Volcanoes can affect climate
usgs.gov
usgs.gov
But we're nowhere near the "stop digging" stage; in fact, we are at "we might be digging at maximum speed now, because at least we're not digging noticeably faster every coming year" stage.
Whatever we do, we will need to restructure the global economy to drastically reduce CO2 emission. Any potential "alternative" solution is an auxiliary measure we could employ on top of decarbonization; it cannot replace decarbonization.
agreed except that is almost certainly _not_ going to happen until there is a catastrophe of enormous proportions in _industrialized_ nations (tragically, millions dying in Botswana, Bangladesh or Bolivia won't move the needle)
so in the meantime we need the alternatives to put off that catastrophe for as long as we possibly can
I have long suspected that in a few hundred years they will look back on us as idiots in the same way many do about the astrologer blood letting types.
... then it's questionable whether geoengineering helps at all, isn't it? All it does is to postpone the inevitable until disasters hit Texas and California, and potentially prolong the misery for Botswana and Bangladesh.
I don't want to repeat all of what I wrote below an older comment dismissing it for a similar reason, but a shorter version of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40887461> is:
>> Eventually, a new generation [that grew up with climate-saving adaptations like electric cars] replaces the old, but that will not be in time for global warming to remain under the identified likely tipping points. If we can make do with artificial cooling for two or three decades, that may be the crucial amount of time we need to deal with the overshoot.
>> I don't know if we will need this [but we should] consider whether that temporary effect is useful
Reduce incoming light via sulfates works, but could cause crop failures due to said light reduction. Sea water cloud seeding, potential for it to rain salt water. Greening deserts, possibility to change weather patterns over great distances. And so on and so on. Anything but stop digging!
So we would have to make responses to the response. This is not a case of, don't do anything but an acknowledgement of the predicament. Damned if with do, damned if we don't.
I don't like talking about this stuff much because I have seen it many times get picked up by folks as a reason to 'burn baby burn!'.
The temperature change and extreme weather events will also do that. Can it be localized to have its main effect over the ocean and deserts instead? (Afaik it's spread by airplanes anyway.) Or would the amount of light reduction needed to move the needle back from, say, +3°C to +2°C be enough to actually starve plants of light? We're talking of small percentages of light afaik and crops are surely able to deal with cloudy conditions; some even work great with agrivoltaics (but none of this is my specialty; there's a lot I don't know here).
Not sure I'm adequately responding to, or understanding, your overall point though. On the one hand, I read "we can potentially cause a whole lot of other issues." with examples, which sounds like we shouldn't even try, but on the other you say "This is not a case of, don't do anything but an acknowledgement of the predicament." which sounds like the comment might be meant as at least not opposed to trying alternatives since we are increasingly finding ourselves in a climate (figurative and literal) where prevention has failed
As for the acknowledgement of the predicament, this come down to the problem of first movers on any technology. Those that do not consider the blow back will be the first to deploy and the first to potentially make a big mistake.
I fear that a country that is being hit hard by climate change will be pushed into a corner and just deploys something quickly without considering all the multi-order events downwards. Or even knowingly aware of impact that will benefit them at the expense of other nations.
Call it.... Sustainability engineering if you will.
At a distance, it just looks so dang silly that ideas like this is what it has come to.
What happens if you get an extended period of low winds? Cloudy weather? You need a LOT of extra capacity and storage.
- source happened to my relatives grids a few times, and they got pretty cynical to the "tax" imposed to get nuclear then no nuclear.
I think that sets the pattern for emissions reactions: they will happen when people have other reasons to do it as an incidental benefit.
And while opposition to nuclear is a challenge in a lot of areas, Canada for example has several places that already have nuclear power plants and are willing to accept more. Plans already have been drawn up. It is just considered too expensive, so it isn't happening.
> A little less conversation, a little more action, please
Yeah because that's what an average citizen needs to do to participate a global treaty: studying Chinese.
There are plenty of people who speak both languages. Hell, there are plenty of people who speak both languages on hackernews alone.
There is a lack of creativity in climate change activism. Which does beg the question: do people actually care deeply and seriously about this issue? Or are they simply trying to assuage their personal anxieties and other neurotic personality traits? I.e., are they deeply unserious people just doing this for themselves?
Check out the Year without a Summer for a historical example:
> The year 1816 AD is known as the Year Without a Summer because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1 °F). Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest of any on record between 1766 and 2000, resulting in crop failures and major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.
> Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in April in the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia).
And, increase CO2, increasing warming, in the long term. I would also naively assume that the reduced light would somewhat pause natural sequestration, from plants, for the duration of the cooling.
I’d say just do it till I no longer need the earth; you all can burn it to the ground once I’m gone.
1. We are stewards of the earth.
2. Resources are worth saving for future generations.
3. The future matters.
4. Time is running out.
It’s a strawman, because it’s so simplified that they lost all meaning. Except the first one which means even more than what was originally meant to be, but it’s not surprising from a “spritiual leader”. It’s easy to construct situations which contradicts the notion that anybody ever thought these things, or the opposite of these (e.g. the future matters, I give you 100 dollars now, but I shoot you in 10 minutes).
When people says that we need to act now, or there will be consequences, the consequences are already happened in context of ‘93, or 100% they will happen (like collapse of Atlantic currents are certain now). Today, the consequences are wildly different.
In other words: nobody ever thought these. Thoughts are way more complex.
Also writing more sentences without any substance is not expanding.
