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Comment by exegete | Hacker News Reader

Just because a volcano eruption can cool the planet doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The cooling would only be temporary anyway.

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).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

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> The cooling would only be temporary anyway.

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

> The cooling would only be temporary anyway.

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 had not thought about that. That is a reasonable collusion about a non intuitive feedback loop.

The article noted the CO2 released matches what humans do in 2.5 hours. Yet, some eruptions have lowered temps globally for months/years. The long term effect from the CO2 is real, but also a tiny drop in the bucket compared to humans

> The cooling would only be temporary anyway.

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.

While post sentience nihilism is one way of looking at the world, another is to see the problem as a symptom of a deeper problem:

https://tricycle.org/magazine/green-credo/

I feel that this articles’ purpose is to keep the status quo. Especially, that it starts with a strawman, and even contradicts itself during dissecting that. I like the individualistic aspect, but it’s completely orthogonal to everything else in the article.

Do you think that in 1993 the below was a strawman?

  1. We are stewards of the earth.
  2. Resources are worth saving for future generations.
  3. The future matters.
  4. Time is running out.

Clearly time has continued running out in the subsequent 30+ years.

Yes, it’s a strawman even in ‘93, and time already ran out in the context of ‘93.

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.

The author expands and addresses each within the article. What marks of a strawman do you see within the author’s description?

> It’s a strawman, because it’s so simplified that they lost all meaning.

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.

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