Climate models take this into account [0], contrary to what some people here seem to imply. It is also very likely that this is part of, but not the major factor of recent warming. [1]
I would like to point out that this is not something we're just figuring out "this week" as Hank Green seems to want to frame it.
There's no need to sensationalize. There is no conspiracy here. This is well known. It's good to educate people, but it sucks that even good educators have to crawl in the click-bait mud to reach people.
But global warming is a very major political issue, and those who determine what will be done about it - voters and politicians - have on average zero clues about it.
It’s reasonable to be skeptical since past climate models (eg from 20 years ago) didn’t do great over the subsequent period. It could be that current ones are much better (but we won’t know for a while).
If Hank was less excited about it, the video would not reach nearly as many viewers, so from an educational perspective, he’s succeeding at educating many more people about this topic. It matters less when we “figured this out”. The educational value is in the details.
yeah unfortunately if some people are click-baity it makes it where basically everyone has to be if they want to maximize their views/revenue on YouTube.
Thank you. I honestly had no context for the discussion, the linked tweet didn't really much help. This article helped clear up the concept and I appreciate the link.
I can’t remember who (maybe he’s quoted further in the thread than I quickly scrolled) but there’s a scientist who has been talking about this on Twitter for a long time (when I used to use it). Pretty scary these things can happen, but he was warning basically we are further along with global heating than we thought and this pollution was just masking some of the effect in the Northern Hemsiphere of CO2 we’d already released. We were always going to have to stop sulfur emissions, might have just been better perhaps to have a bit more gradual phase out to soften the shock…
The way Green is presenting this doesn't sit quite right with me. From day one of the sea temperature anomalies it's been said it's mainly because of these emissions no longer happening. But I guess it's the way it has to be presented to reach the masses.
> I can’t remember who (maybe he’s quoted further in the thread than I quickly scrolled) but there’s a scientist who has been talking about this on Twitter for a long time (when I used to use it).
I’ve unfortunately come to the conclusion that we are buggered.
Watching politics in the U.K. and the rest of the world I’m seeing politicians realise that they can tap into the populist idea that anything green is “the elites trying to control and tax you”.
All they care about us short term election prospects.
It's an interesting observation but I would want to know if bunker emissions from ships matched coal emissions from high sulfur coal or diesel emissions prior to the around year 2007 transition from low sulfur diesel to ultra low sulfur diesel had as much of an impact. Remember there was a huge concern for acid rain in the 1980's and 1990's and cutting atmospheric SO2 pretty much eliminated it.
Not discounting that coal is terrible for lots of reasons but there's a ton of variability on types of coal. One of the core reasons the coal industry pulled out of Appalachia is there were lower-sulfur deposits out in Wyoming... Some gov data: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37752
EDIT: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/emissions-of-... Transportation is a small % of emissions compared to energy generation. There's been a regional shift though as North America moved to sulfur controls earlier for energy generation (1990) than Europe, and Asia has begun to climb as these regions went into decline.
This lacks scientific models or sources that quantify the magnitude of the reduction in ship tracks and the resulting impact on sea temperatures. They are not in the science.org article[1] he links either.
Usually posts with little evidence and the use of the phrase "may be causing" result in flagged posts, but not when it fits a certain narrative?
The fact that the loss of particulate matter in the atmosphere increases warming has been known for at least two decades.
This is not surprising to me. It started years ago when scrubbers began to be installed on coal power plants and continued with low sulphur diesel requirements that started 15 years ago.
If the Sulfur emissions policies were known for >5 years and discussed for >10 years why aren’t they part of mainstream climate models?
The best answer I could find was essentially that models use a proxy for aerosols and so including the new policy might cause “double counting” of this forcing. This ‘conservatism’ caused this effect to be left out of the models.
So the story is basically that current mainstream models underestimated warming due to them ignoring this effect. But if they are missing this forcing, what other “insignificant” forcings are missing? Are they positive or negative? Are there other observations that don’t match the models?
This has really shaken my faith in the climate science community. I’m starting to think ClimateGate wasn’t the nothingburger the media made it out to be.
