, they allow the entire fleet to smoothly transition to climate-friendly energy.

I love bikes. I have an e-bike that is 10x as efficient as an EV. But the public simply isn’t willing to switch to public transit and bikes. Even if they were, a fleet of gas-powered busses will probably be worse for the climate than wind-powered EVs.

P.S. microplastics are a real problem, but if you believe climate change is an existential threat, microplastics are not a very good reason to argue against EVs.

> Yes, transmission has losses, but gas cars are an atrocious 15-20% efficient

I thought you had to be exaggerating, but I just looked it up and you're right.

Holy moly. I'm genuinely surprised this isn't more widespread knowledge. I never hear it come up in most conversations around the pros and cons of EV's.

You are talking about now. In ten, twenty, thirty years from now these will be solved problems.

Your comment might be more insightful if you clarified why. Because they didn’t come fast enough? Or because you were hoping to politicize the climate crisis as an opportunity to kill the automobile?

> So, we're well into geo-engineering territory now, with all the uncertainties that brings.

Some countries will start geo-engineering, it's just a matter of time. Dubious that it will actually help. Might make things much worse, though.

I think the best future scenario is that we geo-engineer the planet into a kind of managed park.

That sounds awful.

Awful compared to a healthy vibrant natural jungle. Wonderful compared to a lifeless hot ball like Venus.

I don't think a planet of mostly natural wilderness is an option in the long run.

I also don't think we'll pave the whole thing over.

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