this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2024
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If it was possible I would put quite some money on that geo engineering (like stratospheric aerosol injection) will be seriously discussed on a UN level within ten years. Climate change seems only to speed up and co2 emissions are still rising. At one point there is simply no alternative.
Greta Thunberg talks about it in her book - if the bathtub is overflowing in your house and water is spilling across the floor everywhere, step 1 for most people is to turn off the water. Yes sure it is fine to look for towels and buckets to try to contain the damage (and I don’t even disagree with you that it’ll be needed), but that also assumes that they’ll work and there will be political support to deploy them at scale, instead of mustering up the political support to turn the fucking taps down since at this point that’s clearly needed and is relatively speaking much much easier.
Exactly. The problem is that too many of the world's leaders don't want to upset the capital holders by limiting greenhouse gases.
These people are literally the people that Alfred told Bruce Wayne about: some men just want to see the world burn.
But at least we created some great shareholder value.
It’s honestly most akin to an AI model over optimizing for the trained outcome even when it turns out it was misaligned from the good outcome we wanted.
They certainly don’t want their grandchildren to inhabit a barely-livable hellscape instead of the paradise world they were born into, but they’ve been optimizing for money for so long that it’s baked in now, and it’s so so easy to just say, well it’s probably not a big deal, or I don’t think the science is really all that dire in its predictions, or oh well someone else will probably figure it out. And so, every year, we keep setting records for “production”.
What frustrates the hell out of me is that if they would just allow everyone who can work from home do so, it helps cut down emissions. It won't solve the whole thing, of course. But it's a super easy way to make a difference.
But control freak bosses are all "Good news, everyone! You must return to working in the office. Because it is so much better. It makes me feel important, you see. If I don't see your butts in chairs in front of monitors, I don't think you're actually doing anything."
Minor stuff like that makes me think that we're really doomed here. Late stage capitalism won't even do the easiest of easy things about climate change.
Hah, jokes on them, I don't do anything at the office, either.
In fact I dare say I do less, due to less efficient monitor placement and constant door-knockers. At least at home the only one knocking on my door is a 5yo asking for help in Mario.
Oh and the pointless meetings where I have to be present in person and actually look attentive, even though realistically there's no damn reason I even should've been invited.
Yup. It's just human storage and performative "productivity". It's about making the people who take credit for the hard work of others look and feel necessary.
I was more stating what I think will happen rather than wat we should be doing.
In terms of pure physics it is ofc easier to turn off the metaphorical tap, but in terms of power and politics we seem unable to transition to renewables. And I’m afraid once we switch on the geo-engineering button we still won’t transition. Only once oil is priced out of the market completely, be it fusion or abundant solar and wind (with energy storage), will we make the transition. But again I might be too pessimistic.
I also think that this is what will happen (not only discussed) but unless we master fusion it's practically just fixing a symptom and we'd have to do that for quite a while and the oceans will probably become too acidic.
Fusion would solve a lot, but even if we invent room-temperature superconductors today, it would still take so much time to roll fusion out on a big scale and replace oil infrastructure with electric infrastructure.
I tend to be very pessimistic about climate change, but I hope I’m wrong.
There already is no alternative. The amount of CO2 released is going to stay high for a long time (centuries?). People are dying from the current weather.
For the expected response: We need to also stop making things worse. Humanity can do two things at once.
Wouldn't aerosols reduce solar irradiance globally, hence reducing the rate of photosynthesis globally...which further reduces natural CO2 capture? How would that help?
No. It can be localized (for large scales of localized).
Also, we are finding through putting solar farms on crop fields, sun light is not the limiter on photosynthesis for many plants. Many plants get too hot, loose moisture, and photosynthesis less.
Nah, Sulfur compounds can lower albedo. That’s actually quite possibly what happened here and why we have sudden outlier acceleration.
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/cutting-pollution-from-the-shipping-industry-accidentally-increased-global-warming-study-suggests
Bit horrifying they put that much in the air.
Yea. They were basically burning the tar like leftovers from fuel distillation and there was a lot of heavy tankers moving from East Asia to the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_fuel_oil