Sulphate aerosols, probably. Calcium carbonate is better for land/ocean based geoengineering. But yeah: the potential for unilateral action with stratospheric aerosol injection in particular is very high. There’s some evidence that doing it from the southern hemisphere will help mitigate some of the negative side effects, but that’s still inconclusive. We desperately need to talk about the global governance of this stuff before we deploy it, but we won’t.
Marine cloud brightening is surprisingly tricky on a technical level. There’s been some discussion of trying to retrofit cargo ships to create larger, more long-lasting wakes, which might actually be more effective. The albedo of calm seawater is VERY low (close to that of asphalt), and with the number of cargo ships out there, even a moderate change might have an impact.
I read a sci-fi novel recently where venezuela just went ahead and started dumping sulfates into the atmosphere without permission and the global north had a huge tantrum over governance and censured them constantly in the un etc, but nobody dared to actually stop them bc it was literally the only thing stopping the planet from turning into an oven 💀
Geo engineering is peak liberalism because it is only a rational fix and not a suicidal thing to do if you believe liberal ideas of infinite sustained economic growth and civilizational progress being linear march forward while ignoring collapse happens at least once a century with total collapse every few centuries. A ~250 year average on the churn of history. I find it nuts there are people who believe human history is a steadily march of forward progress and economic growth rather than a series of stumbles, falls, and lurches.
Am daytime drunk…
The big problem with all these magic geoengineering fixes that allow petrol states to continue existing (looking at you Venezuela, US and Russia too) is when we have a global economic collapse or major conflict, the industrial mass production of sulfur compounds to pump into the upper atmosphere (a costly economic activity at any meaningful scale, not a minor undertaking) comes crashing to a halt and things are 10 times worse than they would have been without doing it in the first place. Everyone pushing this suicidal bullshit always leaves out the caveat that the mass production and release of geoengineering chemicals into the atmosphere if done for any significant period of time has to continue for the rest of human civilization or everything dies. Geoengineering allows us to kick the can down the road (something human civilizations strive at) on abolishing petrol states and enables a level of atmospheric carbon that couldn’t happen otherwise because the changing climate would have caused wars and civilizational collapse that mean a lot of people die, empires fall, but most life on earth (and humans) still survive.
The geoengineering ideas and even people on the supposed “left” supporting it is what has me at this point believing all life will be gone from earth within three centuries max. That rather than 2 to 5 degrees we are going to trigger a greenhouse warming cascade like happened on Venus (earths twin) that early on crossed an atmospheric water vapor and methane tipping point. I’m sure there will be more magic fixes that attempt to mask rather than undo or stabilize. Carbon cycle breaks forever, is done. Issue isn’t with the technical fesability but human behavior to date on a macro scale, I have to believe geoengineering will happen while the petrol states continue increasing their rate of carbon production due to the breathing room it creates. US keeps pouring money into discovering new fossil fuel reserves around the world, US Dept of Energy keeps inventing novel methods to find and exploit previously unreachable fossil fuel ie how to extract shale oil and gas via fracking. Global warming will be masked for 50 years to a century or two until there is a world war or economic collapse, at which point that century of global warming happens in less than a decade triggering a rapid series of catastrophic tipping points (endgame ones being inverted carbon sinks, clathrate gun, water vapor, etc) faster than anyone has means to respond.
As I understand it Venus is kinda locked in anyway at this point, halting all fossil fuel burning with nothing to mitigate the damage we’ve caused just roasts us faster because the exhaust literally blocks a bunch of sunlight
The copium is “new technology not invented yet might be engineered by China, who plans for the future beyond make line go up next quarter” since the alternative is we’re all fucking dead and nothing any human being does has any point at all
As I understand it Venus is kinda locked in anyway at this point, halting all fossil fuel burning with nothing to mitigate the damage we’ve caused just roasts us faster because the exhaust literally blocks a bunch of sunlight
It’s not quite that bad. 2-3° is probably locked in (barring sci-fi technology like large scale carbon capture), but not the kind of runaway that would lead to Venus. You’re right about aerosol masking hiding a lot of the impact, but that damage will be very front-loaded (since the residence time of the aerosols in the atmosphere is only on the order of months), and limited to probably a few tenths of a degree. Not nothing, but not enough for us to go Venus.
Could the old climate be restored over several generations using some large scare application of some future technology? After a rapid transition away from the carbon energy economy. I guess there is a lot of speculative coping in this question.
Gonna be honest - if the Great Dying didn’t kill off all life on Earth, I don’t see even especially reckless human activity doing it either. CO2 from that period went from 400 ppm to 2,500 ppm for reference, and Earth got like 8-10°C warmer then. Even shitty capitalist market mechanics would have abandoned carbon emissions at this point. If you want to turn Earth into Venus, you need to actively make it your goal. I mean burning every single last drop of fossil fuel faaaar after it’s stopped being profitable.
Specifically China will coordinate the effort and crush any military resistance to it seeing as the decline of the US is thoroughly assured now and we’re due for a military humiliation showing how much our arsenal has decayed
we’re gonna see the global south independently start dumping calcium carbonate into the upper atmosphere within a decade, mark my words
i wish em luck
Sulphate aerosols, probably. Calcium carbonate is better for land/ocean based geoengineering. But yeah: the potential for unilateral action with stratospheric aerosol injection in particular is very high. There’s some evidence that doing it from the southern hemisphere will help mitigate some of the negative side effects, but that’s still inconclusive. We desperately need to talk about the global governance of this stuff before we deploy it, but we won’t.
