… this points to the importance of studying the effects of deliberate atmospheric aerosol injections… I think calcium carbonate is very promising—but we need to start doing tests asap to learn the effects.
… this points to the importance of studying the effects of deliberate atmospheric aerosol injections… I think calcium carbonate is very promising—but we need to start doing tests asap to learn the effects.
The effects of deliberate small scale atmospheric aerosol injections is something I've studied extensively. The short term results are often quite noticeable even by parties not directly participating in the study.
This is why I think it will not be done. Any possible blow back will be attributed to those who actioned it, even if it might not be their fault. Do some injection in one part of the world and breadbasket crop fails 6 months later, they can point the finger even if it would have happened regardless.
To risky in terms of liability.
And you're going to do this for the rest of the forseeable future? Way more than anything else it sounds like a cop out to avoid dealing with the long term consequences of what we put out there now and to keep pumping oil
Yes, I think it will be taking place for the remainder of our lifetimes.
Solar growth is likely to remain exponential for the next decade or so, which will create a number of new opportunities. Other energy sources will also come online. But fossil fuels are unlikely to be regulated away, globally. We are also likely past some serious tipping points— so I prefer to figure out ASAP whether stratospheric aerosol injections are a viable tactic for preventing the melting of permafrost, for instance.
nice em dash -- how do I generate that in the text box?
but you're burying the lede: "We are also likely past some serious tipping points—" == we're doomed, just slowly, and we desperately need to be doing something to slow down or stop this metaphorical bus before it falls off a cliff
On *nix, <Compose> <-> <-> <-> (or install a Mac-like layout and AltGr+Shift+<->).
I see the replies to the literal question, but I think the parent was pointing out the possibility of the grandparent post being AI generated. The em dash is one of the common indicators.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1fx12q1/is_an_em_d...
And all of the replies to the literal question are reasons not to take that as a sign of an AI-generated post.
On iOS: long press the “-“ keyboard button to access variants of longer lengths like “–“ and “—“ (and also a “•”).
On macOS, you can do alt+shift+hyphen to get one: —.
ALT+0151
It seems pretty wild that we would even think about deliberate climate engineering. We're dealing with an incredibly complex system, the only place we have to live, and one where "harmless" actions before have had devastating unforeseen effects decades later. The lesson we should have learned we need to stop pumping stuff into the atmosphere and oceans until something bad happens, not "let's pump more stuff into the atmosphere."
Some random small group of people get to take these risks for all humanity? No thanks.
It just seems collectively insane to NOT be researching the hell out of the possibility that we could regulate our global heat balance issues for a cost of a few tens of billions of dollars a year.
Especially when the alternative solution to global warming is… degrowth. Which is just not going to work functionally as a political policy in a competitive world.
Fossil fuel use will decrease significantly… eventually.
Btw, did you know that if the USA replaced farmland currently growing biofuels with solar, that land area would produce 4x the current total electricity use of the entire nation?
We need to buy time — we can’t let the permafrost melt because “stupid humans deserve it”
>Some random small group of people
Like, say, petroleum exporters?
everything we do is climate engineering, just not the deliberate kind
Thing is we're not stopping. So given the fact that we are not stopping and won't stop, climate engineering starts to look like a decent Sr ond choice. I mean it doesn't take much for it to be better than nothing.
> sounds like a cop out to avoid dealing with the long term consequences of what we put out there now and to keep pumping oil
Any practical solution will consist of a wide array of approaches executed in parallel.
Talking about suddenly getting the whole world to stop using oil is a hypothetical thought exercise. It’s not going to happen. We have to be looking at all of the approaches together, including some lessening of fossil fuel use.
I think we need to do this until we develop large scale underground CO₂ sequestration.
Unfortunately even if/when we completely stop producing CO₂, it takes at least several centuries until levels go fully back down to natural levels by themselves.
Pumping SO₂ into the stratosphere should be able to regulate global temperatures to reasonable levels while we develop effective CO₂ sequestration.
Unfortunately SO₂ injection is incredibly controversial, as it triggers the "don't mess with nature" taboo, especially among people who have seen Jurassic Park, and affects the whole planet, including those who don't want it.
We do actually know that SO₂ breaks down in the stratosphere in 1-2 years, because we've studied when volcanoes injects it. It also doesn't cause acid rain because it's above the rain cycle.
But these facts are very hard to get across to people.
I think the idea is to do it as a stop gap while we catch up on renewable energy production/integration.
Equatorial countries probably should do it regardless of whether we reach net zero tomorrow. About 1.4C warming is a lot.
