… this points to the importance of studying the effects of deliberate atmospheric aerosol injections… I think calcium carbonate is very promising—but we need to start doing tests asap to learn the effects.
Solar growth is likely to remain exponential for the next decade or so, which will create a number of new opportunities. Other energy sources will also come online. But fossil fuels are unlikely to be regulated away, globally. We are also likely past some serious tipping points— so I prefer to figure out ASAP whether stratospheric aerosol injections are a viable tactic for preventing the melting of permafrost, for instance.
but you're burying the lede: "We are also likely past some serious tipping points—" == we're doomed, just slowly, and we desperately need to be doing something to slow down or stop this metaphorical bus before it falls off a cliff
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1fx12q1/is_an_em_d...
Some random small group of people get to take these risks for all humanity? No thanks.
Like, say, petroleum exporters?
Especially when the alternative solution to global warming is… degrowth. Which is just not going to work functionally as a political policy in a competitive world.
Fossil fuel use will decrease significantly… eventually.
Btw, did you know that if the USA replaced farmland currently growing biofuels with solar, that land area would produce 4x the current total electricity use of the entire nation?
We need to buy time — we can’t let the permafrost melt because “stupid humans deserve it”
Would it produce that much or would that be the capacity? They're very different things that i see endlessly confused in this context.
Unfortunately even if/when we completely stop producing CO₂, it takes at least several centuries until levels go fully back down to natural levels by themselves.
Pumping SO₂ into the stratosphere should be able to regulate global temperatures to reasonable levels while we develop effective CO₂ sequestration.
Unfortunately SO₂ injection is incredibly controversial, as it triggers the "don't mess with nature" taboo, especially among people who have seen Jurassic Park, and affects the whole planet, including those who don't want it.
We do actually know that SO₂ breaks down in the stratosphere in 1-2 years, because we've studied when volcanoes injects it. It also doesn't cause acid rain because it's above the rain cycle.
But these facts are very hard to get across to people.
Suppose we start putting enough SO₂ in the stratosphere to halt warming or at least slow its growth down.
I can almost guarantee that the response of the current US government would not be "Whew...now that we've averted the near term problems we were facing from climate change we can get to work on seriously getting rid of most fossil fuels use".
No, it would be "Great! We can now get rid of those cancer causing wind farms and ugly solar farms and go all in on a 100% fossil fuel economy featuring a massive increase in coal. We should have been doing that all along but enough people believed in the global warming hoax to slow us down. Now we are free of that!".
We'd need ongoing increasing SO₂ injections to counter this, and all it would take is something to disrupt that for a few years and then all that increasing warming that has held back by those injections would come roaring back. But we'd be getting that warming increase over a short term instead of a longer term, making it much harder to deal with.
Any practical solution will consist of a wide array of approaches executed in parallel.
Talking about suddenly getting the whole world to stop using oil is a hypothetical thought exercise. It’s not going to happen. We have to be looking at all of the approaches together, including some lessening of fossil fuel use.
To risky in terms of liability.
Otherwise I'm gonna hold the international maritime organisation solely responsible for every drought, fire and megastorm from how much their ban of fuel with sulphur content has exacerbated the warming situation by destabilizing the existing balance.
we are going to see countries going to war over unilateral solar radiation management efforts
Ironically, aerosol injection will probably benefit fossil fuel companies, with less pressure to meet aggressive emissions targets.
ETA: Don’t get me started on how weird it is that there’s a pre-spun conspiracy theory in chemtrails, one that makes zero sense but happens to align perfectly with making geoengineering even more difficult. But now I’m being conspiratorial.
It wasn't too long ago since another aerosol punctured a giant hole into our ozone, what was the effect of that?
They can sit on their asses, but going against people who actually try to do something to address climate change is a step too far.
There's currently 31 states who have bills to ban geoengineering. Its not just red states, there are plenty of "blue states" on the list as well. Painting this as a partisan political issue is just stupid. California is set to join the list as well.
March 2025:
As of this week, 31 out of 50 U.S. states—well over half the nation—have introduced legislation to ban or severely limit geoengineering and weather modification operations. Just days ago, on March 24th, that number stood at 24. Seven new states have joined in under a week, reflecting an undeniable groundswell of public awareness and political will.
https://sayerji.substack.com/p/weve-crossed-the-tipping-poin...
Anyone can introduce legislation. Keep this off HN.
