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Comment by marcuskane2 | Hacker News Reader

The reactionary panic to any geoengineering efforts to counter climate change always kind of entertain me.

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.

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And we have a natural experiment proving this effect, cargo ships' sulfur pollution had unknowingly been masking some percentage of climate change by reflecting sunlight, so reducing that pollution has had the side effect of exacerbating climate change.

The global sulphur dioxide emission has gone down continuously since the 80s [1], and ship emissions are a small fraction of the total emission.

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...

That is rather simplistic thinking and a false equivalence. Building a trinket factory is nowhere near the scale and potential impacts of trying to inject huge quantities of sulphuric acid into the stratosphere. It has geographical, sociological and political ramifications which will take decades to untangle before you start. Unintended consequences, and key to it all - it doesn't solve any problem at all. It just lets things continue as usual while trying attach a ridiculously arrogant sticking plaster to the problem. It's a scam, and a monstrous one at that.

Yep, and it's same simplistic thinking from the same people that got us into the problem in the first place.

Hey - to borrow your metaphor and expand - Bandaids help heal wounds, and prevent infections.

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).

I hear what you're saying, but the problem is all the time we spend on doing something completely insane (I'm sorry, but blotting out the source of the planet's photosynthesis is truly mad for so many reasons) we could be doubling down on reducing emissions, planting more carbon sinks, and shifting the planet onto a more secure footing.

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.

Agree, but only somewhat. It's not clear that we are actually short of sunlight to grow a lot of plants in a lot of places. Sure, places with short growing seasons would have less yield, but, cooling the planet would also make more equatorial latitudes a bit easier to farm in for some crops by reducing the irrigation needs.

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.

It comes from the media whose golden goose, the only thing really keeping them alive, is selling new fears to people.

Pretty sure lack of sun is the primary extinction causing event.

Not it itself. A famine is.

The fact that you decided to equate building a trinket factory with blocking the friggin' sun is crazy.

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