The problem with anything to do with messing with clouds, cloud seeding, etc, is that for _most_ countries, it's absolutely going to to affect other countries. Few countries are large enough or sit near enough water, to do these things without casting a long shadow.
People are right to be afraid. If China starts trying to grow a desert somewhere, it's nearly guaranteed that the desert effect will generally be _displaced_ not removed. If it's displaced to another poorer country, are we suppose to just let that happen? Are we then going to give them tech to displace it further until the least among us has to suffer?
Sure, all this could be some how negotiated, but there's no evidence of the global will to even agree that climate change is a "bad thing"(tm)
Inexpensive? The stuff laid out in there would require a global effort. Microbubbles across the ocean surface! Spraying salt into the air to form reflective clouds (and I'm sure spraying salt everywhere wouldn't hurt anything either).
I think the most developed scheme is to seed the stratosphere with SO2. You need a large aircraft that flies above 80,000 feet. If you inject it where air is upwelling near the tropics it will spend a long time before settling out near the poles.
The obvious rebuttal is "What about acid rain?" but note that SO2 from power plants lasts several days in the atmosphere but SO2 is expected to last several years in the stratosphere. It seems likely you could get a larger cooling effect then we got from sulfur in coal back in the day but have much less acid rain.
To me the obvious rebuttal is what about the things that aren't obvious? The unknown unknowns that nobody knows to test for beforehand?
Our usual approach of "well we can't think of any reasons why it could go wrong, and we have to do something, so let's ship it and see what happens" is a little scary when it comes to something you might not get any do overs for.
I think it would be very much like us to wipe ourselves out this way though. And probably be proud of it at the same time.
Developing the aircraft would cost something in the low billions if you can find a partner that is experienced in developing aircraft. It's not going to have the need for extreme optimization that you'd need to compete with the A220 or the F-22. It could take 5 years to a decade to complete the project.
A small test of a full-scale system would get answers to the above questions and would not plausibly have catastrophic results. The longer we wait to try, the more likely we'll be up against the wall and facing dangerous tipping points and it will be too late. And it all costs less than a failing social media site.
> well we can't think of any reasons why it could go wrong
Sometimes smart people thinking about things really hard isn't enough. With such a complicated system, it seems likely that there would be some unforeseen results.
The climate is a complex nonlinear system with self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms. We had better make damn sure we understand what we are doing before embarking on global geoengineering.
Yes because we gave such a shit when we lit billions of tons of crap on fire and dumped it into the atmosphere without any regard? We are doing untested geoengineering already and have been for over a century and now you are worried about it?
That doesn't really follow. We know that the planet will warm from CO2 because of the physics of it. We spend gazillions modeling the climate. The scientists will tell you that the models have been very accurate (other will say otherwise, but...)
Those same models can be used to test various geo-engineering efforts. And should have similar accuracy.
Whether we should pursue those efforts is a matter of policy. But, rationally, we should definitely consider it.
Personally, Ithink that a small-ish (and growing) CO2 tax combined with a realistic effort to invest in nuclear will be enough to save us from really bad results. But plenty of people push back on those two things (from each "side"). So, here we are.
"According to Nilsen's calculations, the cost of implementing enhanced weathering is about $20/T-CO2. If there are two teratons of excess CO2 in our atmosphere, enhanced weathering can remove one teraton for about $400 billion US per year, over the next forty years."
I wonder what $400 billion/year in just solar panel purchasing and install would do to the climate? $400 billion/year could build a lot of nuclear plants as well. Begs the question, if we had unlimited money, what would we do that would be potential solve the climate crisis?
Enhanced weathering has the advantage that, if it works, it really takes CO2 out of the atmosphere and also reverses ocean acidification.
It's hard to know if it really works though because it is spread over such a large area and is hard to measure. Contrast that to injection into a saline aquifier where you can put a meter on the pipeline and know exactly how much gas you injected.
One basic challenge with it is that you have to more-or-less pulverize the rock to make it chemically reactive and you have to do that without generating more CO2 or spending too much money. This looks like the most attractive scheme yet and it's got the plus of raising crop yields.
We have satellites that can track CO2 concentrations in the air[0], allegedly at high resolution. If you spread out weathering rock to, I dunno, a square a few kilometers to a side, a gradient in CO2 might be measurable? If you're objective is much more quantitative than that, it probably is a non starter. Unless you were maybe flowing air actively over a controlled system and could take measurements at the input and output grating. But that seems a bit much.