For anyone interested in a near-future sci-fi look at how sulfur as a form of geoengineering might play out, check out out Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson[0]. The title[1] refers to what happens when you suddenly stop an effort like that...
I'd wager a lot of money we've not seen that last of humanity screwing around with the climate in well-intentioned but bad-outcome ways.
Is there a name for this phenomenon of harmful actions because by an "increase" of understanding of the underlying system?
I imagine there are similar outcomes in many areas, politics, economics, code bases. Kind of like requiring helmets (protect personal health) for cycling leading to less cyclists (poorer health outcomes for a population)
<offtopic>Does this Twitter link open for you in Chrome? Lately I have had less than 50% success rate opening Twitter. I just see a blank page with an X in the middle.</>
The enthusiasm with geoengineering among the HN community is worrisome. Not sure which computing analogy would drive home the complete recklessness of this mentality but the Earth is not something you can reboot to the last working state once you harebrained patch implodes.
It is true that we have been slowly geoengineering for ages (initially unwittingly, recently with eyes wide open) and it is also true that our modeling abilities increase but this is quite far from making us experts in geoengineering.
For the short term future (decades) the only strategy that seems to make sense on the face of epistemic uncertainty is to refrain from aggravating the situation while studying ever more deeply the system we are now perturbing so much.
Our biggest mental deficiency when handling complexity is that we cant think holistically in practical ways. Isolating individual factors and applying linear thinking has worked wonders in isolated problems but it is not cutting it here.
Most people here on HN are rationally capable of understanding the challenges humanity faces right now.
What many aren't capable of is accepting the conclusion that we all have to change the way we live and quite possibly even the way we organize society in order to mitigate the irreperable problems our way of living has already caused.
Deep down they might suspect this is necessary, but it is much more comfortable to believe in a solution that is only technological and go on as we did. That is why discussions around such technological silver bullets are always toxic: people want to believe.
I highly doubt many proponents of geoengineering think in terms of rebooting or isolating individual factors.
The appeal of geoengineering is you can nudge specific systems slowly into another direction. You can start small and observe expected effects and unwanted side-effects.
Reduction of sulfer emissions by ships is an interesting starting point to learn something.
Reducing atmospheric CO2 is geo-engineering just as well. Tackling climate change is going to involve climate engineering. Some solutions will work. Others will not.
> to refrain from aggravating the situation
Easier said than done. What makes you think this is going to be achievable?
Why are you assuming the HN community isn't acknowledging the complexity and not taking a holistic approach?
I used to think this way, but after years of trying I don't think getting people to change their life habits is going to happen.
At this point I think geoengineering is necessary. At the very, very least, carbon sequestration at scale is a fairly safe form of geoengineering if we can pull it off.
> For the short term future (decades) the only strategy that seems to make sense on the face of epistemic uncertainty is to refrain from aggravating the situation while studying ever more deeply the system we are now perturbing so much.
Sometimes perfect is the enemy of good. If climate change really was going to kill a billion people then taking the risk with some geoengineering would be better than just letting it happen.
It’s almost like this website is full of people that let Silicon Valley money trick them into believing they are Gods amongst men and that knowing how to write software grants them some sort of transferable expertise.
I think it’s important to have realistic ideas about how climate change might actually go. For example:
- if all emissions stopped tonight, we’d still be on track for temperature rises over the next several decades
- some places would get hotter, others wouldn’t. Similarly changes in rainfall would not be evenly distributed. It may be that Europe’s climate doesn’t change all that much, for example (due to changing ocean currents cooling the North Atlantic)
- some of the facts that drove rhetoric 20 years ago have since changed, for example the cost of renewable energy has dramatically decreased such that certain kinds of subsidies or sacrifices are less necessary (on the other hand, the power/km^2 density of solar / wind in some places may still imply land uses that people would find unacceptable were they to become dominant)
- in the grand scheme of things, geoengineering (like pumping SO2 into the troposphere or dispersing silver particles in the atmosphere) is cheap and could be performed unilaterally by many countries were they to feel sufficiently threatened by climate change.
I think one reason to care about this kind of geoengineering is that it might just happen. I think it’s also useful to consider that we’re currently doing the ‘geoengineering’ of pumping more and more CO2 into the atmosphere and I think we should be careful to avoid treating ‘planned’ geoengineering asymmetrically from the side-effect kind.