We're doing deliberate tests with sulfur dioxide instead of CaCO3, more info here: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/so2-injection
Entirely different forcing mechanism(s). The two most promising vectors are stratospheric injection and marine stratocumulus injection. Both approaches induce very different radiative and attendant circulation responses, and aren't relevant in the context of this work.
The red states have begun banning geoengineering and even small-scale tests. It seems to be spreading across these states, which suggests that we'll soon see similar laws being proposed at the Federal level.
the uproar over minor, localized cloud-seeding (which had nothing to do with the Texas floods) is probably a death knell for aerosol injection.
we are going to see countries going to war over unilateral solar radiation management efforts
I don't see this as a truly organic reaction. When I see the same laws popping up in multiple states, my suspicion is that it's driven centrally by right-wing think tanks, probably to benefit the fossil fuel lobbies. You don't need aerosol injection if there's no climate change, so we need to make it illegal (just as we need to defund Earth sciences, fire climate scientists, etc.) Similarly, if we need aerosol injection, then climate change is real. It's all one big package.
I think is pretty reasonable for people to be suspicious of spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. What's the effect of breathing this stuff in long term? Can you even construct an effective experiment around here? Do you know what the second and third order effects are?
It wasn't too long ago since another aerosol punctured a giant hole into our ozone, what was the effect of that?
Possibly. Seems like a mix of conspiracy-theory induced paranoia and right-wing influencers pushing a coordinated narrative.
Ironically, aerosol injection will probably benefit fossil fuel companies, with less pressure to meet aggressive emissions targets.
The irony is that this is probably true, but the greater project of suppressing any acknowledgement of climate change exceeds the possible benefits that aerosol injection might afford even to GHG emitters. It’s actually pretty goddamn frightening because it means these people are ready to take the whole damn ship down around them.
ETA: Don’t get me started on how weird it is that there’s a pre-spun conspiracy theory in chemtrails, one that makes zero sense but happens to align perfectly with making geoengineering even more difficult. But now I’m being conspiratorial.
The strategy still seems pretty bad to me. Even if fossil fuel lobbies convince MAGA-types in America that there's no climate change, other countries may do their own geonengineering. Nothing prevents areas like China and EU from starting their own programs, and thanks to more successful education systems their populations mostly don't have such anti-science sentiment.
Check out the open letter to ban geoengineering research by European scientists
https://www.solargeoeng.org/
Having the political system with the largest military on earth doing your bidding is a very good first step, if your goal is to make sure we do nothing while the whole world burns.
This is the plot of the Stephenson novel Termination Shock. Not endorsing the book but the hypothetical it poses is interesting.
If countries prefer that nothing would be done about climate change, they can go get bombed for all I care.
Countries are often gigantic though? There's plenty of state and local efforts going on in the United States despite the federal government currently backtracking for instance. Does that count as... worth burning tons of fossil fuels to bomb out of existence?
If they want to go to war over geoengineering efforts done by someone else, then yes.
They can sit on their asses, but going against people who actually try to do something to address climate change is a step too far.
I seriously hate this political nonsense.
There's currently 31 states who have bills to ban geoengineering. Its not just red states, there are plenty of "blue states" on the list as well. Painting this as a partisan political issue is just stupid. California is set to join the list as well.
March 2025:
As of this week, 31 out of 50 U.S. states—well over half the nation—have introduced legislation to ban or severely limit geoengineering and weather modification operations. Just days ago, on March 24th, that number stood at 24. Seven new states have joined in under a week, reflecting an undeniable groundswell of public awareness and political will.
https://sayerji.substack.com/p/weve-crossed-the-tipping-poin...
You “hate this political stuff” and then you link to a bizarre Substack where the first quote is from noted non-partisan scientist RFK Jr, and he’s claiming that because multiple states have introduced legislation that implies a groundswell of public opinion against evil geoengineering.
Anyone can introduce legislation. Keep this off HN.
A) Quotes from politicians don't discount the facts of the matter.
B) Had you spent five minutes researching what's going on, you would've seen an article from last year about Alameda City, a city in California (yes, THAT California, the supposed VERY BLUE STATE California) that banned geoengineering:
June 2024:
A Northern California city council voted early Wednesday morning to cancel the nation’s first outdoor experiment into the potential to limit global warming by altering cloud behavior.
The five-member Alameda City Council voted unanimously to reject University of Washington researchers’ aerial spraying of liquefied salt from the deck of a retired aircraft carrier in San Francisco Bay, two months after the experiment began.
And shockingly, the report isn't in some strange substack. Its actually a well known LEFT LEANING site - Politico:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/05/california-geoengin...
But hey man, just keep believing that this is simply some red state conspiracy to block climate change.
Does it fix ocean acidification? Does it fix the decline in human mental performance with raising CO2 levels in the air?