If you did it at a large enough scale it would be detectable. It is not entirely undestood, but when Mt. Pinatubo blew up atmospheric CO2 levels dropped:
Enhanced weathering's goal is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, not to create energy.
Nuclear/solar/wind doesn't capture already-emitted CO2 from the atmosphere, and direct carbon capture and storage (DCCS) methods currently cost much more than the 20$/T-CO2.
While adopting solar/wind/nuclear is important, the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is already too high, so we need to apply some DCCS to return to 'normal' levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, and enhanced weathering sounds like a promising technology we could use to achieve that.
If we had unlimited money (which most monetarily sovereign governments do by the way) we'd be limited by real resources - the materials, the manufacturing capacity, the people that do the work. Long term strategic thinking is needed to direct what resources we have to where they are most needed for the long term goal.
In net terms, even at today's interest rates, solar panels have a negative net cost. In other words, if you borrow $1 to install panels and then use the cost savings to pay back the loan, your loan will be paid off within 3 - 20 years and then keep reducing your electricity costs.
So solar panels are cheaper than geoengineering. Similarly, so is wind, short term storage, a small amount of overbuild of renewable generation, increased interconnect, EV's, et cetera.
IOW, we would save money on net for the first >80% of carbon emission elimination.
Only for the last few percent of emissions is it worth discussing using solutions that cost money rather than save money. Things like cement production, long haul flights, et cetera.
A problem of solar panels and other types of green energy is that by themselves they don't reduce CO2 emissions: we use the green energy on top of the energy from fossil fuels.
Even with all the green energy installed world wide so far, global CO2 emissions are still increasing.
>According to Nilsen's calculations, the cost of implementing enhanced weathering is about $20/T-CO2.
And according to everyone else the cost is higher. I read into this a while back. Many articles have already made the rounds on HN, multiple times. The most commonly cited method is using olivine rock. If you consider the full life cycle: mining, crushing, transporting and spreading the rock, it is not as cheap as this guy's calculations. There are actual high quality publications on this but I cannot remember the ones I read. However you can find many if you search for "olivine weathering".
If geoengineering worked, was safe, and was much more affordable than meeting the aggressive greenhouse emission reduction targets needed to forestall further warming, climate activists would still oppose it anyway, since they've come to view the burning of fossil fuels as inherently immoral, in an almost religious-like manner. They'll say things like
> that still doesn't solve our addiction to fossil fuels!
why do we need to "solve" our addiction to fossil fuels? If we can geoengineer away the consequences and keep using cheap, plentiful fossil fuels (which our entire modern lifestyle is built on), then what's the problem? Eventually, probably by the end of this century, renewables will win out anyway. For example, if fusion ever pans out, that will probably do to fossil fuels collectively what natural gas did to thermal coal.
It would be nice to live in a city and not be bothered with the smell, noise and health risks of thousands of engines. It would also be nice if our environment wouldn't be plastered with microplastics.
Idk, maybe indirectly due to wear and tear or whatever. What i'm trying to say, though, is that the dependency on oil should be reduced in general. Nobody needs tupperware to last for centuries. That might also be the point of most environmentalists.
ICEs have numerous inherent disadvantage over EVs, including more moving parts and higher and more frequent maintenance costs, and are inevitably going to be displaced by EVs, provided electricity is cheap enough (and probably some battery tech advances).
Right now, natural gas is dirt-cheap, plentiful, and relatively clean, and can provide the cheap electricity needed for EVs.
Yes, but many manufacturers didn't particularly care about that. Especially not those in my country. Without pressure from the people and the following laws that were implemented by the government, BMW & Co. would still be happily developing new ICEs.
Also, the most ideal solution in my book would be to do less work, not more. Geoengineering requires quite a lot of work on a permanent basis.
Even in the absence of environmental costs, the fossil fuel system creates centralization and incentives toward dictatorship. It also requires a global fuel supply chain, which is inefficient and destructive compared to delivering e.g. solar panels once.