>Not sure which computing analogy would drive home the complete recklessness of this mentality but the Earth is not something you can reboot to the last working state once you harebrained patch implodes.
here's one: stop writing random bits to the BIOS hoping it will fix things
We already are performing geoengineering on the Earth, as you point out. We can't not do geoengineering anymore. Either we can continue the geoengineering we have been doing, or change the geoengineering to work towards some other goal, but there isn't an option where we don't do geoengineering. If you are driving a car towards what you think might be a cliff, you can't choose not to drive. You can continue driving the way you are, you can turn, you can brake, but you can't not drive.
Anything we choose to do will require geoengineering. We can continue dumping CO2 into the air, which is geoengineering. We can try to make our atmosphere more reflective, which is geoengineering. We can try to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, which is geoengineering. We can try to completely stop putting CO2 in the air, which is geoengineering. We need to change the state of Earth, which, pretty much by definition, is geoengineering.
> The enthusiasm with geoengineering among the HN community is worrisome.
It reflects the gravity of the situation. What I find incomprehensible is a reluctance to consider investigating such steps when the extremes of climate model forecasts are so horrific.
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.
Linear thinking is how we take action. Leaning back observation is how we analyze.
It’s cool to analyze but it can paralyze us into observation and this situation benefits from the former because the consequences of being wrong is so profoundly dire.
Generally agree with you, but why not be conservative when it comes to issues like global warming and species extinction and avoid catastrophe if it turns out to be as bad as it could be?
That takes linear thinking and action now. We should also analyze, but it’s logical to take action too.
More people should upvote your post. If there is a rank of how easily humanity can destroy itself and make the earth uninhabitable for itself geoengineering is probably second only to thermonuclear war.
Also I object to the use of the term geo-engineering. Engineering supposes we know exactly what the outcomes will be following centuries/decades of experience with similar systems. Including many failed experiments. Thinking we can geo-engineer a predictable change when there is no way to experiment, fail and learn safely because we only have one shot at this is massively stupid. Anyone that claims "but we've been geoengineering for decades with our greenhouse gas emissions etc" is simply wrong. No, we haven't been "geoengineering". Engineering implies conscious intent. Humanity didn't start burning coal to increase co2 content in the atmosphere. Confusing these two things are akin to finding a victim of a vehicle accident and doing a roadside open heart surgery by a random bystander. "Hey, the guy is already sliced open, we've already started the surgery so we may as well continue right?" No, wrong. That is insane.
The biggest lie today is that we comprehensively know how climate works. We don't. We don't even measure the earth's temperature properly. We extrapolate huge amounts of data. If we _really_ wanted to learn how climate works it would require not just arrays of sensors covering the entire planet's surface, but also ocean depths and the the entire thickness of the atmosphere. No, satellites are not a replacement. Anyone that knows the limitations of satellite sensing knows we can measure a lot, but reliably measuring temperature, humidity, and wind direction across the entire thickness of the atmosphere is not something we can do. We can roughly approximate some measurements across the entire thickness, in theory in good conditions we can narrow it down to certain attitudes and on this basis we make conclusions on the entire state of the system pulling the missing data from our "models". If we discovere the models are wrong? We just tweak them to match the historic data. We might know the measures in this particular place and time, but we use our "models" to "approximate" everything we are unable to measure.
This is one of the major reasons why we cannot reliably predict weather for next 3 days, and why our attempts at making climate predictions are laughable. We know a certain number of principles so we can make some conclusions like more co2/h2o/ch4 = more temperature, but even in this we have to accept there are processes (positive and negative feedback) we have zero idea of.
Furthermore, our planet has shown us huge climatic variability in the geological record. Within that variability the most dangerous to human life are periods of excessive glaciation (ice ages). We're "just" in the warming period after the last one. Is humanity taking part in accelerating the warming? Yes, is it a licence for stupidity like attempting to "stabilise" something that is inherently unstable and periodic(climate) risking we overdo it and find ourselves in a "mini ice age"? No.
