- Morpheus, The Matrix
- AI is not smart enough to take over humanity.
- But by playing god with geoengineering by having rain packed with sulfur on our crops, we are facing The Blight, like in Interstellar.
If we “scorched the sky,” humans would be at least as screwed as the robots, unless we’re getting all our energy (and tons more since we’d have to move all agriculture indoors) from nuclear or such, but in that case, what on earth would the robots need us for? Wouldn’t they just start running nuclear plants? Seems a lot simpler than running the matrix.
Feels like such a sloppy plot hole for an otherwise brilliantly entertaining film.
Let's put this energy into Nuclear Power and CO2 recapture; and actually fix things.
It is 30x higher both in time and cost to capture carbon. At $20B/yr geoengineering the atmosphere can be done for 50+ yrs. In 50yrs, carbon capture would need $30T vs only $1T for spraying sulfur. Carbon capture as a long-term solution doesn't make sense. Also, how much carbon you can capture in 50yrs? At 10% of annual emissions, you can probably reach 30% by the end of 50yrs. Carbon capture is still leaving 70% carbon in the environment. It's a make believe solution build to give us false sense of action for saving climate.
I'm not a physical scientist, but I'd imagine that the amount of Carbon you can capture is fundamentally proportional to the energy you can use on Carbon Capture. That's why I believe a large expansion of Nuclear Energy would be needed.
Alongside a continued reduction in emissions, this is a practical path forward. Throwing new curveballs at the earth, while not addressing the present level of Carbon, is not.
I suspect that this reaction would not be confined to the US.
We could end up in a situation where greenhouse gas levels in 50-100 years are massively higher than they are now, with heating being held in check by continual sulphur spraying.
It would then only take for something to disrupt the sulphur spraying for a year to have sudden massive warming.
It would make more sense to save sulphur spraying for after we are firmly on the road to zero emissions and have reached the point where it is not economically feasible to revive coal and oil. Then sulphur spraying as a temporary measure to lower temperature until our falling emissions make it unnecessary might be safe.
Sadly for all of its popularity the essential message seems to have missed people. I listen to people talk about Mars colonies in their lifetime, because they refuse to acknowledge the complexity beyond "big rocket go fast". This topic is very similar, it requires a staggering amount of engineering, economic, environmental and other disciplines to really understand why it's such a terrible idea. The expense, the known and unknown unknowns, the politics and the reality that it's a band-aid over a sucking chest wound.
People just don't get it, and only engage with these topics as a sort of sport, not something they need to grasp the complexity of.
And may, as per the author says, save our asses while we get our shit together.
Now, granted, this is one of the craziest things Ive ever read in my life. And Im being proportionate here.
The magnitudes of the vectors are much much larger, but it's the same dimensions of environmental modification for our own comfort.
This is just another distraction from the list:
- "there is no climate change, let's continue business as usual"
- "there is climate change, but not human-made, let's continue business as usual"
- "there is human-made climate change but it is too late, let's continue business as usual"
- "environmental activists are to blame, let's continue business as usual"
- "maybe we will find magic-technology, let's continue business as usual"
- "geoengineering will buy some time, let's continue business as usual"
Remember that people are mortal. Rather than invest in permanent solutions that grant us eternal life, evolution favors solutions that keep us alive just long enough to reproduce, then making a half-copy and throwing out the old body.
Sounds like how humans have been operating since eons.
That's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Is it? According to ourwoldindata[0], fossil fuel usage is growing worldwide. ie more fossil fuels are being burned now than ever before.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-fossil-fuel-consum...
"Thus solving the problem once and for all." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW66EX75jIY
Painting roofs and roads white, and simply having more green parks instead of paved areas would actually make a difference.
Improving albedo there may have some local effect, but unlikely to contribute significantly to climate change mitigation.
Can anyone suggest a less baity title? I looked through the text trying to find an accurate, neutral, representative phrase and couldn't find one. That's unusual and probably a bad sign.
The article itself edges on mongering to be fair.
Solar Radiation Management (SRM) as a temporary climate change solutionIt's a bad, bad sign I agree. That said Id propose "someone may decide to pour sulphur in the stratosphere"
> people are starting to take geoengineering seriously
It could be made more objective by prepending "Some" :) Though the author does give a bunch of references under #2 and #3 so perhaps it's unnecessary.
"Solar Radiation Management (SRM)" alone is probably succinct and neither misleading or linkbait.
A half a percent in the global jet fuel supply would put that order of sulfur into the atmosphere, a bit lower than what I think is being proposed here. But adulterating the fuel supply would be affordable and equivalent to a smallish tax on flight.
Helium's a bad thing to fill with because it's a limited resource. Hydrogen is bad because it's a sink for greenhouse gas eliminating hydroxyl. https://e360.yale.edu/features/natural-geologic-hydrogen-cli...
: For instance, some of the hydrogen released will react with the atmospheric compound hydroxyl, creating ozone, which in the lower atmosphere is a greenhouse gas. And by using up hydroxyl, which is the atmosphere’s main cleansing agent, hydrogen will leave less of the organic compound available to break down methane and other greenhouse gases, resulting in those gases lasting longer in the atmosphere and causing additional warming.
The "country of no choice" similarly applies to only a small handful of countries that have no decent way of mitigating climate change but also have the funds and resources to do SRM. So really, just China (which has already shown enthusiasm towards geoengineering) or India.
The primary human response is still going to be crop adaptation and mass economic migration. I think we are going to have to see a lot more of this before we see someone dim the sun.
I guess that will need to be after they stop growing the city forever, and stop paving the earth of my state with black asphalt and concrete, and stop giving all our groundwater to lettuce and alfalfa farming to be sent out of the state or country entirely.
