The species that replaces us as the penultimate will appreciate our efforts as we have appreciated previous terraformers like first organism that polluted this world with oxygen.
One of the big reasons I support off world colonization is because that's probably the only way people will believe that the atmosphere is a thing. Similar to how people really didn't believe there was an "environment"[1] until "Earthrise" in 1968.
If they see "atmosphere" killing other people, all the time, on TV, because someone goofed the gas balance in the Muskdome, then they'll maybe crank up their critical thinking skills.
Also, voting for Space Umbrella. And whoever terraforms the Earth gets to charge rent - financial people need to think about that one.
[1] Like, "closed system" environment, not Walden Pond "environment"
"The properties of ice make it particularly well suited to catalysing chlorine activation and to removing nitrogen oxides at the low temperatures of the stratosphere, but there are clues that other particle types might also have a role. The powerful eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 injected large amounts of sulfur dioxide gas into the stratosphere. After being transported long distances and oxidized, this gas became a layer of reflective sulfuric acid particles over much of the globe. In addition to reducing global average surface temperatures by 0.5 °C for more than a year, these particles also catalysed ozone loss in the stratosphere — not just over polar regions, but throughout the mid-latitudes" (cites Brasseur, G. & Granier, C. Science 257, 1239–1242 (1992) here)
It doesn't matter how technically feasible this is, if nobody can make a profit from it it isn't happening.
The people who can afford to pay for this can also afford to avoid the worst effects of climate change, probably much cheaper while throwing the rest of us under a bus.
You are thinking too small at the level of a penny wise miser.
Making things profitable just requires policy changes. Just look at the IRA in the US right now incentivizing all sorts of things that would otherwise not be that profitable right now rather successfully. Whole industries bootstrapping themselves because of it. And the best part is you can fund it through debt. There was no tax raise to pay for the 1 trillion $ IRA budget. And it's not a zero sum game of course. It's not a hand out but an investment with a positive return on investment. The investment is long term profitable.
Terraforming is going to require large scale investments and there will be plenty of opportunity to profit from that. All it requires is some policy. How do you think people got to the moon? Frugal people counting pennies or people just going for it and moving extreme amounts of funding to make it happen? History is full of moonshots.
We need to implement a global market for CO2 emissions. If the supply of rights to emit C02 is low enough (e.g., negative), the price will raise so high that these people can make a profit of removing CO2.
CO2 accounting is hard and easy to corrupt. And I don't believe that market value alone is a strong enough utility signal to be used to prioritize the important aspects of life.
I used to think this, but if you look at the history of environmentalism, many unprofitable changes have been made (e.g. CFC production reduced, leaded gasoline replaced)
This is a dangerous idea to spread, because if you truly believe it then the only solution is dismantle capitalism. The irony is that regulated capitalism in the West has been the most effective at reducing emissions. The places with the worst emissions have the same economic incentives, but different policy (such as China).
There were less crazy people back then. Or more to the point, they didn't have internet connections and could bully and hector elected officials and scientists and thus stall progress in those space. Things are different now.
How do you figure China is an exemplar for worst emissions? They emit less per capita than the US today as well as historically. They are investing $450 billion over the next 15 years to build 150 new nuclear reactors, more than the rest of the world has built combined over the past 35 years. They're a leader in solar and are learning from the recent hydropower shortages they experienced [0].
The relative rate of emissions reduction: Chinas emissions accelerate while the wests plateaus.
The Chinese don’t emit less because they are good global citizens, it is because they are less wealthy. If emissions per capita is our judge, we should be congratulating all the countries in the worst poverty, since they use the least amount of energy.
> How do you figure China is an exemplar for worst emissions? They emit less per capita than the US today as well as historically.
But the Chinese are also poorer, on average, and since poorer people tend to live a simpler life (not that it is a bad thing), emission per capita may not be a good indicator.
An alternative is to compare tons of CO2 emitted for each USD of GDP produced, which, using the numbers the world bank [1], turns out to be 0.6 for China and 0.2 for the US (using figures from 2021 for GDP and population, and 2019 for emissions, but the results hold qualitatively). Roughly speaking, this means that the same good/service required, on average, three times as much CO2 to be produced/offered in China compared to the US (using USD to measure the "quantity" of goods/services).
