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We are going to end up spraying the atmosphere no matter what. No need to really debate it, it's going to happen.

The smoldering rug is starting to flame. The fine antique chair has fire running up its legs. The renaissance painting is starting to bubble. Everyone in the room knows the fire needs to be put out now, but instead wants to debate how it should be done since everything is so valuable. Blow on it hard? Smack it with some kitchen towels? Stomp on it with out feet?

Someone however is saying we need to break the stained glass window, run the garden hose through, and blast everything with water.

Again, people want to debate this, but it doesn't matter, because it's only viable thing that will work and will work before the whole house burns down. So they will be forced into it. Water damage and all.

Your analogies are just analogies. Straight appeal to emotions.

We have numbers for how many trees we need to plant. "We" could collectively do that and it would outright fix the carbon problem. It's a metric f-ton of trees, a huge number, but it is actually within human capability and has known and studied effects. It's just hard.

Let's go manually adjust the entire atmosphere by blocking the sun? That's wildly speculative and dangerous. Worse, that preserves all the bad behavior that got us into the mess in the first place, and would likely have massive consequences we don't properly understand.

Remember when we had a pandemic and people just had to wear masks and stay inside. That was easy. And society fell flat on it's face.

I just hope the people who want to do the "hard" thing stay out of the way. Once temperatures stop rising we can work on planting a California sized forest every year for two decades in all that vacant empty fertile yet unforested and unpopulated land.

Perhaps your society did. The one I live in didn't. So I think it says more about your society than it says about wearing masks.

I hate to break it to you, but your society is on the same train as mine, barreling towards the same cliff of climate collapse. And unlike your society, mine has a dramatically larger hand on the throttle.

Edit: I see you are from Norway, which ironically is the wealthy high society it is because it sold the fuel that powers this train. It's great your country with a population the size of a single metropolitan area can all wear masks. Good Job. Too bad you all couldn't agree to keep the oil in the ground too. Pot calling the kettle black, eh?

What does all that have to do with the comment I was replying to?

Wearing masks became a political thing, at least in the US, because the government deliberately lied to us about their efficacy. They were trying to reserve masks for health-care personnel, or more generally, trying to "shape" public behavior through lies, and worse, disinformation and disavowal campaigns against those experts that contradicted the message intended to control.

The "get out of my way, I'm trying to control people here" message feels like a really bad way to go about this. We've had enough of that. My credence for your claim that this is the only way is low, and I think most critical thinkers would likely come to the same conclusion.

Having read the article, dumping sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere causes acid rain, which has its own significant problems (not the least of which are direct human health consequences). And Dr. Keith is proposing the same "get out of my way" attitude that has earned us a myriad of troubles:

> “A lesson I’ve learned from this is that if we do this again, we won’t be open in the same way,” Dr. Keith said.

In other words, instead of listening to the objections against solar geoengineering the only thing he learned from the objections was to hide what he's attempting. That's hubris. It isn't just that he's ignoring Indigenous People's groups or Greta Thunberg, he's ignoring his colleagues in the field who are saying this is dangerous.

So no, I don't trust people who lay claim to an existential threat as license to do as they please, especially when we know there are safer alternatives.

Spot on. I think of it like a medical intervention. You can complain all you want that an opiate addict should get clean, but if you don't give them Narcan to stop an overdose, they're not going to get the chance to do so.

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/climate/david-keith-solar...

I personally think planting more trees and coloring more surfaces white may be easier and cheaper.

Nope, Bill Gates believes we should bury trees instead.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/15/1065016/a-stealt...

Trees are naturally efficient at sucking down vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, but they release the carbon again when they die and rot on the ground. Sequestering trees underground could prevent this. If biomass burial works as well as hoped, it may provide a relatively cheap and easy way to pull down some share of the billions of tons of greenhouse gas that studies find may need to be removed to keep global temperatures in check in the coming decades.

This is a truly great idea. Putting great gobs of biomass and safely sequestering it underground is revolutionary. We'll need to put it deep enough that it won't decompose and we'll also meed to find a way to pressurize it to maximize the volume and prevent moisture intrusion. We probably want to put it near desserts where the naturally arid conditions will hasten the process of compaction. Perhaps we can get the Arab Countries on board?