> Sulfur disappears from the atmosphere quickly - it rains out after about a year. This means that once we’ve started SRM, it’s dangerous to suddenly stop. We need to keep spraying particles, all the time. If we suddenly stopped, the warming would spring back rapidly, causing a bad temperature shock. The correct way to stop is a gradual phase out.
It's possible a sufficiently motivated billionaire or even a somewhat wealthy millionaire could independently finance a project to inject sulphates into the upper atmosphere in international waters and have a measurable impact on global warming, although people with respiratory issues might not be too happy.
My understanding is that the way greenhouse gas induced warming works is that we have incoming solar radiation over a broad range of wavelengths.
Some of that ends up being absorbed by various things on the surface which heats them which causes them reradiate some of that absorbed energy as infrared.
Greenhouse gases absorb infrared, and so some of that reradiated energy that would have been radiated back into space gets trapped by those gases.
From a purely reducing warming perspective then it probably wouldn't matter much what wavelengths you are reflecting. Any light you stop from getting absorbed and turned into heat below would help.
But incoming radiation often does useful things before or instead of getting turned into reradiated infrared. For example it may be used by plants for photosynthesis.
It would seem then that if reflecting light in the stratosphere to reduce warming you'd want to try to avoid deflecting wavelengths that are important for photosynthesis or other useful things.
You'd want to pick wavelengths that don't do much other than just end up getting absorbed at the surface. Does sulphur do this?
I don't think the a sun shade would do anything for that.
That said the Simpson's quotes in this thread are making laugh enough that I'm starting to get onboard with this plan whatever my initial doubts.
Lends some support to the author's thesis. A little unsettling that the reflective SRM material in the WSJ article isn't sulfur (apparently) but something proprietary of undisclosed composition.
https://www.wsj.com/science/environment/geoengineering-proje...
hopefully calcium carbonate experimentation gets underway so we can learn about its effects.
Anyone have any good resources or techniques for having honest discussions with friends and family that simply refuse to believe a problem even exists? Real solutions will only come once we admit there's a problem.
In any case, if 2023 wasn't an exception, I'd rather have someone start a program this year. It can always be stopped or scaled down. And I am confident that renewable energy, electrification, and battery deployment will continue unabated anyways.
- Using energy more efficiently (e.g. insulating homes better instead of burning more fuel in the winter)
- Electrifying as many energy demands as possible (heating, ground transportation, materials production, chemical synthesis)
- Replacing fossil-powered electricity generation with low emissions sources: solar, nuclear, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, tidal
- Accelerated silicate weathering for carbon dioxide removal (basically, crushing a lot of alkaline mafic rocks so they react faster to neutralize CO2 that's already in the atmosphere and the oceans)
The IPCC proposes carbon dioxide removal too, calling for "net negative emissions" to neutralize CO2 that has already been emitted [1], except they give examples of afforestation, reforestation, and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage as removal techniques. (I personally think that those are poorly scalable and will not make much headway compared to silicate weathering, but I'd be happy to be wrong.)
What about the transitional time before we get to "the long term?" The majority of global electricity still comes from fossil fuels. Most road vehicles sold today burn fossil fuels. Even after we reach the tipping point where most vehicles are electric, the old ones may continue to operate for decades.
In the meantime, CO2 that has already been emitted is trapping more energy from sunlight and raising temperatures. Once temperatures go up enough, there are bad feedback loops where e.g. tundra thaws, microorganisms start releasing the previously frozen carbon compounds, and we get vast new emissions from thawing regions even as direct human emissions fall. In other regions, temperate forests may dry out, burn, and transition to different biomes with lower carbon sequestration capacity.
That's why I think that solar radiation management will be needed. It can break the feedback loops where higher temperatures denude forests and release vast quantities of soil carbon. It doesn't directly reduce emissions or draw down atmospheric CO2, but it keeps temperatures down so there's time for the energy transition and CDR techniques to stabilize and reverse the atmospheric CO2 excess. A world with 550 PPM of atmospheric CO2 is bad, but a colder world with 550 PPM can be stabilized while a warmer world at 550 is going to keep going up even if anthropogenic emissions are slashed.
[1] "What are Carbon Dioxide Removal and Negative Emissions?" https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/faq/faq-chapter-4/
Yeah! So that they can keep on destroying the planet for profit.
Is not "tinting the sky" a power grab in itself? And a pretty darn serious one at that.
It's also something that could be tested for a year. It's not irreversible. It would allow the undeveloped world a chance to achieve a piece of the global wealth pie.
Why are so many people (especially environmentalists and climate scientists) so opposed to this solution?
Because it's just kicking the can down the road. This will cost Trillions which you might as well invest in a transition to clean energy now because you have to do it eventually anyway.
If the impact of climate chains looks like it's posing a risk to us as a species then perhaps blocking the sun temporarily is something that should be considered. Right now it sounds like there's still a chance that we could avoid the worst if we continue acting faster and faster. Pointing to a hypothetical sun shield decades in the future, now, is similar to pointing to practically unlimited CCS capacity sometime in the future just so we don't have to do anything drastic now.
> Crucially, the biggest problems with SRM are probably not yet known. The side effects of putting sulfur into the stratosphere could be some of the most consequential unknowns in human history.
SpaceX has launched thousands of satellites, and plans to launch many thousands more, polluting sky and space observation for everyone on Earth. This happened relatively quickly, and doesn't require approval from every country, unless they intend to offer service there.
Similarly, it's not far-fetched to imagine a scenario where a "benevolent" billionaire, as the article puts it, or a single country, could decide that SRM is a good idea, and just go with it. Countries still pump excessive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, and historically can't align on a single policy. Why would something like SRM be handled differently?