Change is definitely possible, but unlike with CFCs some very rich, powerful, influential people are meddling with the affairs of every government around the world. Reducing CO2 is affecting the bottom line of some very important people and that's what will cripple many countries more than any real economic ideals.
China's emissions aren't even all that high when you take into account their absolutely massive population. Oil states, tiny states, and western(ised) states are still the top polluters. Per capita, China is about on par with north-western European countries. The average person in China emits between half to two thirds of the carbon emissions the average American citizen emits, and countries like Canada and Australia carbon footprints similar to the USA.
The Chinese carbon emission reduction industry has been so effective that their solar panels had to be taxed extra or even banned from import into the EU because their cheap solar power was killing the European industry and creating an economic dependence on China. While the west is working hard on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, upcoming economies like China and India need to deal with prevention as much as reduction. Frankly, it's amazing how much these economies have managed to limit their carbon footprint despite their massive population and rapidly increasing wealth.
CO2 is harder to limit than CFCs, but my point is that there are existence proofs that policy can trump economics.
I agree the West is higher on a per capita basis, but the important measure is the change. The West is cutting emissions per person, and China is increasing them.
It’s significant that China is mostly selling their panels to the West. If they are such world leaders, why do they continue to accelerate coal and gas generation? If they have the cheapest panels, why don’t they just use those? Because their policy is to maximise economic power and practically ignore emissions. Unless the west finds a way to incentivise reductions in the east and developing world (eg green investment, tariffs based on emissions), our sacrifices will have been in vain.
> "The people who can afford to pay for this can also afford to avoid the worst effects of climate change, probably much cheaper while throwing the rest of us under a bus."
They think they can avoid the worst effects of climate change, but I'd wager they're shockingly wrong about that. They'll more likely only delay their misery for a while longer than the rest of us.
You're 110% right that they'll surely try their very best to "throw everyone else under the bus" though. They've already show their true colors pretty clearly. No reason they'll suddenly get their shit together and grow the hell up now.
> They'll more likely only delay their misery for a while longer than the rest of us.
Yep, but they will have died of natural age. So for the coming decades, people with money can avoid the effects (they can just move, buy more cooling/heating/electric, get food anyway etc) and then they die. The next generation will be similar, and so on, until even the rich cannot get away.
Many people who care and want to change cannot do anything or at least feel they cannot (a child-less one-Prius family driving less is not exactly a feeling of impact).
Eh, there’ll be a pretty sharp turn within the timeframe of 20 years or so, maybe, but nothing real drastic is going to shift over the course of a year - I mean, short of a nuclear attack. Thing all just get measurably worse, poor people will get gut with the worst of it. I don’t think it’ll be bad enough for the jet set crowd.
This is a reflection of the political policy of the day. Economics and capitalism being political policies dressed up with quant models and endowed academic chairs to rubberstamp the distribution of money.
This is not universal physics.
Same for the "Limited Liability Corporation", protections from Ex Post Facto law enforcement, and the like. Political constructs.
Should people get pissed off enough, they won't matter. Now, the rich are good at not being the focus of the angry mob ... usually.
But the point is, the rich are playing games with the core stability of the world, to say nothing of the viability of the interconnected web of species on the planet. It's frankly pretty nuts.
The rich are insane. Sane people would not be doing this.
Once you're talking about millions a year rather than billions or trillions I don't know if that's true. A government (or a group of several) could decide to do it because their citizens would benefit from a reduction in warming.
Whether there would still be appetite for the larger price tag of carbon sequestration once there was a band-aid for warming is another question though.
I don't agree with this line of reasoning.
I would not expect a random commercial company to decide to do this on their own.
I would expect the population and politicians of a country to realise this is what needs to be done, and to put into law public-funded initiatives to work towards these goals.
In the non-US country where I live, we already do this with sustainable energy sources and vehicle types. We tax usage of fossil-fuel vehicles, and give subsidies on using 'clean-energy' vehicles. We execute policies on windmill farms and solar panel areas.
