Scientists propose glacier geoengineering to avoid sea level rise | Hacker News Reader

Scientists propose glacier geoengineering to avoid sea level rise

science.org

29 pointsMetacelsus39 comments

There is almost certainly a point where the costs of massive planet-scale intervention outweigh the costs of doing nothing. I'm not sure exactly where that point lies, but I'd guess it's somewhere between Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and glacial geoengineering projects like the one in this article.

The question in my mind is not whether or not to fund these efforts (we will need to), but how to fund them quickly enough.

There aren't many investment vehicles that are truly global in scope. We've seen individual nations do incredible things when they stand to benefit. The Delta Works project in the Netherlands comes to mind, as does the Three Gorges Dam in China.

But how do we source capital when the whole planet stands to benefit? Especially when many nations either don't have the money and/or the political will. The scale of the problem far outstrips what charity or nonprofits can provide, and private companies can only do so much without a functional market.

I don't mean to suggest that this is an intractable problem. It really isn't-- There have been some really interesting financial innovations already. But we need way more attention on this stuff from the investment class. The bankers, fund managers, and policymakers that work in global development need to get creative, and fast.

There is always the tradeoff between fighting the nature and adapting to it.

SRM and glacial are bullshit, they first won't ever be able to attain enough finanicing to make them convincing to whoever wants to be convinced that "Something Is Done", is from engineering perspective pointless, and all in all resources are better be spent on like, stopping people being killed than on some shit that everyone pretends to care about so that they don't need to care about real issues. Like energy grid instability, Saudis being all butthurt, Iran going batshit crazy, Israel going to hell, Syria already there. And not to mention Ukraine.

If you want to save a world, start small.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aba7e7?...

Here the estimate for solar radiation management injecting aerosols in the stratosphere is estimated at $18B/year per degree Celsius. For the whole planet. Seems to me pretty cheap, even a private initiative can finance that.

Keep in mind that we can halt global warming any time we wish with about $5-10b worth of high altitude sulphur injections. That’s a per year price. EdwardTeller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb, introduced this idea. One classic argument against it is “termination shock” — ending the program could be disastrous.

But I tend to think we should be researching the hell out of this topic. We’ve already geoengineered the whole earth already—it’s just that we ought to get good at it.

The whole subject of anthropogenic climate change is just incredibly depressing the more you think about it. The only way I see to buy time (and I guess that’s all I can really hope for) would be as you suggest.

5-10b sounds very expensive, no? It be cheaper to do something like Project Argus, using aging ICBMs. We already know that taxpayers are willing to pay for this (it’s history), so this sounds a lot more feasible than injecting aerosols for 5-10b or painting icebergs, etc.

https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/1065/nukin...

One practical implementation is to mandate not removing the sulphur from airplane fuel.

It would have to be tested to confirm the SO₂ gets added at the right altitude etc, but it's a very simple way to do it.

It's not a perfect solution, since SO₂ in the lower parts of the atmosphere leads to acid rain.

But, it might actually be viable if we find ourselves with a Republican-led United States. Easy to spin it as "getting government out of the way".

I'm grappling with whether the government mandating sulphur in fuel is the government getting out of the way.

It sounds about as good an idea as requiring blended ethanol.

Odds are near-certain this is just going over my small head, but, FWIW you may have replied to the wrong thread.

I’m agreeing with you.

The US currently has gasoline at 10% ethanol back when we thought biofuel was good against climate change. It isn’t, but now we can’t undo it because important voting blocs and donors depend on the subsidy. The same would happen with an sulfur mandate.

Dear God. I'm 36, knew ethanol / corn was a huge deal in Iowa politics but had no idea that virtually all consumer gas is affected by it. Ty

If it's released high enough above the rain cycle in the stratosphere, it stays there reflecting sunlight for 1-2 years, and produce little or no acid rain.

We know this because volcano eruptions does this, snd the effects have been studied: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1510/global-effects...

It wasn't airplane fuel. It was marine diesel / fuel oil for the bulk of it.

Or we could solve it without geoengineering for about $10T. 30TW of carbon free power, 300TWh of storage, convert vehicles to EV as they're replaced, planes to hydrogen, convert heating to heat pumps as they're replaced.

