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Comment by retrofrost | Hacker News Reader

I'll be honest, why even fucking with any other kind of geo-engineering other than high altitude sulfur dioxide injection. We literally have seen a big jump in warming from problably removing the sulfuric byproducts of cargoship fuel. At its heart global warming is an issue of energy in vs energy out. Its a lot harder to remove billions of tons of co2 to increase energy out versus using a couple thousand tons of sulphur dioxide to reduce energy in. Maybe not as a permanent fix, but a better fix than this nonesense.

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Because (1) sulfur-dioxide injection is a short term solution that doesn’t solve the problem long term, (2) there is a huge risk of termination shock if civilization ever stops injecting it, (3) the only long term route to a stable client is to stop emitting and to remove the CO2 excess we’re adding, (4) all of this assumes that solar radiation management doesn’t have terrible unexpected effects on the climate.

We’re probably going to have to do it anyway as a Hail Mary, since we’re now seeing clouds disappear due to warming. But it’s an emergency measure and not a solution. https://www.science.org/content/article/earth-s-clouds-are-s...

Why is the goal to get something "stable" in the first place? Climate on earth never was and never will be stable, so this should not be our goal in the first place. The goal should be to keep the change fairly slow because most living things have trouble with fast changes. That's it we don't need more than that.

"Fairly slow" on an evolutionary timescale and "stable" across human timescales are functionally the exact same thing.

The difference between the two is negligible compared to the difference between either of them and what we currently have, which is "unprecedented" on human timescales and euphemistically "radical" on evolutionary ones.

You might as well say "look I just don't understand why people say we need to stop the car, obviously slowing down to walking speed would be enough" while the car continues to accelerate at full throttle towards a cliff edge.

> The goal should be to keep the change fairly slow because most living things have trouble with fast changes.

That's what is meant by "stable". It doesn't mean static.

But no one knows what "fairly slow" is. Also the climate collapse theories predict that once a certain tipping point is reached, its game over. If that is true then slow and stable increase still gets us to that point just a bit later.

In other words to make climate change stable do we need to reduce CO2 emissions, completely stop CO2 emission or remove CO2 and reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere?

We don't even know which of these 3 options would lead to the "fairly slow/stable" we want. It seems like we just do all 3 with no evidence of any real world effect whatsoever.

That sulfur was removed to reduce acid rain, so its not without some pretty terrible side effects.

The idea (in theory being the key word) is by injecting into the stratosphere minimises acid rain production and maximises cooling requiring less SO2

Wont it just fall back down again?

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