We also publicly finance e.g. the common shared road network of asphalt, without having an owning commercial company directly profiting off our road network.
The only reason I can see this would break,
is to the extent public government law turns into a lobbying nightmare, where all law-making is reduced to paid-for-by-lobbyist initiatives. Outside the US, that is not where we are yet (though I am aware of the risk - money and power perpetually will corrupt).
I don't see the problem as mainly a billionare-problem ('this is not a problem for billionaires.')
Instead, I see the problem with countries that disagree on these policies - country A spending 100s of billions to fix climate issues,
at the same time country B ignores it all and behaves like, well, the US and Russia.
We know that we are living in an icehouse phase, and earth will return to a greenhouse in time, irrelevant to us.
"Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history... Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously."
I can only point to this interview, which I read some years ago. Fascinating, in its entirety.
"In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the
neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs
than one in the neighborhood of 28...
"When
the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases
as a result of photosynthesis.
"The Cretaceous is clearly a green house
period as opposed to the present ice house that we have. The Cretaceous is a time of tremendous
biological diversity. It is usually said among ecologists today that it is not possible to have more than
seven trophic levels in a trophic pyramid. I would be willing to bet, looking at how I have seen
ecosystems in the Cretaceous, that there were at least eight and maybe nine trophic levels
possible, which would require very much higher temperatures and a much richer food supply than is
available at the moment. Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater
biogenic diversity.
"One of the problems that people
have always suggested about these high levels of oxygen at various times in the past, is that this is
comparable to what you have in an oxygen tent in a hospital. And what about wildfires? What they
forget is that the reason for this high oxygen is that there is also a high carbon dioxide level. We are
talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. And that is more
than enough to essentially combat wildfires."
Yeah, the earth has been cooling down and heating up throughout the history.
Yet, the spike in Co2 levels just after the industrial revolution is unlike any spike earth has ever had naturally. The Earth has never had this drastic changes to its climate as it had in this span of time. Earth's climate has always been changing, but the change was gradual. 200 years is just a blink of an eye in the context of a planet - changes as drastic as we observe today, have never taken place naturally before.
You are correct; the Earth has experienced CO2 rise of this speed before (as far as we know). But not for millions of years, and each time would have been a mass extinction event. https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/
Just because it's happened before (millions of years ago) doesn't mean it's not serious.
Previously the Earth was struck by a giant asteroid, causing a mass extinction event that more or less leads directly to the rise of mammals. Therefore, it's no big deal for us if that happens again.
Don't worry. If Earth becomes inhospitable we'll simply go to Mars, which is much more hostile to any form of life than the Earth is even under the most pessimistic scenarios of global warming. Wait a minute.
Well actually no. Heating is easy, all you need is a power source and a resistive wire. Cooling is hard because you need to radiate the heat away. If earth became 100°C it will be easier to live on Mars.
Cold is far from the only thing that makes Mars inhospitable. Also where are you going to get the electricity for heating on that scale? Assuming you're talking about the whole planet. If you're just talking about heating habitats, it really is approximately as easy to cool as to heat.
"Relatively minuscule quantities of sulfur dioxide (SO2) in the stratosphere are extremely reflective, scattering some of the sun’s light before it hits the Earth, and in the process contributing to the atmospheric haze that gives sunsets their characteristic red color. "
Sounds idyllic of course, but we really don't fully understand what effects such an intervention would have, and unlike what is claimed, we can't turn it off if it goes wrong.
A much safer alternative IMHO is to spray seawater to enhance marine cloud formation.
Also a possible alternative to grinding up mountains is marine iron fertilization, but again, we don't fully understand the effects.
> Stratospheric SO2 rains out of the atmosphere after a year or so, so unlike CO2 emissions it is relatively easy to control the dosing and the magnitude of the desired effect
Is this not true? I'm curious about where I can read more about research about the lifetime of atmospheric SO2.
Edit: The best source I could find about stratospheric SO2 was based on measurements after Pinatubo at
I see that the concentration declined to roughly 1% after 180 days (Figure 7). Volcanic aerosols seem to last a bit longer but seem to go back to background around 4 years (Figure 10).