If not its a distraction, not a solution.
Yes, it does fix acid problems.
The calcium carbonate dust is reflective (the aim of the engineering is to reflect sunlight away from the Earth's atmosphere in the first place). However, it doesn't contribute to acid rain or oceans like the sulfate dioxide does (the aerosol that East Asian scrubbers are removing).
The CO2 (a greenhouse gas) amount isn't increased in this engineering effort. It increases because of burning fossil fuels, though. In the East Asian countries, they are producing/using more energy (via burning fossil fuels), but only removing the reflective aerosol; they're still emitting the CO2.
If cost was no object, we'd probably need to use the calcium carbonate immediately (to prevent the sunlight from entering the atmosphere immediately), we'd scrub existing carbon from the atmosphere (CO2), and we'd convert power plants to non-emissive technologies (and also install scrubbers onto existing ones for as long as they're needed).
The key point here is that we should be researching this stuff as fast as possible.
Looking at the wiki, the effects of long term exposure to CO2 under 0.5% of partial pressure (5000 ppm) are not known. The current concentration is close to just 430 ppm (though that's more than enough for the greenhouse effect). What sort of mental decline do you suspect? And any references?
The short term effects are known though (bad indoor ventilation causes decreased intelligence due to increased CO2 concentration), and a permanent short term effect would arguably be a long term effect.
There have been a handful of studies that last time I looked all involved a single investigator that have shown decreased intelligence due to levels around 1000 ppm.
NASA and the US Navy have been conducting studies since the 1960s showing no loss of cognitive function up to 50000ppm or so.
Submarines and space vehicles regularly operate at CO2 levels much higher than 1000ppm. If the levels of cognitive decline were anywhere close to what some of these studies show it would be easily observable in astronauts and submariners.
Not to mention testing locations with good ventilation would show drastically higher scores over all on standardized tests, and individuals would show drastically higher scores between attempts depending on ventilation.
None of these things happen. The only logical conclusion is that there is some flaw in study methodology.
There is a meta-analysis from 2023:
> Recent studies have shown that short-term exposure to high levels of indoor carbon dioxide (CO2) could negatively affect human cognitive performance, but the results are still controversial. In this study, a systematic review and meta-analysis of fifteen eligible studies was performed to quantify the effects of short-term CO2 exposure on cognitive task performance. The control CO2 levels used for comparison were below 1000 ppm, while the exposure concentrations were divided into three groups: 1000–1500 ppm, 1500–3000 ppm, and 3000–5000 ppm. The results indicated that CO2 exposure below 5000 ppm impacted human cognitive performance, with complex cognitive tasks being more significantly affected than simple tasks. The complex task performance declined significantly when exposed to additional CO2 concentrations of 1000–1500 ppm and 1500–3000 ppm, with pooled standardized mean differences (SMDs) (95% CI) of −2.044 (−2.620, −1.467) and −0.860 (−1.380, −0.340), respectively.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232...
I don't know how large these effects are, but they are statistically significant.
If you dig in you’ll find that for simple cognitive tasks they found no effect.
Then they analyzed only complex cognitive tasks. But fewer studies included complex cognitive tasks, and they used different methods of adjusting CO2 exposure (ventilation vs adding pure CO2)
Then you’ll note that of those studies they found that:
“The effects of pure CO2 on complex cognitive task performance decreased with increased CO2 concentrations”.
Between 1000-1500, and 1500-3000ppm they found a decrease in complex cognitive tasks performance, but at a higher exposure of 3000-5000ppm they found no effect.
This makes no sense until you read
“the complex cognitive task results under pure additional CO2 concentrations of 1000–1500 ppm and 1500–3000 ppm showed publication bias.”
Handful of studies (many with sketchy methodology—reducing ventilation, which brings with it many more variables than just increased CO2), publication bias, and a negative dose dependent response.
Also that Satish et al. study (the author is the one I was referring to in my last post—they also have several other studies on the subject) shows an enormous effect IIRC, which would skew the aggregate effects in the meta study.
The effect sizes in that study were the ones I was referencing when I said that such effects would be obvious.
we are nowhere close to the levels of CO2 concentration that would affect cognitive performance.
skimming through a couple of studies, measurable impact starts around 1000 ppm. with current policy intervention, we will likely reach 550ppm by 2100
> Left unchallenged, the increasing rate of change could see the CO2 concentration increase to about 1000ppm by 2100.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/grantham/publications/briefing-pa...
All right, but indoor concentrations are higher than outdoor. The higher the outdoor concentrations, the easier it is for indoor to exceed 1000 ppm.
If you’re optimistic, it is a means to buy time to implement a solution.
Maybe it will help with heartburn, if nothing else.
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