You have to plant them first in order to have any to bury unless you are proposing further accelerating deforestation.

Planting more trees is not compatible with installing solar panels.

Both are totally fine, you'll be hard-pressed to find areas with canopy cover percentages that inhibit solar installations.

What? Why not? Is there a shortage of space where we can't reasonably grow trees but can install solar panels?

Or just drop a giant ice cube in the ocean. After all we're going to do that starting in 2063.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SYpUSjSgFg

Thus solving the problem once and for all!

SRM has that feel, but I don't really see a choice at this point.

Nah, Mr Burns got there first. And Professor Chaos tried but failed.

Putting climate change on ice

Bad idea https://what-if.xkcd.com/162/

Can't read the article, assume is points out the obvious problem of excess carbon in the atmosphere remaining? Ocean acidification is one big issue that a solar shield won't solve.

Ocean effects actually scare me more than climate change. A huge percentage of the world depends on the ocean for food and it’s foundational to the health of the biosphere. The Earth has been warmer in the past but sudden ocean acidification is a different matter.

I don't think it's all that logical to try and separate ocean effects from climate change; they are part of the climate after all. Dying of heat stroke in a wet bulb event scares me the most personally, but that might be because of the part of the world I live in.

I’m just saying that if it only got hotter and stormier and not much else I think we could roll with that. Having ocean ecosystems collapse is playing the game on ultra hard nightmare mode.

Actually no… nightmare mode game play would be the clathrate gun.

Not to mention the ocean is a major source of carbon sequestration in the form of carbonate plankton shells which sink to the ocean floor where it can accumulate for millions of years. Ocean acidification will dissolve those carbonates and prevent the carbon from exiting the cycle.

Literally the start of the robots taking over in the Matrix

This is more like Mr Burns’ attempt to extort Springfield. Butters also wanted to do it in South Park but ya know, the Simpsons already did it.

Immediately thought of Monty Burns when I read the title.

The war between humans and machines was already in full swing when the humans darkened the skies in an attempt to cripple the machines (which at the time were dependent on solar power).

Or of Snowpiercer

SaaS

Sun as a service.

Want your daily dose of sun? Fork up and pay subscription costs.

Now that is what the Tesla "constellation" is all about!

Why not something more modular, like solar sails at exa scale, at low enough orbit they will degrade and incinerate after X years.

Part of the opposition to this is that there is a certain part of the environmental movement that more than wanting to solve global warming, wants to use it as a stick to go back to a more “natural” state for humanity. They not only oppose geo-engineering but many also oppose nuclear and even solar power installations.

Sorry, the natural state sucked. It was without antibiotics. A tooth infection could kill you. Women were abused by men since they were in general smaller and weaker in a system that placed a premium on physical prowess. Childbirth was painful with high infant and maternal mortality.

No thanks.

We need a massive amount of technology to support our population of hat we have now. And we have to innovate ourselves out of this situation.

It’s basic conservatism.[1] It’s much less risky to put the breaks on so-called progress—maybe even so-called regress—as opposed to staying the course that we have now.

A small amount of prevention is worth a bigger quantity of cure. And crossing your fingers that geoengineering will solve that is risky.

[1] Conservatism now means crazy things like “neo-con” i.e. people who think that invading countries half-way across the world is conservative.

No, it doesn't mean neo-con or reactionaries, it's just that neocons and reactionaries like to call themselves conservatives, like neolibs/capitalist used to call themselves 'liberals', or ancap call themselves 'Libertarians'. At some point it replace the original meaning.

If you're a regular conservative, you should check out Baudrillard.

Jean Baudrillard?

Yes. For some context, he is considered 'postmodernist', which usually means Jack shit, but in his and Lyotard's cases, means they analyse postmodern society ('the postmodern condition') and try to find concepts to explain the changes to society, like the death of metanaratives.

Baudrillard (and to a lesser extent Lyotard) elaborate multiple concepts, but he is most known for his criticism of 'hyperreality', where he posit than in postmodern society, the signifiant detach themselves from signifier and become their own autonomous thing. Which is leftist (in the sense of anticapitalist) , yes, but also deeply conservative.

But this is 'mainstream' books. He wrote a lot of essays and I can tell you although he is assigned as a 'leftist' because of his anti-Us stances, read "The Conspiracy of Art" and you'll see thought out, articulated conservative talking points.