One sort of point was a recent article going around showing that sulfur output from cargo ships was lowered recently, and this seems to have lead to a noticable increase in ocean temperatures along shipping routes. So the cut in sulfur lead to measurable changes less than a year into this change (and the change has seemed to be consistent). In peer review but if that holds this would probably have similar qualities.
Governments cannot even do little local control such as inflation, and people have these fancy ideas about controlling the *temperature* of the entire Earth. Ideas about ulterior motives left as an exercise to the reader.
67 comments
[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadIf they see "atmosphere" killing other people, all the time, on TV, because someone goofed the gas balance in the Muskdome, then they'll maybe crank up their critical thinking skills.
Also, voting for Space Umbrella. And whoever terraforms the Earth gets to charge rent - financial people need to think about that one.
[1] Like, "closed system" environment, not Walden Pond "environment"
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00598-w
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aae0061
The people who can afford to pay for this can also afford to avoid the worst effects of climate change, probably much cheaper while throwing the rest of us under a bus.
(Not that I think terraforming earth is a good idea at this stage, though)
Making things profitable just requires policy changes. Just look at the IRA in the US right now incentivizing all sorts of things that would otherwise not be that profitable right now rather successfully. Whole industries bootstrapping themselves because of it. And the best part is you can fund it through debt. There was no tax raise to pay for the 1 trillion $ IRA budget. And it's not a zero sum game of course. It's not a hand out but an investment with a positive return on investment. The investment is long term profitable.
Terraforming is going to require large scale investments and there will be plenty of opportunity to profit from that. All it requires is some policy. How do you think people got to the moon? Frugal people counting pennies or people just going for it and moving extreme amounts of funding to make it happen? History is full of moonshots.
This isn’t going to happen soon. The developing economies can’t get out of poverty without burning cheap fuel.
Why are companies buying them? Do these companies get tax write offs? Does it help with employee retention? To deflect other bad press?
This is a dangerous idea to spread, because if you truly believe it then the only solution is dismantle capitalism. The irony is that regulated capitalism in the West has been the most effective at reducing emissions. The places with the worst emissions have the same economic incentives, but different policy (such as China).
[0] https://www.chinawaterrisk.org/opinions/what-lessons-do-the-...
The Chinese don’t emit less because they are good global citizens, it is because they are less wealthy. If emissions per capita is our judge, we should be congratulating all the countries in the worst poverty, since they use the least amount of energy.
But the Chinese are also poorer, on average, and since poorer people tend to live a simpler life (not that it is a bad thing), emission per capita may not be a good indicator.
An alternative is to compare tons of CO2 emitted for each USD of GDP produced, which, using the numbers the world bank [1], turns out to be 0.6 for China and 0.2 for the US (using figures from 2021 for GDP and population, and 2019 for emissions, but the results hold qualitatively). Roughly speaking, this means that the same good/service required, on average, three times as much CO2 to be produced/offered in China compared to the US (using USD to measure the "quantity" of goods/services).
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/?locations=US-CN
China's emissions aren't even all that high when you take into account their absolutely massive population. Oil states, tiny states, and western(ised) states are still the top polluters. Per capita, China is about on par with north-western European countries. The average person in China emits between half to two thirds of the carbon emissions the average American citizen emits, and countries like Canada and Australia carbon footprints similar to the USA.
The Chinese carbon emission reduction industry has been so effective that their solar panels had to be taxed extra or even banned from import into the EU because their cheap solar power was killing the European industry and creating an economic dependence on China. While the west is working hard on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, upcoming economies like China and India need to deal with prevention as much as reduction. Frankly, it's amazing how much these economies have managed to limit their carbon footprint despite their massive population and rapidly increasing wealth.
I agree the West is higher on a per capita basis, but the important measure is the change. The West is cutting emissions per person, and China is increasing them.
It’s significant that China is mostly selling their panels to the West. If they are such world leaders, why do they continue to accelerate coal and gas generation? If they have the cheapest panels, why don’t they just use those? Because their policy is to maximise economic power and practically ignore emissions. Unless the west finds a way to incentivise reductions in the east and developing world (eg green investment, tariffs based on emissions), our sacrifices will have been in vain.