Has it ever stopped us before? No. Anyone interested in results of previous "geoengineering" efforts should read up on the soviet attempts at it and what catastrophe it wrought on the region including the Sea of Azov. People in the entire Black Sea region can consider themselves extremely lucky they haven't implemented more than few percent of their plans. It is generally accepted today had more of Soviet attempts at geoengineering been implemented it would've had same horrible consequences we see near the Sea of Azov far and wide.
So we were accidentally cooling by polluting?
I don't think that is good argument to start polluting again.
Sulfur does have downsides, like acid rain.
[+] [-] zith|2 years ago|reply
I would like to point out that this is not something we're just figuring out "this week" as Hank Green seems to want to frame it.
There's no need to sensationalize. There is no conspiracy here. This is well known. It's good to educate people, but it sucks that even good educators have to crawl in the click-bait mud to reach people.
[0] https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1444679408573419520
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
[+] [-] BurningFrog|2 years ago|reply
But global warming is a very major political issue, and those who determine what will be done about it - voters and politicians - have on average zero clues about it.
[+] [-] zeroonetwothree|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] animal_spirits|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zagrebian|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akira2501|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1808_mystery_eruption
[+] [-] jjallen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmbche|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taftster|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephen_g|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChatGTP|2 years ago|reply
So it seems the sulfur was removed for the obvious season that it's not good for respiratory health, but it may be a necessary evil for sometime ?
[+] [-] matsemann|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metamet|2 years ago|reply
Was it Leon Simons? https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8
[+] [-] ivarv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moultano|2 years ago|reply
There was also an underwater volcano that put a lot of water vapor in the upper atmosphere that could be a culprit. (On top of the ongoing trend of warming of course.) https://www.carbonbrief.org/tonga-volcano-eruption-raises-im...
[+] [-] iamflimflam1|2 years ago|reply
Watching politics in the U.K. and the rest of the world I’m seeing politicians realise that they can tap into the populist idea that anything green is “the elites trying to control and tax you”.
All they care about us short term election prospects.
[+] [-] joecool1029|2 years ago|reply
It's an interesting observation but I would want to know if bunker emissions from ships matched coal emissions from high sulfur coal or diesel emissions prior to the around year 2007 transition from low sulfur diesel to ultra low sulfur diesel had as much of an impact. Remember there was a huge concern for acid rain in the 1980's and 1990's and cutting atmospheric SO2 pretty much eliminated it.
Not discounting that coal is terrible for lots of reasons but there's a ton of variability on types of coal. One of the core reasons the coal industry pulled out of Appalachia is there were lower-sulfur deposits out in Wyoming... Some gov data: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37752
EDIT: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/emissions-of-... Transportation is a small % of emissions compared to energy generation. There's been a regional shift though as North America moved to sulfur controls earlier for energy generation (1990) than Europe, and Asia has begun to climb as these regions went into decline.
[+] [-] hnuser0000|2 years ago|reply
Usually posts with little evidence and the use of the phrase "may be causing" result in flagged posts, but not when it fits a certain narrative?
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/changing-clouds-unfo...
[+] [-] 38|2 years ago|reply
http://farside.link/twitter.com/hankgreen/status/16875355251...
[+] [-] rplst8|2 years ago|reply
This is not surprising to me. It started years ago when scrubbers began to be installed on coal power plants and continued with low sulphur diesel requirements that started 15 years ago.
[+] [-] montalbano|2 years ago|reply
Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships has reduced masking of global warming
The word 'cause' in current title seems wrong.
[+] [-] brutusborn|2 years ago|reply
If the Sulfur emissions policies were known for >5 years and discussed for >10 years why aren’t they part of mainstream climate models?
The best answer I could find was essentially that models use a proxy for aerosols and so including the new policy might cause “double counting” of this forcing. This ‘conservatism’ caused this effect to be left out of the models.
So the story is basically that current mainstream models underestimated warming due to them ignoring this effect. But if they are missing this forcing, what other “insignificant” forcings are missing? Are they positive or negative? Are there other observations that don’t match the models?
This has really shaken my faith in the climate science community. I’m starting to think ClimateGate wasn’t the nothingburger the media made it out to be.