I wish there was a way to greatly reduce global population, without risking heinous means or outcomes.

It seems like the size of the human population drives so many of these problems.

1B rich people would have an impact on the earth very comparable to the impact of 1B rich people + 9B poor people.

Rich people expand to use all available resources. We've used virtually all of our arable land for farmland and cities not because we have to, but because that's the cheapest way to make food. If we reduced our population, we'd likely just eat more beef and still use all the land. We'd use less cars and more jets. And so on.

What relevance does that have? If you shrink the overall population you also shrink the wealthy part of it since there is less of the poor population to support the rich one.

The rich don't live off the backs of the poor so much as the rich are rich because they hog the resources. Most of the imports from Africa are capital intensive raw resources, they aren't products with significant labour value add. If the population shrunk the remaining one billion would be much richer unless you also took away the society's built resources at the same time.

Not to worry. Social media and ubiquitous porn are already reducing relationships and frequency of sex in the younger generations in the West. With the rise of AI "companions" I expect that trend to accelerate. We just need to distribute all this worldwide!

If you think that these are the reasons young people aren't choosing to have kids you clearly haven't actually talked to young people. The discussion starts and ends with being unable to afford what is considered the minimum lifestyle to raise a child. When you have to DINK to pay your housing costs and student loans what's even the point?

My partner and I make 3x what my firmly middle class parents did growing up and just the two of us live less lavishly than them despite them paying for private school my whole life.

Everything you say is true, but my point was on the declining frequency of sex, which is a prerequisite to having kids. People may very well be avoiding having kids due to the economic burden, but that doesn't explain the decrease in sex itself among the younger generation.

Well, good news / bad news ...

Good news is the people in the stratospheric pay grades agree, and have been working toward it.

Bad news is that the means and outcomes are indeed heinous.

Antibiotics are extremely overused and lead to chronic illness via gut dysbiosis. Geo-engineering won't work and will just cause more unintended consequences (drought in other regions, chronic illness from heavy metals in the atmosphere)

Cancer rates and chronic illness are rising and people are dying younger for the first time. The writing is on the wall.

These facts aren't revealed often because there's no corporation that benefits from marketing it, there's nothing to sell, only bad technologies to opt out of.

this sounds like a horrible idea

That's the only idea that was actually tested successfuly. Accidentally of course. There was a brief pause in global warming right before we banned sulfur from our fuels.

It's not that there was a brief pause prior, it's that after the ban temps started rising way more than expected. The fuels were "hiding" the extent if global warming.

Between the 40s and the 80s global temperatures pretty much oscillated around the same value when our sulfur emissions roughly balanced our carbon emissions. But due to local damage from acid rains we reduced sulfur emissions (or at least reduced their growth) and carbon emissions rose happily unrestricted.

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

First put five people from the same company in a room with an adjustable thermostat and see what happens.

The reactionary panic to any geoengineering efforts to counter climate change always kind of entertain me.

Announce that you're opening a new factory to build useless trinkets that will also pollute the air with sulfur as a side-effect, and nobody cares other than a few dedicated clean-air activists and nearby neighbors.

If instead you announce you're intentionally putting the same amount of sulfur into the air for its positive impacts on climate, then a million people who barely passed 8th grade science will panic about how that's too scary and dangerous.

The double-standard is frustrating and hindering our collective ability to mitigate the ongoing climate crisis.

And we have a natural experiment proving this effect, cargo ships' sulfur pollution had unknowingly been masking some percentage of climate change by reflecting sunlight, so reducing that pollution has had the side effect of exacerbating climate change.

The global sulphur dioxide emission has gone down continuously since the 80s [1], and ship emissions are a small fraction of the total emission.

The recent spike in temperatures is obviously related to an el Nino. It will go down again, just like it's done after every other el Nino.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/so-emissions-by-world-reg...

That is rather simplistic thinking and a false equivalence. Building a trinket factory is nowhere near the scale and potential impacts of trying to inject huge quantities of sulphuric acid into the stratosphere. It has geographical, sociological and political ramifications which will take decades to untangle before you start. Unintended consequences, and key to it all - it doesn't solve any problem at all. It just lets things continue as usual while trying attach a ridiculously arrogant sticking plaster to the problem. It's a scam, and a monstrous one at that.