They think they can avoid the worst effects of climate change, but I'd wager they're shockingly wrong about that. They'll more likely only delay their misery for a while longer than the rest of us.
You're 110% right that they'll surely try their very best to "throw everyone else under the bus" though. They've already show their true colors pretty clearly. No reason they'll suddenly get their shit together and grow the hell up now.
Yep, but they will have died of natural age. So for the coming decades, people with money can avoid the effects (they can just move, buy more cooling/heating/electric, get food anyway etc) and then they die. The next generation will be similar, and so on, until even the rich cannot get away.
Many people who care and want to change cannot do anything or at least feel they cannot (a child-less one-Prius family driving less is not exactly a feeling of impact).
This is not universal physics.
Same for the "Limited Liability Corporation", protections from Ex Post Facto law enforcement, and the like. Political constructs.
Should people get pissed off enough, they won't matter. Now, the rich are good at not being the focus of the angry mob ... usually.
But the point is, the rich are playing games with the core stability of the world, to say nothing of the viability of the interconnected web of species on the planet. It's frankly pretty nuts.
The rich are insane. Sane people would not be doing this.
Whether there would still be appetite for the larger price tag of carbon sequestration once there was a band-aid for warming is another question though.
So if
"Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history... Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Eart...
This change would be extremely traumatic for humans, as our whole species existence has been in an icehouse.
The good news is that we have only raised co2 levels by one hundred parts per million (to 450) in the whole history of industrial output.
Our impact is not as great as we think, as the cretaceous saw co2 at 5,000-15,000ppm.
If we want to hold the earth under 500ppm, I think, with our ingenuity and growing knowledge, that this can be done.
Is this correct? The data I can see shows more like 1,000-2,000ppm.
"In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28...
"When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis.
"The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have. The Cretaceous is a time of tremendous biological diversity. It is usually said among ecologists today that it is not possible to have more than seven trophic levels in a trophic pyramid. I would be willing to bet, looking at how I have seen ecosystems in the Cretaceous, that there were at least eight and maybe nine trophic levels possible, which would require very much higher temperatures and a much richer food supply than is available at the moment. Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity.
"One of the problems that people have always suggested about these high levels of oxygen at various times in the past, is that this is comparable to what you have in an oxygen tent in a hospital. And what about wildfires? What they forget is that the reason for this high oxygen is that there is also a high carbon dioxide level. We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. And that is more than enough to essentially combat wildfires."
https://profjoecain.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/robert-e-...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-08234-0
Yet, the spike in Co2 levels just after the industrial revolution is unlike any spike earth has ever had naturally. The Earth has never had this drastic changes to its climate as it had in this span of time. Earth's climate has always been changing, but the change was gradual. 200 years is just a blink of an eye in the context of a planet - changes as drastic as we observe today, have never taken place naturally before.
Just because it's happened before (millions of years ago) doesn't mean it's not serious.
Perhaps, for a time, we can intervene. Perhaps not.
Can we even make Earth like Mars or Moon?
Sounds idyllic of course, but we really don't fully understand what effects such an intervention would have, and unlike what is claimed, we can't turn it off if it goes wrong.
A much safer alternative IMHO is to spray seawater to enhance marine cloud formation.
Also a possible alternative to grinding up mountains is marine iron fertilization, but again, we don't fully understand the effects.
> Stratospheric SO2 rains out of the atmosphere after a year or so, so unlike CO2 emissions it is relatively easy to control the dosing and the magnitude of the desired effect
Is this not true? I'm curious about where I can read more about research about the lifetime of atmospheric SO2.
Edit: The best source I could find about stratospheric SO2 was based on measurements after Pinatubo at
https://www.osti.gov/pages/servlets/purl/1439705
(https://doi.org/10.1002/2017JD027006)
I see that the concentration declined to roughly 1% after 180 days (Figure 7). Volcanic aerosols seem to last a bit longer but seem to go back to background around 4 years (Figure 10).
Is there something about the stuff being recommended here that makes this not very nasty to just dump all over the ocean?
$350m/year sounds very cheap though. Just convince some billionaire to pay for this for the next 40 years?