The idea that we'd eclipse the sun to control the climate is just one of the dumbest scifi nerd fantasies I've ever heard.
It's a good thing young idealists generally are never in positions of power to actually try their ideas.
Except we basically already did it, just unintentionally. A primary hypothesized reason for the literally-off-the-charts heat of the past 15 months or so is that regulations that cleaned up the amount of sunlight-reflecting aerosols in container ship fuel was having the effect of letting more sunlight reach Earth; the idea is that the aerosols had previously been limiting the amount of global warming that would have shown up earlier.
My point is that while geoengineering does sound pretty crazy at first, it feels less crazy once you realize we've already been doing geoengineering on a massive, global scale.
Obviously CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions are what's driving climate change. But climate scientists have been surprised by the recent (like post-pandemic) big spike in heat, especially in the North Atlantic, and they hypothesize that low sulphur shipping rules that went into effect in 2020 reduced the global warming "masking effect" that these aerosols previously had: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
> Given that there will be a lagged response from the climate to the shift to low-sulphur marine fuel, it is reasonable to expect less than half of the warming resulting from the 2020 regulations to have materialised by 2023, likely only in the hundredths of a degree globally.
> This is unlikely to be sufficient to explain the spike in global sea surface temperature in recent weeks, which is around 0.2C above the prior record for this time of year.
It's a really fascinating phenomenon and I'm glad you shared it, but the researchers likely wouldn't stand by your phrasing and if you trace the stories and search results, you can see that it's really all just reporting about the same single bit of research from those researchers. So those pushing back on your own claims about it here have a point.
> Taking the high end of the range of estimates of radiative forcing could result in up to 0.18C additional warming by 2030 and 0.25C additional warming by 2050, though most studies have found lower forcing estimates than this.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
That’s nowhere near enough to back your previous claim. In fact, that entire article looks at decade-long scales.
I see this repeated a lot on HN, but it appears to be incorrect. It seems that climate scientists are aware of aerosols and can model them, but 2023 is still a baffling outlier.
> These include continued accumulation of greenhouse gases, the evolution of El Niña and La Niña, and the 11-year solar cycle. It also includes two new factors that emerged during the decade: the 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano and the 2020 phase-out of sulphur in marine fuels. Both of these are estimated to have relatively modest effects at present – less than 0.05C each – but with large scientific uncertainties.
> Similarly, the phase-out of sulphur in marine fuels occurred in 2020. If it had a large climate impact, it would show up in 2021 and 2022 rather than suddenly affecting the record in 2023. While it definitely has had a climate impact – alongside the broader reduction in aerosol emissions over the past three decades – the timing suggests that its likely not the primary driver of 2023 extremes.
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/2023s-unexpected-and-unexp...
Also, the first is much too vague to pin down to anything precise: was switching from agriculture to factories a case of "our way of life going extinct" to those who lived through it? Was universal suffrage, universal education, and the introduction of state pensions? Was broadband?
Almost everyone who loses culture to climate change, is going to be those who already lost a lot of it to the European powers from around 1870 to 1914 (not that this makes it alright, especially as the actual harms that population will get in the absolute worst case scenario where such cultural loss occurs is the much worse fate of "being shot at by border guards when trying to migrate").
The only science that will be lost, will be in the form of secrets learned by governments that fall and which others didn't discover independently.
We still should try to stop, even slightly reverse, climate change; just not because of the arguments you're making.