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Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I think it will be taking place for the remainder of our lifetimes.

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.

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It seems pretty wild that we would even think about deliberate climate engineering. We're dealing with an incredibly complex system, the only place we have to live, and one where "harmless" actions before have had devastating unforeseen effects decades later. The lesson we should have learned we need to stop pumping stuff into the atmosphere and oceans until something bad happens, not "let's pump more stuff into the atmosphere."

Some random small group of people get to take these risks for all humanity? No thanks.

>Some random small group of people

Like, say, petroleum exporters?

Thing is we're not stopping. So given the fact that we are not stopping and won't stop, climate engineering starts to look like a decent Sr ond choice. I mean it doesn't take much for it to be better than nothing.

It just seems collectively insane to NOT be researching the hell out of the possibility that we could regulate our global heat balance issues for a cost of a few tens of billions of dollars a year.

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”

> that land area would produce 4x the current total electricity use of the entire nation?

Would it produce that much or would that be the capacity? They're very different things that i see endlessly confused in this context.

everything we do is climate engineering, just not the deliberate kind

nice em dash -- how do I generate that in the text box?

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

ALT+0151

On macOS, you can do alt+shift+hyphen to get one: —.

On *nix, <Compose> <-> <-> <-> (or install a Mac-like layout and AltGr+Shift+<->).

On iOS: long press the “-“ keyboard button to access variants of longer lengths like “–“ and “—“ (and also a “•”).

I see the replies to the literal question, but I think the parent was pointing out the possibility of the grandparent post being AI generated. The em dash is one of the common indicators.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1fx12q1/is_an_em_d...

And all of the replies to the literal question are reasons not to take that as a sign of an AI-generated post.

This is a bad cop-out, honestly. Every macOS for at least 11 years—and iPhones for a similar length of time—have automatically changed dash dash space to an em-dash. Edit -> Substitutions -> Smart Dashes to toggle the behavior. Here's an 11-year-old video discussing the feature. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZrkDetAmpE

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