Scientist Wants to Block the Sun to Cool the Earth
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The smoldering rug is starting to flame. The fine antique chair has fire running up its legs. The renaissance painting is starting to bubble. Everyone in the room knows the fire needs to be put out now, but instead wants to debate how it should be done since everything is so valuable. Blow on it hard? Smack it with some kitchen towels? Stomp on it with out feet?
Someone however is saying we need to break the stained glass window, run the garden hose through, and blast everything with water.
Again, people want to debate this, but it doesn't matter, because it's only viable thing that will work and will work before the whole house burns down. So they will be forced into it. Water damage and all.
We have numbers for how many trees we need to plant. "We" could collectively do that and it would outright fix the carbon problem. It's a metric f-ton of trees, a huge number, but it is actually within human capability and has known and studied effects. It's just hard.
Let's go manually adjust the entire atmosphere by blocking the sun? That's wildly speculative and dangerous. Worse, that preserves all the bad behavior that got us into the mess in the first place, and would likely have massive consequences we don't properly understand.
I just hope the people who want to do the "hard" thing stay out of the way. Once temperatures stop rising we can work on planting a California sized forest every year for two decades in all that vacant empty fertile yet unforested and unpopulated land.
Edit: I see you are from Norway, which ironically is the wealthy high society it is because it sold the fuel that powers this train. It's great your country with a population the size of a single metropolitan area can all wear masks. Good Job. Too bad you all couldn't agree to keep the oil in the ground too. Pot calling the kettle black, eh?
The "get out of my way, I'm trying to control people here" message feels like a really bad way to go about this. We've had enough of that. My credence for your claim that this is the only way is low, and I think most critical thinkers would likely come to the same conclusion.
Having read the article, dumping sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere causes acid rain, which has its own significant problems (not the least of which are direct human health consequences). And Dr. Keith is proposing the same "get out of my way" attitude that has earned us a myriad of troubles:
> “A lesson I’ve learned from this is that if we do this again, we won’t be open in the same way,” Dr. Keith said.
In other words, instead of listening to the objections against solar geoengineering the only thing he learned from the objections was to hide what he's attempting. That's hubris. It isn't just that he's ignoring Indigenous People's groups or Greta Thunberg, he's ignoring his colleagues in the field who are saying this is dangerous.
So no, I don't trust people who lay claim to an existential threat as license to do as they please, especially when we know there are safer alternatives.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/15/1065016/a-stealt...
Trees are naturally efficient at sucking down vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, but they release the carbon again when they die and rot on the ground. Sequestering trees underground could prevent this. If biomass burial works as well as hoped, it may provide a relatively cheap and easy way to pull down some share of the billions of tons of greenhouse gas that studies find may need to be removed to keep global temperatures in check in the coming decades.
SRM has that feel, but I don't really see a choice at this point.
Actually no… nightmare mode game play would be the clathrate gun.
Sun as a service.
Want your daily dose of sun? Fork up and pay subscription costs.
Sorry, the natural state sucked. It was without antibiotics. A tooth infection could kill you. Women were abused by men since they were in general smaller and weaker in a system that placed a premium on physical prowess. Childbirth was painful with high infant and maternal mortality.
No thanks.
We need a massive amount of technology to support our population of hat we have now. And we have to innovate ourselves out of this situation.
It seems like the size of the human population drives so many of these problems.
Rich people expand to use all available resources. We've used virtually all of our arable land for farmland and cities not because we have to, but because that's the cheapest way to make food. If we reduced our population, we'd likely just eat more beef and still use all the land. We'd use less cars and more jets. And so on.
Good news is the people in the stratospheric pay grades agree, and have been working toward it.
Bad news is that the means and outcomes are indeed heinous.
My partner and I make 3x what my firmly middle class parents did growing up and just the two of us live less lavishly than them despite them paying for private school my whole life.
Cancer rates and chronic illness are rising and people are dying younger for the first time. The writing is on the wall.
These facts aren't revealed often because there's no corporation that benefits from marketing it, there's nothing to sell, only bad technologies to opt out of.
A small amount of prevention is worth a bigger quantity of cure. And crossing your fingers that geoengineering will solve that is risky.
[1] Conservatism now means crazy things like “neo-con” i.e. people who think that invading countries half-way across the world is conservative.
If you're a regular conservative, you should check out Baudrillard.
Baudrillard (and to a lesser extent Lyotard) elaborate multiple concepts, but he is most known for his criticism of 'hyperreality', where he posit than in postmodern society, the signifiant detach themselves from signifier and become their own autonomous thing. Which is leftist (in the sense of anticapitalist) , yes, but also deeply conservative.
But this is 'mainstream' books. He wrote a lot of essays and I can tell you although he is assigned as a 'leftist' because of his anti-Us stances, read "The Conspiracy of Art" and you'll see thought out, articulated conservative talking points.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
Announce that you're opening a new factory to build useless trinkets that will also pollute the air with sulfur as a side-effect, and nobody cares other than a few dedicated clean-air activists and nearby neighbors.
If instead you announce you're intentionally putting the same amount of sulfur into the air for its positive impacts on climate, then a million people who barely passed 8th grade science will panic about how that's too scary and dangerous.
The double-standard is frustrating and hindering our collective ability to mitigate the ongoing climate crisis.
Of course, we know that sulfur will introduce plenty of anticipated negative consequences. Acid rain, for one, does change ecosystems (though in some areas, this can actually increase soil fertility).
The question really is what risks - known and unknown - can we sign up for in order to effect giving us more time before hot days just start killing more and more people? it feels very relevant to have a reasoned conversation about the different kinds of risks, and to spend research time on them (as opposed to armchair time).
It's like that mad billionaire in Don't Look Up, with his mini atom bombs. It's never going to work, but it makes lots of money in the meantime. Just like mechanical carbon capture is doing right now.
My personal favorite geo-engineering approach, though, is iron-seeding parts of the pacific to create large plankton blooms. to me, this seems substantially less risky.
The recent spike in temperatures is obviously related to an el Nino. It will go down again, just like it's done after every other el Nino.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/so-emissions-by-world-reg...
(And let's be real here, most scientists suggested a wildly different approach to solving climate change. This smells more like the behavior of capital than science.)
Incidental rather than deliberate geoengineering, but totally monitored and openly discussed.
The recent spike in temperatures is obviously related to an el Nino. It will go down again, just like it's done after every other el Nino.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/so-emissions-by-world-reg...