Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why (2024)

Eradicating all life is not unscientific, you might be better at throwing real arguments of why you don't like this idea instead of boasting.

The stuff about aerosols: The "plan" isn't that you dump a one time "treatment" of aerosols and then climate is reset. It's a continuous aerosol injection advitam aeternam to offset the warming - constant upkeep.

About comments on destruction of all life: the biosphere is so conplex it's hard to even grasp the gist of it. Global temp affects every level of it. Were this "treatment" be a little too strong/maladjusted, it could very well cause runaway mass death.

And we only have proof of life on earth - if we kill life on it, as far as we know, it's over for life itself. Can't be careful enough, and aerosol dispersal isn't that.

Regarding the “no way to undo” and the “violent snap back”, we know the desire albedo effects dissipate and therefore require continuous maintenance.

However, these aerosols also cause hard-to-reverse reactions to other things like damaging the ozone layer and causing rain pattern shifts.

Yeah, most climate catastrophe scenarios are of the severity you describe. This one is not.

The entire point of SAI is to “save up” damage to the environment. So over 100 years of SAI and then stopping, you will incur 100 years of atmospheric and temperature changes within a few months.

And that’s only over a hundred years. If we depend on this and do it for a thousand years, now it’s a thousand years of damage applied in months.

This is far, far, far faster than any biological system evolves. Sure maybe some microbes that can survive in a gigantic range of environments could survive, but no, probably no complex life forms would.

It's not quite that simple.

The intuition that you're subtly relying on is the idea that the response or effect of one of these geoengineering treatments is linear. But unfortunately, that's not something you can assume about a dynamical system. In reality, the climate system can undergo certain types of hysteresis where "undoing" the forcing doesn't revert the initial perturbation, because you're suddenly on a different response curve. Probably the most famous example of this in climate dynamics is the way that the ice-albedo effect sets up a hysteresis in the trajectory towards a "snowball Earth" scenario. Apologies for the lack of links/references; Wiki has decent write-ups on this, and it's typically covered in the first chapter of a climate dynamics textbook.

The potential response to suddenly stopping a climate change mitigation strategy has a very well-popularized name: a "termination shock." In fact, Neal Stephenson used exactly this concept in his titular novel on the topic in 2021.

As a climate scientist, my mental model to better understand the risk of termination shocks and unintended consequences boils down to how fast the response of the climate system is. Marine brightening is "less risky" because the meteorological response to these interventions is extremely fast; a cloud-precipitation system will respond on the order of minutes to hours, and unless the intervention continues unabated, it will clean the air quickly, limiting the repsonse. Stratospheric aerosol injection is more complicated, but we have a very good analogue - very large scale volcanic eruptions like Mt Pinatubo. The response to these sorts of events is measured more on the timescale of 2-5 years, although knock-on effects (such as a shift towards more diffuse solar radiation reaching the surface, which has significant effects on terrestrial and oceanic biogeochemistry) could very much persist longer than that - and don't "snap back" nearly as quickly. A continuous, Pinatubo-like intervention would compound and introduce coupled atmosphere/ocean responses that could decade years or longer to fully play out. And that's _in addition_ to the near immediate (1-2 year) response in global average temperature, which would bounce back to most of the pre-intervention level very quickly.

These things are complex. There's a lot we don't know. But, there's also a lot we _do_ know. I would encourage anyone who does not have significant experience in climate dynamics to remain curious and avoid jumping to conclusions based on simple intuition; they're probably wrong.

The effect that has on the climate depends on how much CO2 is in the atmosphere at the time.

If during the time we were doing the aerosol program we've also continued increasing CO2, using increasing aerosol releases to prevent that from causing warming, then when we stop with the aerosol we get that deferred warming over a few years or less.

We end up at the roughly the same place we would have been if we had not done the aerosols at all, except instead of getting from where we are now to them over several decades we get their over a few years.

Let's say that is 3℃ above current average temperature. A 3℃ rise over 2 years is a lot harder to handle than a 3℃ rise over 30 years.

Worse, if we started aerosols a lot of countries might decide that it is OK to keep increasing emission rates, so if we ever stop the aerosols were are looking at a rise to much higher than we would have had if we had not used aerosols.

You can go look up the differences in dissipation dynamics between that and what’s being proposed by the BS in Econ student and his growth marketing cofounder.

I wouldn't argue that all scientists are selfless that would be silly. I would argue that the average scientist is less selfish than the average politician, yes.

Examine the motivations. Few people go into pure science seeking power or money. Most or all politicians do.

This is where the "termination shock" issue comes in. Given current CO2 emission rates, a 50 year geoengineering strategy would mask an additional 100-125 ppm of CO2 added to the atmosphere. If the geoengineering scheme was suddenly stopped, it's not entirely obvious what the response trajectory would be of the climate system.