We have "aggravated the situation" (as you put it) beyond recovery. Doing nothing will now surely lead to an unacceptable outcome. We are going to have to fix it, or resign ourselves to a huge shrinking of the habitable region of the planet, with the hunger/famine/war that will accompany that.
Obviously we can always make things worse. But when doing nothing is unacceptable, we have to start taking risks.
You have absolutely no idea if the "solutions" we try won't lead to even worse outcomes.
Up until the point climate change is becoming an existential threat, which it isn't yet, we shouldn't go doing anything too drastic. There is plenty of evidence that we can still avert the worst of it without resorting to geoengineering.
Why exactly do you place faith in evidence that says "we can still avert the worst of it" and are not willing to do the same for evidence that says "we can do even better with geo-engineering"? Presumably the scale of the problem is the same either way, so well-reasoned evidence should be able to persuade you of either.
> In the early 1990s, anthropogenic sulfur dominated in the Northern Hemisphere, where only 16% of annual sulfur emissions were natural, yet amounted for less than half of the emissions in the Southern Hemisphere.
> Such an increase in sulfate aerosol emissions had a variety of effects. At the time, the most visible one was acid rain, caused by precipitation from clouds carrying high concentrations of sulfate aerosols in the troposphere. At its peak, acid rain has eliminated brook trout and some other fish species and insect life from lakes and streams in geographically sensitive areas, such as Adirondack Mountains in the United States. Acid rain worsens soil function as some of its microbiota is lost and heavy metals like aluminium are mobilized (spread more easily) while essential nutrients and minerals such as magnesium can leach away because of the same. Ultimately, plants unable to tolerate lowered pH are killed, with montane forests being some of the worst-affected ecosystems due to their regular exposure to sulfate-carrying fog at high altitudes.[1]
One of the risks of a strategy like this is that we become reliant on it and use it as an excuse to solve the actual problem slower. Then if there's ever any disruption to SO2 production we get 20 years of warming all at once that we otherwise might have worked to avoid.
Betting on never having a disruption to that supply seems high risk to me.
It is untrue that they have no idea if the "solutions" we try won't lead to worse outcomes
It is true that they have some idea that the "solutions" we try won't lead to worse outcomes
It is true that they have some idea that the "solutions" we try will lead to better outcomes.
I think the nuance needed here is: what do we mean by "better outcomes?" It's reasonable to believe that it will help lower temperatures. But is that an "outcome" in and of itself?
If we consider the "outcome" to also include the second and third order effects, I'd like to understand how anyone could be certain that it will be better.
> There is plenty of evidence that we can still avert the worst of it without resorting to geoengineering.
We already have once in a lifetime climate event every month and the carbon locked-in of the past decade still hasn't kicked-in. I'd argue the complete opposite, there's a lack of evidence of other options.
This kind of defeatist attitude doesn't help with the situation at all. We can all do our part in reducing our daily carbon emissions, raise awareness, and educate policymakers and business stakeholders on the importance of mitigating climate change!
I want to know what the costs[1] of ignoring are likely to be so I can be sure it's worth the pain to ban non-electric cars in 10 years, ram through nuclear power plants while gutting safety regs so we can get them built in less than a decade and try and threaten India and China into reducing CO2 emissions. What do you tell me?
[1] In $, convert other units like lives into dollars as need be and be sure to value lives from different cultures at 0.1x as thats the expressed preferences of the population based on chatitable giving figures.
You can call it defeatist, but at this point it's factually true. We've made a negative amount of progress on this matter. And that's taken 40 years. We have very little time left. We have already locked in almost 2 degrees of warming.
These are all regrettable facts. But that are facts.
40 years of raising awareness and individual action has failed.
One man's defeatist attitude is another mans realistic attitude. Does it help? No, it doesn't. But for the defeatist and the realist alike that may no longer matter. I'm 'long' on humanity, but I'm not convinced we will be able to avert the looming (and for some already very present) issues. My feelings are in part because of how we dealt with COVID-19, if a pandemic can't get us to pull the cart together then nothing can.
Doing nothing is itself a risk. Better to think of it as risk in every direction, all we can do is use what we know from science to choose our exit from the roundabout.
If all human carbon emissions magically ceased today anthropomorphic global warming and its concomitant environmental changes will stillcontinue to unfold for the next few centuries or millennia, at a minimum, before settling into a new (albeit shifted) "natural" evolution. It will take millions of years for the human carbon emissions to be cycled back into the lithosphere.