There’s also having ships spraying seawater mist to make larger, brighter marine clouds.
Marine cloud brightening is surprisingly tricky on a technical level. There’s been some discussion of trying to retrofit cargo ships to create larger, more long-lasting wakes, which might actually be more effective. The albedo of calm seawater is VERY low (close to that of asphalt), and with the number of cargo ships out there, even a moderate change might have an impact.
I read a sci-fi novel recently where venezuela just went ahead and started dumping sulfates into the atmosphere without permission and the global north had a huge tantrum over governance and censured them constantly in the un etc, but nobody dared to actually stop them bc it was literally the only thing stopping the planet from turning into an oven 💀
Geo engineering is peak liberalism because it is only a rational fix and not a suicidal thing to do if you believe liberal ideas of infinite sustained economic growth and civilizational progress being linear march forward while ignoring collapse happens at least once a century with total collapse every few centuries. A ~250 year average on the churn of history. I find it nuts there are people who believe human history is a steadily march of forward progress and economic growth rather than a series of stumbles, falls, and lurches.
Am daytime drunk…
The big problem with all these magic geoengineering fixes that allow petrol states to continue existing (looking at you Venezuela, US and Russia too) is when we have a global economic collapse or major conflict, the industrial mass production of sulfur compounds to pump into the upper atmosphere (a costly economic activity at any meaningful scale, not a minor undertaking) comes crashing to a halt and things are 10 times worse than they would have been without doing it in the first place. Everyone pushing this suicidal bullshit always leaves out the caveat that the mass production and release of geoengineering chemicals into the atmosphere if done for any significant period of time has to continue for the rest of human civilization or everything dies. Geoengineering allows us to kick the can down the road (something human civilizations strive at) on abolishing petrol states and enables a level of atmospheric carbon that couldn’t happen otherwise because the changing climate would have caused wars and civilizational collapse that mean a lot of people die, empires fall, but most life on earth (and humans) still survive.
The geoengineering ideas and even people on the supposed “left” supporting it is what has me at this point believing all life will be gone from earth within three centuries max. That rather than 2 to 5 degrees we are going to trigger a greenhouse warming cascade like happened on Venus (earths twin) that early on crossed an atmospheric water vapor and methane tipping point. I’m sure there will be more magic fixes that attempt to mask rather than undo or stabilize. Carbon cycle breaks forever, is done. Issue isn’t with the technical fesability but human behavior to date on a macro scale, I have to believe geoengineering will happen while the petrol states continue increasing their rate of carbon production due to the breathing room it creates. US keeps pouring money into discovering new fossil fuel reserves around the world, US Dept of Energy keeps inventing novel methods to find and exploit previously unreachable fossil fuel ie how to extract shale oil and gas via fracking. Global warming will be masked for 50 years to a century or two until there is a world war or economic collapse, at which point that century of global warming happens in less than a decade triggering a rapid series of catastrophic tipping points (endgame ones being inverted carbon sinks, clathrate gun, water vapor, etc) faster than anyone has means to respond.
As I understand it Venus is kinda locked in anyway at this point, halting all fossil fuel burning with nothing to mitigate the damage we’ve caused just roasts us faster because the exhaust literally blocks a bunch of sunlight
The copium is “new technology not invented yet might be engineered by China, who plans for the future beyond make line go up next quarter” since the alternative is we’re all fucking dead and nothing any human being does has any point at all
It’s not quite that bad. 2-3° is probably locked in (barring sci-fi technology like large scale carbon capture), but not the kind of runaway that would lead to Venus. You’re right about aerosol masking hiding a lot of the impact, but that damage will be very front-loaded (since the residence time of the aerosols in the atmosphere is only on the order of months), and limited to probably a few tenths of a degree. Not nothing, but not enough for us to go Venus.
Could the old climate be restored over several generations using some large scare application of some future technology? After a rapid transition away from the carbon energy economy. I guess there is a lot of speculative coping in this question.
It’ll fix itself over the next few tens of thousands of years, but obviously that doesn’t help us at all.
From what I understand there isn’t a model that suggests the earth becoming un-inhabitable by complex life no matter how bad we fuck up right now.
The sharks will be fine. They’re older than Polaris. They got this shit.
Well, that’s at least comforting. Any Venus model would probably push a few people into an existential crisis. Thanks for your response.
Gonna be honest - if the Great Dying didn’t kill off all life on Earth, I don’t see even especially reckless human activity doing it either. CO2 from that period went from 400 ppm to 2,500 ppm for reference, and Earth got like 8-10°C warmer then. Even shitty capitalist market mechanics would have abandoned carbon emissions at this point. If you want to turn Earth into Venus, you need to actively make it your goal. I mean burning every single last drop of fossil fuel faaaar after it’s stopped being profitable.
I did my postdoc on geoengineering, and I’m sorry to tell you that I basically agree with all of this.
What’s your take on the weather being unusually bad this year and that correlated with the banning of some container ship exhaust products?
Ministry for the future? I should get around to finishing that
Specifically China will coordinate the effort and crush any military resistance to it seeing as the decline of the US is thoroughly assured now and we’re due for a military humiliation showing how much our arsenal has decayed
the global north can freeze to death from the meltwater or they can starve to death from the darkening (technically starves in both cases)
this is the future that we chose