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Comment by zonkerdonker | Hacker News Reader

This, and stratospheric aerosol injection are both:

1. Incredibly cost effective 2. Mimic natural effects 3. Could pretyy easily cause anotger ice age if miscalculated

I wonder at what point the potential benefits will outweigh the potential risks for using these geoengineering techniques. Cant be far off, right?

Sulfur dioxide injection could halt global warming in its tracks for a measly $18 billion a year. I wonder if a vigilante billionaire climate activist gonna take a try in the next few decades..

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> 3. Could pretyy easily cause anotger ice age if miscalculated

Could they? At least for stratospheric aerosol injection it would be easy to just stop doing it if things seemed like they were tipping. It doesn't happen _that_ fast, we'd have time to notice and react.

It depends on how badly we may miscalculate the aerosol deterioration rate. If we inject a bit too much and it stubbornly stays airborne, that would be a hard geoengineering problem to tackle!

I'd say that things are not bad enough for anyone with the means to take the risk. When the things get bad enough for the Overton window to admit geoengineering, it may be too late for simple and affordable solutions, as usual.

We have some experimental data on this, though, since jetliners and volcanoes both inject sulfur into the stratosphere. The global air traffic halt of 2001 and the aftereffects of eruptions have been heavily studied.

(It would be ironic if the world's response to fossil CO2 emission is to mandate extra high sulfur jet fuel, but nothing would surprise me)

Another example is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer caused by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora

I wonder whether you have studied what happened in the past several centuries after major volcanic eruptions.

Imagine a nation state started doing this. Lets imagine the Netherlands because they realise that it is worth it for them alone when so much of their land is at sea level. They hope to reduce worldwide temps by 1.75C (to pre industrial levels) within a year or so, which would immediately halt sea level rise.

I think other nations will demand they stop - with threats of sanctions - simply because there are other nations who now depend on the higher temperatures and increased agricultural output.

Conversely, imagine a nation state like India that will experience mass death events if heat/humidity waves become too much worse. They would continue geoengineering even in the face of threat of nuclear retaliation because the consequences would be so dire.

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