So many hoops we are jumping though when we could ... You know.... Just stop oil
It's not the easy option but is the correct one
It's not the easy option but is the correct one
Geoengineering test launches salt crystals into atmosphere
- Thread starter Forerunner
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Except this is bad science whose only use is to distract us from the only real solution (decrease carbon emissions).
You can easily educate yourself on why a lot of climate scientists are against geoengineering even in this very thread.
Me as well. We need to keep experimenting and finding small solutions.
There is no all or nothing approach to this. No one big solution. Never will be.
This is my take as well. It's become obvious that energy reduction / power source pivots aren't going to happen fast enough or consistently across the globe so we should absolutely explore alternatives.
But science saves lives... it could save us all. Your own life has been vastly improved by science. Yes, science is also responsible for nightmarish ends as well, but that's the point - your sentiment is a gross generalization and oversimplification of an entire concept and field of human activity. It's like saying "god I hate humanity".. there are too many good people that exist to outright condemn the entire species.
So you're saying the solution is to travel back to the past and change human nature?
I agree, there are only bad or terrible options left.
All these things have a probability of doing more harm than good, but I think that once climate change is truly something that people are feeling and can scream at politicians to fix, this sort of thing will happen more frequently, especially some stuff that they say can have lots of upsides and is "cheap" to implement.
I get that sentiment and am not a fan of the secrecy. However, that sentiment is likely also precisely why they were so secretive 😂 A double edged sword, if you will.
So um.... why not do it from Seattle or some other spot on the coast of Washington? 🤨
No one wants to live in the world that would result if we "just stopped oil"
Billions of humans that currently exist could not exist in that world.
We've had decades to get a solution in place. But let's see if we can fuck up the planet in other ways before the obvious answer to climate change.
At least these are real scientists and not whatever the fuck these guys are.
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Geoengineering startup’s claim it got ‘OKs to launch’ from the FAA doesn’t stand up to scrutiny
After Mexico barred their experiments, the startup launched balloons in US.
www.theverge.com
Reading the OP and I wasn't thrilled at the idea at all. I'm open to new ideas to combat climate change, but using unproven science that messes with climate even more sounds like a disaster in waiting. It could literally make things worse, FFS
And yeah it's typical of trying to fix a symptom rather than the cause
And yeah it's typical of trying to fix a symptom rather than the cause
Yeah that was my takeaway too, and that was before I read your rebuttal. Damn.
We have no idea what the world would be like if there was a genuine push to phase out fossil fuels and actually implement ecologically and anti-colonial systems of production and transportation.
Beyond less extreme weather, species extinction, and overall deaths that are happening year after year from the heat and conflict alone. That shit would go down.
Are the scientists in control of that? Will they be making those decisions?
You're right. We should build toward a world that isn't reliant on fossil fuels. But it doesn't make sense to pretend that "Just stop using them" is a real plan, unless we want to pick a few billion people to sacrifice first (and yes, continued use of fossil fuels without transitioning to alternatives will also lead to mass loss of life).
We need to find clever ways to mitigate the impact of our continued reliance on fossil fuels while we find alternatives. Stopping the tap without a replacement is not something anyone will ever do - no society will deliberately accept reverting to standards of living we haven't seen since the 19th century.
It will take longer than anyone hopes for that transition to take place. I'm not particularly fond of this example of geoengineering, but I believe we are going to need every trick we can come up with to mitigate climate change.
The window to avoid the need for geoengineering sadly closed. Frankly I wish we had acted sooner so it could have been avoided.
But I think at this point we have little choice.
But I think at this point we have little choice.
Plenty of communities and countries are already living substandard lives even with fossil fuels though. That's not unique to a no-oil world.
And the countries coasting off of all the oil and blood it takes to get it are riddled with unhealthy systems and pathologies anyway. Like cool, the world we've built off of fossil fuels and road systems allows you to get a video game console with one-day shipping from Amazon. Do you have any meaningful relationships with other human beings? A job that pays you what you're (actually) worth? Good healthcare? Walkable infrastructure? Are you a minority?
Like, toss a stone at any thread on Era and you will find it riddled with people who are just ridiculously unhappy for one reason or another, even under a Western standard of living. What are those people losing if you're unable to waste as much because the systems at play don't allow you to, or have to take more public transportation, or you can't do one-day shipping anymore?
I don't know about you, but if you told me getting rid of fossil fuels meant I could have a better life by the standards that actually promote healthier, happier living, and not just the ones that facilitate mindless consumerism and dangerous travel along highways built over my ancestors ' homes, I would make the trade in a heartbeat. And frankly, I don't think you're ever going to move the needle as much as you need to if you're defaulting to the alternatives always resulting in a worse standard of living anyway. That we have to keep up this ridiculous system of production and waste or else we are worse off. We have to actually be more optimistic and imaginative.
Of course, "just stopping" isn't feasible right now because way too many systems rely on oil, but it should still be the utmost goal to work towards. Because we're going to run out of oil anyway if we keep this up. And then what? It isn't our problem because that's too far off? The worst climate change predictions are slated for 2100. Do we just kick the can down the road more than what we are doing now because most of us will be dead by then? Of course not.
No oil is the finish line.
It's more of an engineering project, and your take is beyond silly.