Geoengineering doesn't solve all the consequences but it solves some. I've done some analysis of the problem of building a factory that builds a factory that turns something like
into solar sails that navigate on their own power to the Earth-Sun L1 point. (Part of the problem is how do you build chemical factories that work in space, part of it is like building a ship in a bottle except you are in the bottle.) Such a scheme has few off-target effects on Earth because very little is done on Earth. It sure cools the planet but it does nothing to stop ocean acidification.
People in places like Saudi Arabia that are rich with both sulfur and oil might find it to be a convenient way to preserve the status quo, but many people who are interested in geoengineering also want to see decarbonization.
Funny in my research project I found that the chemistry it takes to make plastic out of the "coal", carbonates and volatiles that exist on asteroids is very similar to the chemistry to make jet fuel out of atmospheric CO2 and of course carbon is so precious on an asteroid that however you produce iron (abundant enough to use on CC and stony asteroids and the moon despite what you read in sci-fi novels) you are going to recycle whatever volatiles you use to reduce iron be that CO or H2.
Oil corporations and related industries has been making trillions of fossil carbon emissions, and is expensive to undo this? Who should pay here is clear.
And the focus of the article is to push a company that make biofuels, that don't increase the amount of fossil carbon, but also doesn't decrease the amount of GHG in the atmosphere nor through geoengineering try to cool down the planet. It may, eventually, work as an (expensive) alternative to fossil fuels, but that must happen, all points that fossil fuels will keep being extracted till they are not economical to extract them anymore. But as those "green" fuels are being generated, somewhat the perception of that something is being done remains.
Anyway, as with COVID, that when you notice the symptoms it is already too late for you and the people around you, we are now noticing the big symptoms of all those emissions during in the last decades. Even if we stop everything (not the fake stop of the "solution" the article is selling) the system inertia and its feedback loops will push the entire planet into a hot spot. Odds are high that a massive geoenginneering (or geotrying, at least) will be done, and not so low that that effort won't solve anything or worsen badly things in unexpected yet ways.
> Even if we stop everything the system inertia and its feedback loops will push the entire planet into a hot spot.
This sounds more like doomerism than science. Who can listen to this crap without wondering if the climate change believers aren't a little kookoo for cocopuffs?
It's well understood that even if we stopped all carbon emissions now, the warming trend would continue for a while. Even if it were not so, why would the comment of one random netizen make you question the beliefs of all the people who do follow the science?
Who can read comments like yours without wondering if all climate change deniers are all a bit disengenous?
It wouldn't. There's been a concerted effort for decades to do anything to keep the discourse from shifting to geoengineering. The same sort of unintelligent counter-arguments are used for it that the people who are overly concerned about the economy use.
> of all the people who do follow the science?
Nothing I have ever learned about science has ever said anything about "following science". It is a principle of science I have never heard even a hint of.
I have heard of people following religion. All the time. It seems to be one of their favorite words.
> Who can read comments like yours without wondering if all climate change deniers are all a bit disengenous?
If a grifter goes after you trying to pull a fast one, why would you have any obligation to be honest with them? In fact, if they start trying to harangue you about honesty, that's just another part of their grift.
Geoengineering is something I've never opposed. We can and probably should do it regardless of whether you guys are right about climate change. If it's too cold, make it warmer, if it's too hot, make it cooler.
The only reason to not do it is if you see an opportunity to seize political power by allowing a crisis to continue. If it gets solved (especially too early), you might not stay in charge (or in this case, never quite make it there in the first place).
"Following the science" just means paying attention to what science is telling us at the moment. You can also follow baseball or music or any other ongoing activity. It's a really common phrase, and is not a scientific principle.
> "Following the science" just means paying attention to what science is telling us at the moment.
Science doesn't tell us anything. It's just a loose set of methods for investigating how the universe works. When you anthropomorphize it, it's kind of dumb and sounds a little like you're trying to deify it.
Don't follow science. Perform it. Read it. Think about it.
Don't believe in it. It's not a religion. It's not your young child that needs you to believe in it. Instead, suspect the truth while remaining skeptical. Know it. Learn it.
Using emotionally charged words takes you further away from what it's all about.
Your own original comment was (I checked, to make sure it wasn't some third party joining in on our fray):
> make you question the beliefs of all the people who do follow the science?
It seems that, even in your own head, these two things are related very closely, the beliefs and the "following", to the point that this later assertion that they "have nothing to do with each other" is... just weird.
