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by netcan
4011 days ago
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This is where geo-engineering can come in. I think climate scientist will be much more comfortable discussing it if it seems we are on track for fixing the underlying causes. There are bunch of different ideas, most of them involve directly interacting with global temperature by reflecting energy back to space. Injecting sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere for example, mimics how some volcanic eruptions cause temporary cooling. Another is massive scale cloud seeding over the oceans. One of the scariest things about these ideas is how cheap could be are. What happens if Canada decides it would really prefer a milder winter and sprays the hydro dioxide up there like a bunch of unruly mounties? Then they cut it out and Uzbekistan do the same. |
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It is a red herring: in discussing climate change, it is brought up primarily as a reason not to worry about doing anything now, we'll fix it in post. The sheer number of otherwise smart, educated people who blithely assume that attempting to modulate a huge chaotic system we don't fully understand and can't model is a tribute to optimism and not much else. Add to that the fact that we only have one atmosphere on which to practice, and, well, I'm not optimistic.
And that is before we get in to the (alluded to by the parent post) public choice questions on an global scale, something that history demonstrates is, politely, extremely difficult, extremely slow, mostly toothless and prone to cheating. To pick one example, we, as a species, cannot agree that leaving explosive objects scattered around to randomly maim and kill is, on balance, a bad idea.
If, in 100 or whatever years, the options are go extinct slowly or pump tons of reflective gas into the upper atmosphere and see what happens, well, I'd vote to go for broke, too. But that is all the "geo-engineering" approach is at this point.