B) Had you spent five minutes researching what's going on, you would've seen an article from last year about Alameda City, a city in California (yes, THAT California, the supposed VERY BLUE STATE California) that banned geoengineering:
June 2024:
A Northern California city council voted early Wednesday morning to cancel the nation’s first outdoor experiment into the potential to limit global warming by altering cloud behavior.
The five-member Alameda City Council voted unanimously to reject University of Washington researchers’ aerial spraying of liquefied salt from the deck of a retired aircraft carrier in San Francisco Bay, two months after the experiment began.
And shockingly, the report isn't in some strange substack. Its actually a well known LEFT LEANING site - Politico:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/05/california-geoengin...
But hey man, just keep believing that this is simply some red state conspiracy to block climate change.
If not its a distraction, not a solution.
skimming through a couple of studies, measurable impact starts around 1000 ppm. with current policy intervention, we will likely reach 550ppm by 2100
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/grantham/publications/briefing-pa...
NASA and the US Navy have been conducting studies since the 1960s showing no loss of cognitive function up to 50000ppm or so.
Submarines and space vehicles regularly operate at CO2 levels much higher than 1000ppm. If the levels of cognitive decline were anywhere close to what some of these studies show it would be easily observable in astronauts and submariners.
Not to mention testing locations with good ventilation would show drastically higher scores over all on standardized tests, and individuals would show drastically higher scores between attempts depending on ventilation.
None of these things happen. The only logical conclusion is that there is some flaw in study methodology.
> Recent studies have shown that short-term exposure to high levels of indoor carbon dioxide (CO2) could negatively affect human cognitive performance, but the results are still controversial. In this study, a systematic review and meta-analysis of fifteen eligible studies was performed to quantify the effects of short-term CO2 exposure on cognitive task performance. The control CO2 levels used for comparison were below 1000 ppm, while the exposure concentrations were divided into three groups: 1000–1500 ppm, 1500–3000 ppm, and 3000–5000 ppm. The results indicated that CO2 exposure below 5000 ppm impacted human cognitive performance, with complex cognitive tasks being more significantly affected than simple tasks. The complex task performance declined significantly when exposed to additional CO2 concentrations of 1000–1500 ppm and 1500–3000 ppm, with pooled standardized mean differences (SMDs) (95% CI) of −2.044 (−2.620, −1.467) and −0.860 (−1.380, −0.340), respectively.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232...
I don't know how large these effects are, but they are statistically significant.
Then they analyzed only complex cognitive tasks. But fewer studies included complex cognitive tasks, and they used different methods of adjusting CO2 exposure (ventilation vs adding pure CO2)
Then you’ll note that of those studies they found that:
“The effects of pure CO2 on complex cognitive task performance decreased with increased CO2 concentrations”.
Between 1000-1500, and 1500-3000ppm they found a decrease in complex cognitive tasks performance, but at a higher exposure of 3000-5000ppm they found no effect.
This makes no sense until you read
“the complex cognitive task results under pure additional CO2 concentrations of 1000–1500 ppm and 1500–3000 ppm showed publication bias.”
Handful of studies (many with sketchy methodology—reducing ventilation, which brings with it many more variables than just increased CO2), publication bias, and a negative dose dependent response.
Also that Satish et al. study (the author is the one I was referring to in my last post—they also have several other studies on the subject) shows an enormous effect IIRC, which would skew the aggregate effects in the meta study.
The effect sizes in that study were the ones I was referencing when I said that such effects would be obvious.
Since humans have been building shelter and living in caves, we have regularly been exposed to long term CO2 levels of 1000-2000ppm. The natural variations in ventilation dwarf a few hundred extra ppm in the atmosphere.
We’ve also been exposing submariners to thousands of ppm for extended periods with no observed effect, and we have many studies shows no observed effects up to 40k ppm.
We even have studies showing that small babies sleeping next to the mothers are exposed to CO2 levels of 5-10kppm.
The calcium carbonate dust is reflective (the aim of the engineering is to reflect sunlight away from the Earth's atmosphere in the first place). However, it doesn't contribute to acid rain or oceans like the sulfate dioxide does (the aerosol that East Asian scrubbers are removing).
The CO2 (a greenhouse gas) amount isn't increased in this engineering effort. It increases because of burning fossil fuels, though. In the East Asian countries, they are producing/using more energy (via burning fossil fuels), but only removing the reflective aerosol; they're still emitting the CO2.
If cost was no object, we'd probably need to use the calcium carbonate immediately (to prevent the sunlight from entering the atmosphere immediately), we'd scrub existing carbon from the atmosphere (CO2), and we'd convert power plants to non-emissive technologies (and also install scrubbers onto existing ones for as long as they're needed).