[rwyinuse]

The good news is that this pretty much proves we can somewhat slow down climate change by spraying certain chemicals into the air. Obviously it would be better to limit co2 emissions radically, but that's not going to happen thanks to the idiots who rule America these days.

The prospect of geoengineering is the only thing which gives me some hope for the future.

[estearum]

You should do some reading on why there are few actual climate scientists pushing this idea, and instead it’s mostly people with totally unrelated backgrounds like marketing or economics.

[azan_]

Why is that? Could you say something more?

[getnormality]

Is it your impression that scientists should be considered the paramount experts on climate change policy questions? Even though their expertise is on the climate side and not the policy side?

What exactly does the science say that makes it definitively a bad policy choice, regardless of the fact that policy requires the consideration of political and economic feasibility?

[letmetweakit]

I’m far from being an expert but geoengineering gives me the shivers. Dumping boatloads of chemicals into the atmosphere, a lot can go wrong.

[FloorEgg]

Same. Also no expert.

My intuition is that if we carefully reverse what we have been doing it's a lot less scary to me than rolling dice on adding something new.

the geoengineeing strategies that make sense to me are ecosystem restoration, not novel climate manipulation.

- converting solar energy to reforestation via automation

- solar powered robots digging demi-dunes in Sahel

- industrial CO2 capture, economically extracting the CO2 and converting it into something more valuable and environmental sustainable

In other words, using scalable and novel technology to carefully reverse the changes we have made rather than adding to them. In other words, undoing the damage we have done by targeting and repairing the damage itself instead of the consequences.

[tosapple]

Weapon of mass de-desertification.

You can spray it from anywhere, source it from god knows where. What flavor of snowcone do you want this week?

[red75prime]

Fortunately, we have volcanoes that were doing it in an uncontrolled manner for a long time. I think we have survived.

[whimsicalism]

we already dump boatloads of 'chemicals' into the atmosphere, this is how we got into this whole mess.

[red75prime]

> Obviously it would be better to limit co2 emissions radically

And to sequester hundreds of billion tonnes of co2, once humanity reaches carbon neutrality.

[malfist]

There was some promising research showing that you could recapture co2 and catalyze it into methane pretty efficiently. I wonder whatever happened to that.

It'd be nice if we could continue burning "fossil" fuels by recapturing and reusing. With enough solar power, the efficiencies don't matter a lot. And with reuse we wouldn't have to change any of our chemical processes or equipment that we've already built in the modern plastic era.

[mempko]

For those not understanding why aerosols dimming the sky is not a solution is it won't stop ocean acidification and obviously just slows down the warming, not stopping it.

The thing we need to do is remove CO2 but unfortunately that will take more energy than putting it up there is in the first place.

[red75prime]

Lower temperatures allow to take advantage of CO2-fertilization unimpeded by heat stress to speed up natural carbon sequestration somewhat. In addition to having less of climate change and its consequences that is.

[estearum]

Critically, it actually builds tension and the risk of a “climate snapback”. Where if humans can’t perpetually dim an ever-increasing amount, then the entire global system snaps back and destroys actually all or nearly all life on earth.

[orson2077]

Good lord, read Termination Shock by Neil Stephenson. Stratospheric aerosol injection is effective, but comes with severe risks, and can even be used as a strategic weapon (e.g. inject your sulphur over X and disrupt the monsoon in the Punjab, fucking their agriculture).

[rossjudson]

Neil Stephenson is predicting way too much of the future.

Tenses are hard. Again:

Stephenson predicted way too much of the present.

[mosura]

Careful now, that is dangerously close to admitting weather manipulation has been known about and possible for decades, and not merely a conspiracy.

[nxm]

You mean China and India which are building coal power plants at record pace as we speak.

[azan_]

China is also building renewables and nuclear at record pace and their per capita emission is much lower than USA. If we also take historic emission into account (and we should - the CO2 from decades ago is still in atmosphere!) then China still has a lot of budget to catch up with USA. Honestly, the China argument is getting really tiring.

[alkonaut]

While they do, 2025 was also the first year that the fraction of coal dropped in both China and India. In india it dropped by 3% and in China by 1.6%. So they build out fossil, but they build out non-coal power faster. China also hopes to peak coal in absolute terms by 2030. That's something at least.

[SilverElfin]

Does it matter what they do? These are countries that are poorer. We should be eating the cost of reducing our per capita emissions because we are wealthier. Why would you expect the world’s poor to be the ones to shoulder the burden first?

[jakkos]

Per capita, China and especially India emit far less CO2e than the US.

[Sharlin]

Whataboutism. The truth is that neither China nor India will ever reach the cumulative emissions of the US, probably by a very large margin. Those who have already put the most CO2 into the atmosphere have the greatest moral responsibility to become CO2-negative yesterday – and to do everything they can to help other, less wealthy countries do likewise.

[SilverElfin]

I am very against that kind of fix. We have no idea what the long term side effects will be and it may be impossible to clean up. We have gone through this type of reckless action before, and it can take decades for us to understand the downsides.

[fenwick67]

Sulfates are not good to spray into the air, they are bad for you

[luxuryballs]

but it doesn’t prove there won’t be worse side effects from adding new stuff into an already complex problem