"Follow" is just a bad word. In the most generous way I am able to read your rebuttal, it seems that you may have (inadvertently) confused two separate meanings. It would be better if you were to excise it from your vocabulary. It would allow you to think more clearly, and to not make mistakes like this one.
Or should I go with the other, less generous, interpretations?
> Oil corporations and related industries has been making trillions of fossil carbon emissions, and is expensive to undo this? Who should pay here is clear.
If they even do pay (which is far from certain), they'll find a way to pass the costs to consumers.
I think we've seen over the past decade that countries are really quick to excuse acts of war because they don't want to go to war. See: cyber attacks, novichok, shooting down civilian airliners, spy balloons, Nordstream 2, ramming into a military drone to crash it.
Unless the geoengineering has a clear and large negative effect, or if it were done maliciously (somehow?), I don't see any wars arising. At most a strongly worded letter about how everyone else should have been consulted first.
Over a decade ago I was predicting that cohesive GHG mitigation agreements would stall because there is far too many groups and people in power who feel we can geo-engineer our way out of rising temperatures.
As an Australian, we probably have more caution in this area with most due to the massive ecological damage we've caused trying to engineer our way through pest control.
Geo-engineering should always be an ultimate last resort when nothing else is available, not a casual option to use at will.
Geoengineering is (un)shockingly imprudent. Do any of the man-made global warming/climate change hypotheses factor in any effects of solar cycles especially in conjunction with the long term weakening of the geomagnetic field? Are ocean surface temperatures still interpolated and not directly measured?
Geoengineering climate change has been making some people very rich at the expense of everyone else. In order to stop or reverse it, the incentives need to change.
To stop digging the hole:
-- Implement a carbon tax that is significant enough to change behavior. Also give tax credits for holding land in a natural state to encourage reforestation & other habitat restoration. Either that or implement a Georgist single-tax policy to close the loop on externalized costs to the commons that never get addressed.
-- Get rid of farm subsidies so people pay more for foods that are more resource intensive to produce. Similarly, review other subsidies for environmental impact.
-- Impose environmental restrictions on the worst polluters on the planet: The US military. I'm sure they have a national security argument for all the wasteful and polluting things they do, but they need to rethink some of their positions. You can't protect something by destroying it. Climate change has national security implications.
Why should I support some of these experimental schemes that could have possibly unforseen (or more likely downplayed) consequences, like termination shock, when we haven't done anything to change the systems that have put us in this situation?
Won't work. Climate change mitigation is like international relations in general - any solutions have to be feasible in a state of international anarchy (i.e., no central regulator). Strong powers like the US can sometimes influence or pressure other nations on issues like this. However, the US's power and influence is on the decline. They might have been able to do this in the 1990s, but that was too early for solar panels, good batteries, and other technology that really let us think about a carbon-free future in earnest (a special fuck you to the environmental activists that scuttled nuclear). There's a reason everyone was eager to sign the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 - with the US not part of it, no one had to worry about enforcement, so it was cheap virtue signaling. Now, the US has blown its moral and military credibility with Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya. Ukraine isn't quite the disaster of those yet - mostly because people largely accept that Russia performed a preemptive invasion and Ukraine obviously wants to fight - but the US and its allies blew their one chance to do large-scale sanction warfare with the dollar, and Russia is still not out of the war.
So any decarbonization now has to happen strictly out of each country's self-interest. We are blessed in that renewable energy looks like it's going to be cost effective (albeit not enough for people to shut down existing fossil fuel plants, just to avoid building new ones) - the US and its allies don't make up a large enough portion of world consumption for their decarbonization to be enough, even if they could eliminate emissions from non-energy sources, which are substantial.
The US could take on the policies I suggested without international cooperation, and it would make an enormous impact. I don't understand why you're acting like this hinges on the US's ability to influence other nations as if the US isn't a major world leader in carbon emissions.
BTW, anti-nuclear energy "environmental activists" were funded by the fossil fuel industry.
--So kill some of the poor people?-- This is the reality of what will happen from a tax on getting to work and fueling your body to provide work.
Solutions that involve taxing always disproportionately hurt the poor and do nothing to curb poor behavior of people who are well off.
Unless we are taxing as a percentage of income? Let's go with that. All unneeded polution is taxed and the money goes to reversal of the problem.
So:
- You buy a car that fits more people than what exist in your family (1% per seat per year). Other metrics for weight of vehicle/mileage/EV status/gas useage over the year as well.