In this sense, continued emissions only accelerate and compound the current process unfolding. Global warming as it exists today cannot be stopped passively.
That was the previous poster's point. We can infer that their unstated objective is the end of global warming in the near future (i.e. in the next few centuries), the achievement of which necessarily requires active intervention.
I might infer that your unstated objective is not the end of global warming, but the end of ongoing human interference per se. That's an entirely different objective, albeit no less legitimate.
If I'm correct (and I'm confident in my assessment wrt to the previous poster), then you two are talking past each other.
No problem with this, apart from convincing like 5-6 billion people to cut their standards of living to half. Also less people is needed, few children. Sounds like impossible now without concentrated media effort and all ruling parties probably would lose for decades.
We don't have the time to sit back and let epistemic knowledge wash over us. We know more or less what needs to happen (less sunlight in, more heat out). All attempts to resolve the situation require taking some risk, and it'll be impossible to quantify all those risks until we try them.
At the risk of stating the obvious: we need to measure every weird idea we try, and do our best to isolate the variables. Easier said than done. But we broke it, it's our problem now.
Talking about humility: an excess of humility leads to fatalism. Some is good, but not too much if you want anything to happen. We're talking about fixing the ecosystem of a planet, of course it's ambitious.
>You sound like someone about to perform a triple bypass with a butter knife.
This style of comment is lazy and simply trying to shut down conversation without actually making an argument. If you have an objection to the comment you're responding to, then say why you think they're wrong, what your alternative point of view is, and why your point of view is the correct one.
That metaphor implies an understanding and overview that we simply do not have. Think of it as changing bytes in an executable file which will be run in 50 years, based on what "seems reasonable" to you staring at a wall of hex without even a de-compiler existing, much less you being able to use one. The only reason to even dream of it is not having to suffer the consequences, period. And that's not just because you might not be here in 50 years, it's because you're just one person in one very, very narrow walk of life, as opposed to being billions of people.
The carbon emissions of the richest 1% of humanity are more than double than that of the poorest half of humanity. Oil and coal companies profit, while putting out disinformation, as they have been for decades. But why step on the toes of the powerful when you can just use inject sulfur into the atmosphere?
So don't do a bloody tripple bypass with a butter knife. Just stop the bleeding. Jeez, this conversation is the best illustration of everything that's wrong with geoengineering ideas.
Indeed we have practiced quite a bit. Read on the catastrophe that was geoengineering attempts resulting in what is now happening with the Sea of Azov.
There are a number of problems that all interlock. Democracies with their relatively short election cycles will naturally find it hard to deal with problems that last much longer than those election cycles and that have the bulk of the problems downstream of us. Voters are motivated by their personal issues first, local issues second and global issues dead last. Countries are going to have to collaborate in a very strict manner in order to deal with global issues.
Throw all of those in a blender and it's easy to see why democracy and global problems are not going lead to an actual solution. Individuals are going to make some minor difference but not enough to offset the larger trends as long as it isn't a solid majority doing this.
I agree we shouldn’t count on our liberal democraties to handle that. Individuals will do the job and the majority is coming, just wait for the boomers to evade in their fantastic plastic graves.
> So don't do a bloody tripple bypass with a butter knife. Just stop the bleeding.
We're way past that point, the choice is quickly became to try geoengineering or die and I'm not going to take the dying option, no thanks, no matter how immoral you think the other one is.
We’re actually curating it to get closer to the situation. Or are you seeing humanity as a kind of god that can play with earth without impacting it existence on it ?
> You sound like someone about to perform a triple bypass with a butter knife.
If climate change was a disease it wouldn't have an ICD number, no method of diagnostic in standard literature, let alone a treatment approved by the competent authority.
The recommended solutions would be to eat more healthy, more physical activity, and something to treat the symptoms.
There won't be a double-blind study for specific treatments of earth, so any kind of idea is equally valid.
We have "aggravated the situation" (as you put it) beyond recovery. Doing nothing will now surely lead to an unacceptable outcome. We are going to have to fix it, or resign ourselves to a huge shrinking of the habitable region of the planet, with the hunger/famine/war that will accompany that.
Obviously we can always make things worse. But when doing nothing is unacceptable, we have to start taking risks.