[+] [-] uxamanda|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering#Maintenan...
[+] [-] peyton|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] victorbstan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AJRF|2 years ago|reply
Is there a name for this phenomenon of harmful actions because by an "increase" of understanding of the underlying system?
I imagine there are similar outcomes in many areas, politics, economics, code bases. Kind of like requiring helmets (protect personal health) for cycling leading to less cyclists (poorer health outcomes for a population)
[+] [-] psychphysic|2 years ago|reply
Cold acidic oceans, or warm sulphur free ones?
[+] [-] Kikawala|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)
[+] [-] visarga|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nologic01|2 years ago|reply
It is true that we have been slowly geoengineering for ages (initially unwittingly, recently with eyes wide open) and it is also true that our modeling abilities increase but this is quite far from making us experts in geoengineering.
For the short term future (decades) the only strategy that seems to make sense on the face of epistemic uncertainty is to refrain from aggravating the situation while studying ever more deeply the system we are now perturbing so much.
Our biggest mental deficiency when handling complexity is that we cant think holistically in practical ways. Isolating individual factors and applying linear thinking has worked wonders in isolated problems but it is not cutting it here.
[+] [-] atoav|2 years ago|reply
Most people here on HN are rationally capable of understanding the challenges humanity faces right now.
What many aren't capable of is accepting the conclusion that we all have to change the way we live and quite possibly even the way we organize society in order to mitigate the irreperable problems our way of living has already caused.
Deep down they might suspect this is necessary, but it is much more comfortable to believe in a solution that is only technological and go on as we did. That is why discussions around such technological silver bullets are always toxic: people want to believe.
[+] [-] sfvisser|2 years ago|reply
The appeal of geoengineering is you can nudge specific systems slowly into another direction. You can start small and observe expected effects and unwanted side-effects.
Reduction of sulfer emissions by ships is an interesting starting point to learn something.
[+] [-] bartimus|2 years ago|reply
> to refrain from aggravating the situation
Easier said than done. What makes you think this is going to be achievable?
Why are you assuming the HN community isn't acknowledging the complexity and not taking a holistic approach?
[+] [-] dheera|2 years ago|reply
I used to think this way, but after years of trying I don't think getting people to change their life habits is going to happen.
At this point I think geoengineering is necessary. At the very, very least, carbon sequestration at scale is a fairly safe form of geoengineering if we can pull it off.
[+] [-] concordDance|2 years ago|reply
Sometimes perfect is the enemy of good. If climate change really was going to kill a billion people then taking the risk with some geoengineering would be better than just letting it happen.
[+] [-] brucethemoose2|2 years ago|reply
Geoengineering is an act of desperation. Its like your laptop is on fire, so you throw some water on it.
[+] [-] tmpX7dMeXU|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tuna-Fish|2 years ago|reply
There are methods of geoengineering that you can stop doing at any point, at which point they stop having an effect.
The one proposed in this twitter thread, marine cloud brightening by spraying seawater in the air, is one of those.
[+] [-] dan-robertson|2 years ago|reply
- if all emissions stopped tonight, we’d still be on track for temperature rises over the next several decades
- some places would get hotter, others wouldn’t. Similarly changes in rainfall would not be evenly distributed. It may be that Europe’s climate doesn’t change all that much, for example (due to changing ocean currents cooling the North Atlantic)
- some of the facts that drove rhetoric 20 years ago have since changed, for example the cost of renewable energy has dramatically decreased such that certain kinds of subsidies or sacrifices are less necessary (on the other hand, the power/km^2 density of solar / wind in some places may still imply land uses that people would find unacceptable were they to become dominant)
- in the grand scheme of things, geoengineering (like pumping SO2 into the troposphere or dispersing silver particles in the atmosphere) is cheap and could be performed unilaterally by many countries were they to feel sufficiently threatened by climate change.
I think one reason to care about this kind of geoengineering is that it might just happen. I think it’s also useful to consider that we’re currently doing the ‘geoengineering’ of pumping more and more CO2 into the atmosphere and I think we should be careful to avoid treating ‘planned’ geoengineering asymmetrically from the side-effect kind.