- Your garbage collection is limited to 5 bags a year and each additional bag is 0.1%
- Not understanding how to recycle is 0.01% per item needing to be sorted correctly.
- Electricity usage is taxed after a certain kWh is reached on a yearly basis @ 0.02% per kWh.
Etc.
The problem is that everyone thinks it isn't their problem. The solutions people produce never negatively impact themselves. Including mine above. Though I already practice what I preach. Exception being that the limits above are more forgiving than the ones I impose on myself. My tax would be near zero, if not zero or negative perhaps, given the above framework.
Taxes can be progressive or regressive. That's orthogonal to my point.
Climate change disproportionately hurts the poor.
Not sure why you just assume I'm against the poor when nothing I suggested is inherently harmful to poor people.
I also walk the talk. I made significant lifestyle changes because I care about the environment. More people would do the same if the incentives were aligned and we didn't just rely on peoples' intentions.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 98.1 ms ] threadPeople are right to be afraid. If China starts trying to grow a desert somewhere, it's nearly guaranteed that the desert effect will generally be _displaced_ not removed. If it's displaced to another poorer country, are we suppose to just let that happen? Are we then going to give them tech to displace it further until the least among us has to suffer?
Sure, all this could be some how negotiated, but there's no evidence of the global will to even agree that climate change is a "bad thing"(tm)
The obvious rebuttal is "What about acid rain?" but note that SO2 from power plants lasts several days in the atmosphere but SO2 is expected to last several years in the stratosphere. It seems likely you could get a larger cooling effect then we got from sulfur in coal back in the day but have much less acid rain.
Our usual approach of "well we can't think of any reasons why it could go wrong, and we have to do something, so let's ship it and see what happens" is a little scary when it comes to something you might not get any do overs for.
I think it would be very much like us to wipe ourselves out this way though. And probably be proud of it at the same time.
A small test of a full-scale system would get answers to the above questions and would not plausibly have catastrophic results. The longer we wait to try, the more likely we'll be up against the wall and facing dangerous tipping points and it will be too late. And it all costs less than a failing social media site.
This is what I was talking about with this:
> well we can't think of any reasons why it could go wrong
Sometimes smart people thinking about things really hard isn't enough. With such a complicated system, it seems likely that there would be some unforeseen results.
Which makes it the most expensive possible way to try to "solve" global warming.
The climate is a complex nonlinear system with self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms. We had better make damn sure we understand what we are doing before embarking on global geoengineering.
Let’s test it on Venus.
Using the “we have no idea” logic, we don’t know what happens if we reduce carbon output to 0 and wait 100 years.
It’s not that geoengineering is the answer, it’s that it might be. We can model and do tests until we have confidence.
What is the other alternative? Just let billions suffer and millions die?
Those same models can be used to test various geo-engineering efforts. And should have similar accuracy.
Whether we should pursue those efforts is a matter of policy. But, rationally, we should definitely consider it.
Personally, I think that a small-ish (and growing) CO2 tax combined with a realistic effort to invest in nuclear will be enough to save us from really bad results. But plenty of people push back on those two things (from each "side"). So, here we are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp2GHanfkOc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITh4GUhA_B8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEXzzlDCkoo
I wonder what $400 billion/year in just solar panel purchasing and install would do to the climate? $400 billion/year could build a lot of nuclear plants as well. Begs the question, if we had unlimited money, what would we do that would be potential solve the climate crisis?
It's hard to know if it really works though because it is spread over such a large area and is hard to measure. Contrast that to injection into a saline aquifier where you can put a meter on the pipeline and know exactly how much gas you injected.
One basic challenge with it is that you have to more-or-less pulverize the rock to make it chemically reactive and you have to do that without generating more CO2 or spending too much money. This looks like the most attractive scheme yet and it's got the plus of raising crop yields.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/30/rock-flo...
[0]https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...
Nuclear/solar/wind doesn't capture already-emitted CO2 from the atmosphere, and direct carbon capture and storage (DCCS) methods currently cost much more than the 20$/T-CO2.
While adopting solar/wind/nuclear is important, the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is already too high, so we need to apply some DCCS to return to 'normal' levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, and enhanced weathering sounds like a promising technology we could use to achieve that.