$10T is about the cost of a major war. Eminently doable.

The difference between 10T and 10B is approximately 10T. That’s pretty significant. And the 10T plan requires a great deal more participation from every single citizen. Good luck.

The difference is that $10T is an investment that pays returns -- 30GW of power plants generate electricity for ~free once they're built. In the long run, that $10T will be paid back and then some.

OTOH the $10B is an annual expense with no return.

Sure, but you can spend 10B a year for a thousand years and you still won't be anywhere even approaching 10T in today money. We could just do both and it would cost the same, for all practical purposes.

In any case, if those power plants have a great ROI, they will get built very quickly without having to be publicly subsidized.

None of those actually reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, and the amount of emissions to produce them are substantial.

I also think we should work on geoengineering, but I also agree with those that fear that it will make us complacent and facilitate continued emissions.

So I think the time we start geoengineering needs to be after we’ve seen some really huge impact of climate change that really makes people panic and imprints in a whole generation that cutting emissions needs to be their highest priority. We probably need to see some islands that are completely swallowed by the ocean and a summer without ice on the North Pole.

I’m sure there’s some research we can do before that time. We need to be able to ramp up the measures really fast.

> we can halt global warming any time we wish with about $5-10b worth of high altitude sulphur injections.

Sulfur compounds are just one of several atmospheric aerosols considered, but it's not as simple as this comment would suggest.

For one, the confidence about the ability of atmospheric aerosols (sulfur or otherwise) to halt global warming isn't very high. There are a lot of unknowns and the research is still in the early phases. It's a lot harder to get the aerosols in the right sizes and in the right place in the atmosphere for them to live long enough to do something.

Second, there are downstream effects that need to be understood. Sulfur aerosols can deplete the ozone layer, for example. So maybe we get some short-term wins, but how much of that is offset by ozone layer depletion? Altering the solar dynamics of the upper atmosphere could also dramatically change the way air circulates up there, leading potentially to even more second order effects we don't understand.

It's an interesting topic, but it's not a simple question of coming up with a few billion dollars to halt climate change.

There are no simple solutions, unfortunately. Research should continue, but don't be misled into thinking that the only obstacle is coming up with an amount equivalent to a fraction of a percent of the US budget.

There are lots of optimizations, I agree, but we know the mechanisms work because of all the natural experiments (volcanos). We definitely need the research—but no one thinks we don’t do this research because it is too expensive. It’s a third rail—and major litmus test. But it is a bit like the greens being antinuclear. If you really want to preserve biodiversity and prevent massive climate shifts, why make your mechanism of action human morality?

“If we can merely engineer our way out of global warming, then humans won’t get what’s surely due.” Something like that, if you know what I mean.

Bacteria proteins are the most effective ice condensation nuclei. Let it snow more and use bubble to contain cool water and keep warm away and cool down with small bubbles as a floating mirror.

Seems like doing this has a significant energy requirement.

Is it geoengineering when you put curtains on a glacier? The term seems, well it's not clickbait, but at least a more sensational way of phrasing a local measure to have global effects. Like turning off an enormous fossil fuel power plant to prevent global warming is also geoengineering, technically, a little bit?

Best bet is more snow from bacteria proteins. Some resorts still use them.

Wouldn’t fauna and flora care of this giant wall?

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

"Heh heh heh," said https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

Your point regarding unintended consequences is a valid concern.

Let the planet warm back up. More CO2 in the atmosphere is positive for life.

Not human life.

A melting glacier does not cause the sea level to rise. I can’t believe people don’t understand this. If you have a cup of ice water and melt the ice, the water level stays constant.

Glaciers form on land though, they're not floating in the sea.

One counterpoint, what about when that ice cube is part of a tray of ice that is melting into the cup? My understanding is these glacier sheets are resting on land and sliding into the water.

https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/chang...

You’re confusing glaciers with icebergs.

This is factored in. The sea level rise comes from ice that is currently sitting on continental shelves, hence why Antarctica is a particular concern.

“ warning that the ice sheets on top of Greenland and Antarctica, which collectively store enough water to cause many more meters of global sea level rise, are already past tipping points”

The article specifically mentions the ice sheets on land.

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