Wait... We need to bring back pollution to cool down the earth?
The nightmare scenario would be something like we start releasing sulfates into the upper atmosphere to induce cooling to counter the warming from greenhouse gases but do not reduce the growth in greenhouse gases.
Greenhouse gases would continue growing and so the amount of sulfates we have to release to counter that also would keep growing.
There are two big problems with that.
#1. The greenhouse gas emissions are a side effect of numerous useful and important activities. People make a lot of money from those activities. They happen unless we make a concerted effort to reduce them.
The sulfite emissions on the other hand would be specifically to counter the effects of greenhouse gases. Whoever is paying for them would be losing money doing this. All it takes is an economic downturn to make budgets tight and funding might go away.
#2. Greenhouse gases can affect climate for a long time. It takes hundreds to thousands of years in the case of CO2 for today's emissions to be no longer affecting the climate.
Sulfates in the upper atmosphere clear out in months to maybe a couple years.
Let's say then we go down the sulfates path, don't reduce greenhouse gas growth and this goes on for decades. Then something stops or disrupts the sulfate releases for a couple years and the sulfites leave the upper atmosphere.
The greenhouse gases are there still there and we rapidly get most of the warming that had been held off for decades by the sulfates.
This would likely be disastrous. Getting all that warming spread over several decades at least gives people time to adapt. Getting it all over a few years would be way to fast for people to deal with.
I think probably the only way purposefully emitting pollutants like this might be acceptable would be after we've got greenhouse gas emissions under control and are on a path we are sure is going to get is to net zero in some specific timeframe, but it will still take a few years to reach peak greenhouse emissions and we've identified a tipping point that we will hit before that. Then maybe countering that with emitting pollutants just until greenhouse gases peak and then come down to where we are below that tipping point might be reasonable.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/indias-solar-boo...
It's quite the opposite situation than the US, where coal is extremely high-quality and private player participation is unrestricted.
I'm not holding my breath. I'm happy they saw a slight reduction in oil and gas use, though.
They are technically also paying the rich (and crucially the companies that supply things for both the rich and poor) to not use oil and gas too.
The entire point is that the global climate is a complex system and changing things may have unintended consequences.
Proved by reality, that's why they propose to reduce or even undo human emissions.
It's just shifting, what types and where, energy is generated.
And those shifts, have tradeoffs.
Want cleaner air in developed urban areas via EVs? ok cool, but the tradeoff is more mines elsewhere to supply those minerals, more batteries and metals for charging infrastructure.
There is no free lunch in the energy world, solar and wind have tradeoffs.
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/VW-and-H...
( Carbon Dioxide Absorbs and Re-emits Infrared Radiation - https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-climate-works/carbo... )
You want science, testable and repeatable science?
Start with, say, Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity (1967)
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...
described as "the most influential studies of all time" ( https://www.carbonbrief.org/prof-john-mitchell-how-a-1967-st... )
There are others: https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-most-influential-climate-cha...
The real world physics of doubling a low CO2 concentration in representative air samples has been performed many a time .. it works as the cited paper says .. trapping more of heat energy radiated upwards by the land and sea that would otherwise diffuse outwards.
People calculated precisely what exactly happens when you double CO2... And the effect it's logarithmic...
Maybe read the paper and those that followed, especially about the follow on increases in water vapor and methane and where trapped heat energy goes once there's little to no ice left to melt and act as a sink.
The people you are quoting are a known fossil fuel disinformation crew providing a pension plan to fossils like Clauser who have zero peer review papers in any part of the climate or geophysics field despite some sound work in unrelated fields contemporous with 1967.
Original paper (on arvix, not accepted by any mainstream journal so far): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.03098.pdf
C.A. de Lange loves it, claims it as game changing etc: https://co2coalition.org/publications/van-wijngaarden-and-ha...
There are a number of discussions re: the original paper and why it was not accepted, eg:
What is technically wrong with Wijngaarden & Happer's paper claiming to show that CO2's contribution to surface warming is saturated? - https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/25227/what-...
The thing about Venus is also something you'll find if you look for serious papers trying to criticise the paper. Nitpicking about the word logarithmic seems to be the only things that serious critics have found. The other main argument seems to be name calling and Cancel Culture... and that's all what critics so far have produced...
Claiming that things are unaccepted is also some kind of rumour. There are more papers, and if you read them you'll notice that they're of very high quality. Just compare the quality with that of papers of critics...
To me the most compelling argument for Wijngaarden is the incredible low quality of all the writings from people from climate-institutes that tried to find something against him. OMG...
For some that is less cows, for others, it seems like the desired solution is less humans.
Dirt poor people heat and cook with coal or firewood. They burn down forests to plant food. They are sustained by long supply chains by well intentioned NGOs rather than local produce.
It's not simple to say rich people are polluters, and poor people are living naturally.
Although per capita, the middle class consumer may be the worst of them all.
- start with the humans that pollute more - which is way more correlated to their consumption that their solar roof surface. Sorry USA, you go first. Others high standard living countries follows.
- Regarding the cows, they have a shorter lifespan and don’t shop much neither do they heat their house or shower water. We could just stop breeding new ones and keep the existant till their death.
Their farts are not a long term issue like so damn many people make it out to be. (and I don't think they don't produce (that much) more than the wildlife and plant rot they replace over the total outsized amount of space they actually take up) If there's a reason to have less it's because we chop down forests for more grazing space to grow the herd. Environment impact aside these are carbon sinks even if vastly less efficient than kelp forests or bogs or the like. Also because we use a bit of fossil fuels for fertilizers in part for their feed. That said the manure they produce is probably invaluable in avoiding famines if we're going to stop utilizing Haber–Bosch or start utilizing more expensive methods without gas.