For more on this subject and some convincing arguments for why this kind of approach is generally A Bad Idea, I'd recommend this podcast co-hosted by the chap who runs the Climate Town YouTube channel:
pca.st
We Shall Blot Out The Sun! - The Climate Denier's Playbook
From the minds that brought you Climate Town, comes… a podcast that's suspiciously similar to Climate Town.Rollie Williams (Climate Town) and Nicole Conlan (The Daily Show) are two comedians with Master's Degrees in Climate Science & Policy and Urban Planning. But don’t get too excited, because...
isnt the problem that even a first world nations, the US, eu ect, reduce carbon by sheer fact of development, up and comming nations wont b/c they want to ddevelop too, and on the other people wont give up stuff that produces co2 until there is a afordable alternative. your argument is we should dp nothing until those issues are resolved?
At no point did I suggest they would. But comments like "I hate science" and misrepresenting the position of these scientists as "hey, no need to adjust anything you're doing, we'll just find a miracle cure" are absolute trash-tier takes. If people were responding that way to a thread about vaccine scientists exploring all options in the face of COVID, they'd get run off the forum for being reactionaries.
We should be reducing GHGs by as much as we can before going down the route of geoengineering.
The least we can do is enforce the Paris Agreement and go from there.
While I'm not pro "I hate science" level of takes, I do not think the vaccine example is comparable, there is some genuinely well-founded skepticism over certain solutions being used as excuses to not do meaningful action, and we see this in forms of geo-engineering already, where we have carbon capture facilities being used as an excuse to keep pumping money into fossil fuel companies.
When that is a possibility, one needs to consider it as a con to the research itself.
This isn't even a conversation foreign to climate science really, not only do we see it in discussions about geoengineering, but we have seen that messaging on climate and how urgent these problems are, has been a bit of a problem, even if obviously governments/corporations misusing things as excuses for inaction isn't realistically the fault of climate scientists, but that also doesn't mean it shouldn't be a consideration.
If we're using vaccine science analogy, doing SAI/microscopic salt at a global scale to combat climate change is akin to doing gain of function research out of lab on wild animals. It's extremely reckless and it's basically gonna substitute one type of climate change for another. The poster was right to be extremely skeptical about this.
At the same time, a lot of people seem to be taking the stance of "We shouldn't do this because then people won't make the changes I want them to make" which is pretty fucked up when all our lives are on the line here. It's basically saying, "It's ok if things get worse because the changes will be worth it." Fighting something like climate change has to be a muti-faceted thing.
We need to do both.
And I don't agree with the idea that we shouldn't be even studying this as it might encourage the continued use of coal/gas/oil. It comes off as ideological, people being unhappy we might try to deal with climate change in a way not exactly how they want. I don't think we can get societal change fast enough, or to the extend we need it to be.
In the very possible scenario where we reduce solar irradiance without curbing emissions then we'd just end up doubly fucked because we'd have higher temperatures and less sunlight.
The thing is we've already started to curb emissions, just not fast enough. If this potentially buys us some time to keep going and doesn't do much harm then it seems a pretty obvious thing to do.
That's the thing. We don't know. And given the ramifications that this may have, it'd require a careful examination and very strong arguments for this to be greenlighted.
We haven't made enough research to prove that atmospheric manipulation is feasible let alone that it wouldn't cause much harm. Much of the science behind this is at best in very early stages or just outright speculative. Establishing that would take time, which we don't have by definition, and start ups and businesspeople are willing to jump the gun in their own economic interests.
if a race to manipulate the atmosphere started, the results would be a real gamble.
I think people here are grossly overestimating the capability of climate science. We can't even do cloud seeding that accurately, let alone predicting what effect this will have on the climate at the global scale. Modifying the solar radiation over the ocean is a recipe for global ecological disaster.
Not really. They did that to try and kill the machines that were taking over the world because they ran on solar power. It was very deliberate.
My criticism of geoengineering because it incentivizes nations and corporations to continue emitting GHGs is the least of my concerns.
Assume we collectively use geoengineering to tackle climate change. Let's use my example of India experiencing a 'below normal' monsoon that decimates their agriculture business—an unintended consequence.
I ask you, who pays for it?
How many billions of dollars is this unintended consequence going to cost in terms of humanitarian aid? Now you have millions of people with food insecurity as well. Will countries let these people in because of the climate migration that we created? Or do we close our borders? Are the deaths of millions of people an acceptable outcome for the greater good?
Now project that out with multiple unintended consequences in different countries, and one can forsee how this spirals out of control.
Also, any unintended consequence violates ENMOD. Adversaries can use this as a pretense for invasion/conflict.
e.g., the US, along with other countries, decides to use SAI/microscopic salt particles on a global scale, but without Russia or China's approval. An unintended consequence impacts China's economy, agriculture, or <<insert any reason>>. China then uses this as a pretense to invade Taiwan. Now what?
Do you get my point now?
It's been obvious to me for a long time that some type of geoengineering is going to be necessary to stave off the worst of climate change since we aren't going to make the necessary changes in a realistic time frame to avert disaster. Even if the changes were made in time should +1.5C be the new normal forever more? I'd hope we'd want to undo the damage we've caused.
This doesn't seem smart. Next they'll import ice to the poles to keep them cold.
I can't believe this post got under people's skin as if you insulted something sacred.
I can't believe this post got under people's skin as if you insulted something sacred.