So solar panels are cheaper than geoengineering. Similarly, so is wind, short term storage, a small amount of overbuild of renewable generation, increased interconnect, EV's, et cetera.
IOW, we would save money on net for the first >80% of carbon emission elimination.
Only for the last few percent of emissions is it worth discussing using solutions that cost money rather than save money. Things like cement production, long haul flights, et cetera.
Even with all the green energy installed world wide so far, global CO2 emissions are still increasing.
https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/
And according to everyone else the cost is higher. I read into this a while back. Many articles have already made the rounds on HN, multiple times. The most commonly cited method is using olivine rock. If you consider the full life cycle: mining, crushing, transporting and spreading the rock, it is not as cheap as this guy's calculations. There are actual high quality publications on this but I cannot remember the ones I read. However you can find many if you search for "olivine weathering".
> that still doesn't solve our addiction to fossil fuels!
why do we need to "solve" our addiction to fossil fuels? If we can geoengineer away the consequences and keep using cheap, plentiful fossil fuels (which our entire modern lifestyle is built on), then what's the problem? Eventually, probably by the end of this century, renewables will win out anyway. For example, if fusion ever pans out, that will probably do to fossil fuels collectively what natural gas did to thermal coal.
Does burning fossil fuels distribute microplastics?
Right now, natural gas is dirt-cheap, plentiful, and relatively clean, and can provide the cheap electricity needed for EVs.
Also, the most ideal solution in my book would be to do less work, not more. Geoengineering requires quite a lot of work on a permanent basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/253_Mathilde
into solar sails that navigate on their own power to the Earth-Sun L1 point. (Part of the problem is how do you build chemical factories that work in space, part of it is like building a ship in a bottle except you are in the bottle.) Such a scheme has few off-target effects on Earth because very little is done on Earth. It sure cools the planet but it does nothing to stop ocean acidification.
People in places like Saudi Arabia that are rich with both sulfur and oil might find it to be a convenient way to preserve the status quo, but many people who are interested in geoengineering also want to see decarbonization.
Funny in my research project I found that the chemistry it takes to make plastic out of the "coal", carbonates and volatiles that exist on asteroids is very similar to the chemistry to make jet fuel out of atmospheric CO2 and of course carbon is so precious on an asteroid that however you produce iron (abundant enough to use on CC and stony asteroids and the moon despite what you read in sci-fi novels) you are going to recycle whatever volatiles you use to reduce iron be that CO or H2.
And the focus of the article is to push a company that make biofuels, that don't increase the amount of fossil carbon, but also doesn't decrease the amount of GHG in the atmosphere nor through geoengineering try to cool down the planet. It may, eventually, work as an (expensive) alternative to fossil fuels, but that must happen, all points that fossil fuels will keep being extracted till they are not economical to extract them anymore. But as those "green" fuels are being generated, somewhat the perception of that something is being done remains.
Anyway, as with COVID, that when you notice the symptoms it is already too late for you and the people around you, we are now noticing the big symptoms of all those emissions during in the last decades. Even if we stop everything (not the fake stop of the "solution" the article is selling) the system inertia and its feedback loops will push the entire planet into a hot spot. Odds are high that a massive geoenginneering (or geotrying, at least) will be done, and not so low that that effort won't solve anything or worsen badly things in unexpected yet ways.
This sounds more like doomerism than science. Who can listen to this crap without wondering if the climate change believers aren't a little kookoo for cocopuffs?
Who can read comments like yours without wondering if all climate change deniers are all a bit disengenous?
It wouldn't. There's been a concerted effort for decades to do anything to keep the discourse from shifting to geoengineering. The same sort of unintelligent counter-arguments are used for it that the people who are overly concerned about the economy use.
> of all the people who do follow the science?
Nothing I have ever learned about science has ever said anything about "following science". It is a principle of science I have never heard even a hint of.
I have heard of people following religion. All the time. It seems to be one of their favorite words.
> Who can read comments like yours without wondering if all climate change deniers are all a bit disengenous?
If a grifter goes after you trying to pull a fast one, why would you have any obligation to be honest with them? In fact, if they start trying to harangue you about honesty, that's just another part of their grift.
Geoengineering is something I've never opposed. We can and probably should do it regardless of whether you guys are right about climate change. If it's too cold, make it warmer, if it's too hot, make it cooler.