[+] [-] BasedAnon|2 years ago|reply
here's one: stop writing random bits to the BIOS hoping it will fix things
[+] [-] peyton|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gilbetron|2 years ago|reply
Anything we choose to do will require geoengineering. We can continue dumping CO2 into the air, which is geoengineering. We can try to make our atmosphere more reflective, which is geoengineering. We can try to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, which is geoengineering. We can try to completely stop putting CO2 in the air, which is geoengineering. We need to change the state of Earth, which, pretty much by definition, is geoengineering.
[+] [-] rgmerk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|2 years ago|reply
It reflects the gravity of the situation. What I find incomprehensible is a reluctance to consider investigating such steps when the extremes of climate model forecasts are so horrific.
[+] [-] defrost|2 years ago|reply
Ooops... bricked it :(
[+] [-] sz3|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] happytiger|2 years ago|reply
It’s cool to analyze but it can paralyze us into observation and this situation benefits from the former because the consequences of being wrong is so profoundly dire.
Generally agree with you, but why not be conservative when it comes to issues like global warming and species extinction and avoid catastrophe if it turns out to be as bad as it could be?
That takes linear thinking and action now. We should also analyze, but it’s logical to take action too.
[+] [-] jabbany|2 years ago|reply
Probably akin to "testing in production". But, as is in computing, it's still done all the time despite the dangers.
[+] [-] Roark66|2 years ago|reply
Also I object to the use of the term geo-engineering. Engineering supposes we know exactly what the outcomes will be following centuries/decades of experience with similar systems. Including many failed experiments. Thinking we can geo-engineer a predictable change when there is no way to experiment, fail and learn safely because we only have one shot at this is massively stupid. Anyone that claims "but we've been geoengineering for decades with our greenhouse gas emissions etc" is simply wrong. No, we haven't been "geoengineering". Engineering implies conscious intent. Humanity didn't start burning coal to increase co2 content in the atmosphere. Confusing these two things are akin to finding a victim of a vehicle accident and doing a roadside open heart surgery by a random bystander. "Hey, the guy is already sliced open, we've already started the surgery so we may as well continue right?" No, wrong. That is insane.
The biggest lie today is that we comprehensively know how climate works. We don't. We don't even measure the earth's temperature properly. We extrapolate huge amounts of data. If we _really_ wanted to learn how climate works it would require not just arrays of sensors covering the entire planet's surface, but also ocean depths and the the entire thickness of the atmosphere. No, satellites are not a replacement. Anyone that knows the limitations of satellite sensing knows we can measure a lot, but reliably measuring temperature, humidity, and wind direction across the entire thickness of the atmosphere is not something we can do. We can roughly approximate some measurements across the entire thickness, in theory in good conditions we can narrow it down to certain attitudes and on this basis we make conclusions on the entire state of the system pulling the missing data from our "models". If we discovere the models are wrong? We just tweak them to match the historic data. We might know the measures in this particular place and time, but we use our "models" to "approximate" everything we are unable to measure.
This is one of the major reasons why we cannot reliably predict weather for next 3 days, and why our attempts at making climate predictions are laughable. We know a certain number of principles so we can make some conclusions like more co2/h2o/ch4 = more temperature, but even in this we have to accept there are processes (positive and negative feedback) we have zero idea of.
Furthermore, our planet has shown us huge climatic variability in the geological record. Within that variability the most dangerous to human life are periods of excessive glaciation (ice ages). We're "just" in the warming period after the last one. Is humanity taking part in accelerating the warming? Yes, is it a licence for stupidity like attempting to "stabilise" something that is inherently unstable and periodic(climate) risking we overdo it and find ourselves in a "mini ice age"? No.
Has it ever stopped us before? No. Anyone interested in results of previous "geoengineering" efforts should read up on the soviet attempts at it and what catastrophe it wrought on the region including the Sea of Azov. People in the entire Black Sea region can consider themselves extremely lucky they haven't implemented more than few percent of their plans. It is generally accepted today had more of Soviet attempts at geoengineering been implemented it would've had same horrible consequences we see near the Sea of Azov far and wide.
[+] [-] FrustratedMonky|2 years ago|reply