Edit: to expand a little bit. Nobody thinks that time runs out. They think that time runs out about X in the context of Y. Even when people use the absolutist version there is always a context. Author transformed these to the usual religious absolutism nonsense with no good reason, except of course that absolutists statements are easier to attack, hence the strawman.
But the world changes in the meantime.
People need time to adapt to things. We often stereotype old people as being stuck in their ways and, while they can change, they typically appear much more reluctant to, or have real trouble even if they want to (such as when needing to learn how to drive an automatic, or how to work with that new laptop OS version, or now how to use a touchscreen phone with a notification area: my parents barely get it, let alone my still-alive grandparents). Changes like an electric vehicle are difficult because charging works very differently from refueling and you need to additionally know how to use a phone to find charging spots while you may be stressing about being in a foreign country and needing to get somewhere (this is how a ~60 year old family member experiences it at least). These sorts of "we can't go on like this" versus "things were better 20 years ago" also reflect in elections, but the scales tip over time and what were once young people's opinions become the new normal.
Eventually, the new generation replaces the old, but that will not be in time for global warming to remain under the identified likely tipping points. If we can make do with artificial cooling for two or three decades, that may be the crucial amount of time we need to deal with the overshoot.
I don't know if we will need this, it's just that dismissing it as "it's just temporary, what's the point" does not consider whether that temporary effect is useful
We worked hard to get the sulfur compounds out of our fuels... What if that was a long term mistake. Perhaps we should be putting extra sulfur in our jet fuels.
Acid rain was not that bad... was it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
> Stratospheric aerosol injection is a proposed method of solar geoengineering (or solar radiation modification) to reduce global warming. This would introduce aerosols into the stratosphere to create a cooling effect via global dimming and increased albedo, which occurs naturally from volcanic winter.
Also read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/ (you can find snippets of the NOVA program about)
> Perhaps we should be putting extra sulfur in our jet fuels.
Kind of... though it's an interesting thing. https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-airplane-contrails-are-he...
I recall a suggestion that jets should "run rich" which would increase the water vapor in the exhaust and create more contrails in combination with eliminating redeye flights so that contrails aren't formed at night (allowing more radiative escape)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
> Marine cloud brightening also known as marine cloud seeding and marine cloud engineering is a proposed solar radiation management climate engineering technique that would make clouds brighter, reflecting a small fraction of incoming sunlight back into space in order to offset anthropogenic global warming. Along with stratospheric aerosol injection, it is one of the two solar radiation management methods that may most feasibly have a substantial climate impact.
What if an enterprising billionaire got tired of waiting for meaningful action to mitigate climate change,
and undertook to put sulfur back into the atmosphere, on the cheap?
"Taken from tomorrow's headlines..." perhaps. There are no international conventions or bodies currently prepared to regulate cowboy geoengineering, let alone capable of coercion.
> Acid rain was not that bad... was it?
My least favorite property of environmentalism is the inability to consider tradeoffs.
If asked to choose between acid rain and global warming, the typical environmentalist will just refuse.
You have very little idea what will happen if we inject sulfur into the stratosphere.
Unless you think "natural" sulphur from volcanoes behaves different than "artificial" sulphur, maybe because it is blessed by Gaia, of course.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1510/global-effects...
Everything from there is a generalization and abstraction which is very hard to do with complex systems like meteorological ones.
If we use the sulfides to mitigate the effects of warming without addressing the causes and then stop with the sulfides all the warming that was countered by the sulfides happens over a short period.
That would probably be much worse than having not used the sulfides at all. If you get some particular amount of warming spread over 20 years that's probably easier to adapt to than if you get that same amount of warming over 2 years after 18 years of no warming.
To me, this is one of the best features! Because if, by some unforeseen anomaly, it turns out to actually have bad net effects, you can just wait 1-2 years, and it goes away by itself!
The reality is that even if we stop CO₂ emissions cold today, CO₂ levels will stay the same, not go back to preindustrial levels for at least several centuries.
So the best practical plan I know is this:
- Learn how to spray SO₂ in the stratosphere so it cools down Earth to desirable levels.
- Figure out large scale CO₂ sequestration, to bring CO₂ levels back down. My guess is this takes ~50 years.
- As CO₂ levels go down, we can tamper down the SO₂ injections, and get the planet back to a healthy state.
On a huge scale it would be.
A huge (and often overlooked) effect of higher CO2 is ocean acidification and this will come on top of that.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
This sucks, it looks like one form of compliance is to “clean” the exhaust in ocean water.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072023/ship-scrubbers-w...
Climate change is definitely bad, but not quite as dramatic in as short a time. People make fun of the Day After Tomorrow for trivializing climate change, but the Mount Tambora eruption resulted in very fast, rapid changes worldwide. And it seems foolish to think we would be any good at controlling the strength of a volcanic eruption.
But if it's just a temporary fix for one year, then it's probably a bad idea.
But there will come a tipping point at which time we'll consider drastic measures that society would not otherwise tolerate. Look at Covid for a recent example.
What could possibly go wrong?
/s
News at 11 ! /s
I hope that a moderately dry and educational page like this would not be taken down for political satisfaction.
Even if by large you’re talking about once in 50 year events like the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo that lasted days during which it released 10 cubic kilometers of material. But it still only added 0.05 GT of CO2, roughly what people currently release every 12 hours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_eruption_of_Mount_Pinatub...
There’s been larger eruptions, but I think we’re looking past what people consider ‘Large’ into apocalyptic events.