The only reason to not do it is if you see an opportunity to seize political power by allowing a crisis to continue. If it gets solved (especially too early), you might not stay in charge (or in this case, never quite make it there in the first place).
Science doesn't tell us anything. It's just a loose set of methods for investigating how the universe works. When you anthropomorphize it, it's kind of dumb and sounds a little like you're trying to deify it.
Don't follow science. Perform it. Read it. Think about it.
Don't believe in it. It's not a religion. It's not your young child that needs you to believe in it. Instead, suspect the truth while remaining skeptical. Know it. Learn it.
Using emotionally charged words takes you further away from what it's all about.
> It's a really common phrase,
But also a really bad one.
You seem to be confusing it with the idea of following a religion. In that context, following has a different meaning.
> make you question the beliefs of all the people who do follow the science?
It seems that, even in your own head, these two things are related very closely, the beliefs and the "following", to the point that this later assertion that they "have nothing to do with each other" is... just weird.
"Follow" is just a bad word. In the most generous way I am able to read your rebuttal, it seems that you may have (inadvertently) confused two separate meanings. It would be better if you were to excise it from your vocabulary. It would allow you to think more clearly, and to not make mistakes like this one.
Or should I go with the other, less generous, interpretations?
"without wondering if the climate change believers".
At this point, I don't think we are having a productive conversation. Interpret it any way you like.
If they even do pay (which is far from certain), they'll find a way to pass the costs to consumers.
That alone makes it way to bloody expensive.
Unless the geoengineering has a clear and large negative effect, or if it were done maliciously (somehow?), I don't see any wars arising. At most a strongly worded letter about how everyone else should have been consulted first.
As an Australian, we probably have more caution in this area with most due to the massive ecological damage we've caused trying to engineer our way through pest control.
Geo-engineering should always be an ultimate last resort when nothing else is available, not a casual option to use at will.
To stop digging the hole:
-- Implement a carbon tax that is significant enough to change behavior. Also give tax credits for holding land in a natural state to encourage reforestation & other habitat restoration. Either that or implement a Georgist single-tax policy to close the loop on externalized costs to the commons that never get addressed.
-- Get rid of farm subsidies so people pay more for foods that are more resource intensive to produce. Similarly, review other subsidies for environmental impact.
-- Impose environmental restrictions on the worst polluters on the planet: The US military. I'm sure they have a national security argument for all the wasteful and polluting things they do, but they need to rethink some of their positions. You can't protect something by destroying it. Climate change has national security implications.
Why should I support some of these experimental schemes that could have possibly unforseen (or more likely downplayed) consequences, like termination shock, when we haven't done anything to change the systems that have put us in this situation?
So any decarbonization now has to happen strictly out of each country's self-interest. We are blessed in that renewable energy looks like it's going to be cost effective (albeit not enough for people to shut down existing fossil fuel plants, just to avoid building new ones) - the US and its allies don't make up a large enough portion of world consumption for their decarbonization to be enough, even if they could eliminate emissions from non-energy sources, which are substantial.
BTW, anti-nuclear energy "environmental activists" were funded by the fossil fuel industry.
Solutions that involve taxing always disproportionately hurt the poor and do nothing to curb poor behavior of people who are well off.
Unless we are taxing as a percentage of income? Let's go with that. All unneeded polution is taxed and the money goes to reversal of the problem.
So: - You buy a car that fits more people than what exist in your family (1% per seat per year). Other metrics for weight of vehicle/mileage/EV status/gas useage over the year as well. - Your garbage collection is limited to 5 bags a year and each additional bag is 0.1% - Not understanding how to recycle is 0.01% per item needing to be sorted correctly. - Electricity usage is taxed after a certain kWh is reached on a yearly basis @ 0.02% per kWh.
Etc.
The problem is that everyone thinks it isn't their problem. The solutions people produce never negatively impact themselves. Including mine above. Though I already practice what I preach. Exception being that the limits above are more forgiving than the ones I impose on myself. My tax would be near zero, if not zero or negative perhaps, given the above framework.
Climate change disproportionately hurts the poor.
Not sure why you just assume I'm against the poor when nothing I suggested is inherently harmful to poor people.
I also walk the talk. I made significant lifestyle changes because I care about the environment. More people would do the same if the incentives were aligned and we didn't just rely on peoples' intentions.