Hey - to borrow your metaphor and expand - Bandaids help heal wounds, and prevent infections.

Of course, we know that sulfur will introduce plenty of anticipated negative consequences. Acid rain, for one, does change ecosystems (though in some areas, this can actually increase soil fertility).

The question really is what risks - known and unknown - can we sign up for in order to effect giving us more time before hot days just start killing more and more people? it feels very relevant to have a reasoned conversation about the different kinds of risks, and to spend research time on them (as opposed to armchair time).

I hear what you're saying, but the problem is all the time we spend on doing something completely insane (I'm sorry, but blotting out the source of the planet's photosynthesis is truly mad for so many reasons) we could be doubling down on reducing emissions, planting more carbon sinks, and shifting the planet onto a more secure footing.

It's like that mad billionaire in Don't Look Up, with his mini atom bombs. It's never going to work, but it makes lots of money in the meantime. Just like mechanical carbon capture is doing right now.

Agree, but only somewhat. It's not clear that we are actually short of sunlight to grow a lot of plants in a lot of places. Sure, places with short growing seasons would have less yield, but, cooling the planet would also make more equatorial latitudes a bit easier to farm in for some crops by reducing the irrigation needs.

My personal favorite geo-engineering approach, though, is iron-seeding parts of the pacific to create large plankton blooms. to me, this seems substantially less risky.

Yep, and it's same simplistic thinking from the same people that got us into the problem in the first place.

It comes from the media whose golden goose, the only thing really keeping them alive, is selling new fears to people.

Pretty sure lack of sun is the primary extinction causing event.

Not it itself. A famine is.

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The UN thinks differently [0].

0 - https://www.un.org/en/un75/climate-crisis-race-we-can-win

So do the WEF, but it's just another excuse for them to tighten their control over the population.

If those at the top really thought it was a "crisis", maybe they'd lead by example. Instead they keep preaching their propaganda and hire the sheepest of the sheeple to disrupt everyone's lives and silence any dissenters. Keep the population in eternal fear and they'll easily be coerced into submission to the global authoritarian order.

But an increasing number of us have realised the truth, and we will not give up the fight.

The fact that you decided to equate building a trinket factory with blocking the friggin' sun is crazy.

Do it! Stop talking about doing this stuff and just do it.

Fantastic way to get people to not trust scientists.

(And let's be real here, most scientists suggested a wildly different approach to solving climate change. This smells more like the behavior of capital than science.)

And what exactly smells like science then? This is the only method of planet cooling that we know actually works due to it having occurred naturally in the past due to volcanic eruptions.

A) that's absolutely not true, for instance we have archeological evidence of plants drastically altering the global temperature. For some reason the same solution is viewed as naive today with no clear explanation. B) presumably any such smell would imply extreme skepticism—same as any empiricist presented with a model. There's zero skepticism as presented by this article, which leads me to think this dude is either insane or a shill for moneyed interests.

They shouldn't. Science has been captured by industry and the military industrial complex.

Because what could go wrong? Imagine Crowdstrike interfering with all that, just because a stupid mistake.

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They've been doing it for decades, and the news reports on it, but then gaslights anyone who talks about stratospheric aerosol injections. Therr have been ongoing tests of these geo-engineering tools for decades.

That's aircraft contrails you're talking about? They're part of standard climate modelling because they behave slightly differently than regular clouds. Or do you mean the sulphur-rich fuels used in shipping until recently, which had a similar impact (though IIRC low level not stratospheric)?

Incidental rather than deliberate geoengineering, but totally monitored and openly discussed.

The global sulphur dioxide emission has gone down continuously since the 80s [1], and ship emissions are a small fraction of the total emissions.

The recent spike in temperatures is obviously related to an el Nino. It will go down again, just like it's done after every other el Nino.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/so-emissions-by-world-reg...

This is the main unknown with global warming imho: how will it affect the thermoaline circulation. Because if it's 'not much', the adaptation will be hard in some places but possible (and we will be able to predict/modelize risk and mitigate). If it's 'a lot', I'll become religious and pray a lot.

I think they're referring to cloud seeding, which has been a thing for decades. Just not exactly what the topic is about.