https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/climate/climate-change-geoengineering.html?searchResultPosition=1
Ahhhhh for the past month I've been bombarded with this shit so much. The media is manufacturing consent to keep polluting forever because studies will come out once it is too late which show how modifying the atmosphere is an incredibly awful idea with disastrous consequences
Modifying the atmosphere is GOOD & EASY & CHEAP.
Just plant some fucking trees. A big tree-planting program would cost maybe ~$300 billion per year for the entire planet and would offset more than just our yearly CO2 increases. We would still be adding CO2 to the atmosphere, but the rate of addition could slowly start decreasing.
Uhhh, no, it's not that simple lol. You're neglecting the fact that trees dont help with methane gas , in fact they produce it when they burnt, and lots of it. Methane is serious problem that wasn't fully understood till somewhat recently and wasn't accounted for accurately in old climate models. Methane is worse than CO2 and there is millions of tons in pockets of permafrost melting like crazy right now. Trees are great but it's not enough at all
It's a bit more complex. Rewilding does indeed act as a substantial net greenhouse decrease in the medium term. But the methane increases emissions impact in the short term, even though it degrades fairly fast.
Basically, we need to rewild, but also get to zero emissions and scrub current emissions out at the same time. And yes, we're probably going to need to do some geoengineering, probably solar shades to increase albedo and replace lost ice reflection.
The issue is that things are now so bad we're going to have to do pretty much everything just to stop human extinction, or at least severe degradation into one or two high tech enclaves (no AnPrims, the climate will be too unstable to support Hunter-gathering.)
Really well said. The other tragic part about reforesting areas is how extreme fired all around the world are getting. It's just an overall dryer and warmer climate and drought is common now in areas that didn't really have thst issue.
I really truly wish we could get our shit together but as it stands, especially considering this original posts suggestion of geo-engineering, they are doing everything possible but the one thing we truly need to do, dramatically lower emissions. I feel like I'm going insane sometimes seeing the hoops they suggest instead of it.
Trees are great but it’s not enough at all
I already said that this would just decrease our CO2 addition, not reverse it. But this is a form of simple & cheap atmosphere modification.
Have you looked into some of the tree planting programs across India and Africa? It's a very mixed result for your claim of offsetting current and future CO2 emissions. Growing a bunch of trees in areas that need it the most is extremely difficult and water is much harder to come by as well as sustainability issues, especially keeping them alive. It's much harder than it appears on surface level, especially the water part
The problem is that as I understand it the atmosphere has multiple zones or layers. The CO2 gets up into the higher layers where it will not easily be cycled down to where trees can reach it for hundreds of years. And as someone else noted more wildfires plus the release of deep ocean methane sheets which are going to front-load a lot of the heating for climate change but be gone significantly ahead of the time the carbon starts to cycle out. Replanting trees while good is nowhere near enough. We must get carbon emissions massive down and not in 15 years but in less than 10. All planting trees can do is slightly delay the entry of more carbon into the atmosphere to buy a little more time but you'd have to plant a lot for little effect and the developed countries that are reckless enough to continue spewing CO2 at high rates with no plan for reductions are not going to be the ones spending hundreds of millions planting trees.
Above ground biosphere currently contains about 500 gigatons of carbon, while fossil fuel emissions are about 10 gigatons per year. So doubling the number of trees on earth would buy us less than 50 years of burning oil at the current rate. (This is a gross simplification as the above ground biosphere is in equilibrium with the atmosphere and the soil, but it still gives an idea of the magnitudes involved). I would not call the herculean effort needed to plant that many trees easy or cheap. Maybe we should just reduce emissions instead?
If you build geoengineering facilities instead of addressing the capitalists that have caused all this then I hope you have a shit load of security at those facilities because they are definitely getting bombed.
Not even just by leftists. But by fucking reactionaries too who have spent the last 50 years consuming contrails and "making the frogs gay" conspiracies.
Also, to be quite honest I do not trust the US with filling the atmosphere with whatever undisclosed concoctions they feel like on an industrial world-changing scale...
We really are going to block out the sky like in the Matrix, except instead of doing it to own the robots we will be doing it to own ourselves
It really does amaze me the length capitalists are willing to go through. Literally taking the hardest path possible just so you can earn a few more cents per microsecond
Headline white noise is worth exactly as much as it cost to print. There isn't going to be a global terraforming effort. We're not going to re-engineer life on the planet. Look at what's happening to Exxon right now. The largest business in the world put a big bet on O&G in 2014 and it is currently eating shit like shit is going out of style, because demand for their product is down. Five years and the firm has gone from Titan Of Industry to Mountain of Bad Debt.
This is the future of western capitalism. Half a century of risky bets failing to pay off. Trillions in liabilities being rendered worthless. And the nation responding with British-style Austerity, further collapsing the economy like it's a neutron star.
We're not going to Mars. We're not going back to the Moon. We're not beating Climate Change with Infrastructure Week. We're just going to bleed out like a bunch of stuck piggies, as our creditors cannibalize the corporates dinosaurs and then each other. That is what, in the end, will curtail US consumption of fossil fuels. A Second Great Depression.
Morpheus : We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky.
Fucking sick man all this so much easier than just not burning fossil fuels and ending subsidies for them fuck
Im going to shoot myself into the fucking sun
It seems like they'll do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING before they simply commit to planting forests and ending clear cutting. If we actually wanted to treat climate change as a national security threat, we could use our tough negotiations against Brazil and Malaysia etc to protect their forests. We could come up with a grand plan to subsidize planting trees and re-greening degraded landscapes that we have everywhere in the US. But now....lets try something crazy and expensive instead.
i 'm glad scientists are hard at work, grabbing ideas from mid 2000s animated shows for kids such as jimmy neutron
makes one wonder why they have to have such advanced degrees imo.
The thumbnail makes me think of Ben Garrison if he was a video maker
hey look, something we clearly don't understand enough. let's fuck with it
Something I've been thinking about for a while now in relation to artificially cooling the earth: We all know that capitalists aren't going to do anything drastic to curb climate change until it starts affecting their profits, so realistically we're just going to be sitting on our asses about this issue until we're far past all points of no return for using renewables and long term policy decisions. At some point, what the article is suggesting, manipulating the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface of the earth in order to cool it off, is basically going to be our only realistic option for curbing the effects of rising temperatures.
So what are our options for actually doing that you might ask. Giant mirrors to reflect more light back out into space? A swarm of small mirror satellites that block/reflect light away from earth? Pumping other gases into the atmosphere that block/reflect sunlight? All theoretically possible, but in my opinion, the quickest, easiest, and most effective way we currently have of doing this are nuclear weapons. It's the same thinking behind nuclear winter: the vacuum created after a nuke goes off sucks a shitload of dirt and debris and throws it miles up into the atmosphere, and that debris acts in the same way as a volcano's ash plume to block sunlight. This means that theoretically, if we set off enough nukes across the entire globe at the same time, we could create an artificially volcanic ash cloud that cools off the earth temporarily, perhaps giving us more time to actually start doing things we should have started doing decades ago.
TL;DR: At some point, someone in a major position of power is going to seriously suggest causing a nuclear winter in order to fight climate change.
Yeah that’s the futurama solution we can do to tide us over until we can start mining ice.
probably easier to use "bunker-busting" bombs on several supervolcanoes to have the same effect.
More on supervolcanoes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-a-supervolcano-what-a-supereruption https://www.heritagedaily.com/2019/07/10-of-the-largest-super-volcanoes/124137
And a couple documentary type videos on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1pa6afh8o4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt07neEU0bU
They're already planning to frack near Yellowstone (supervolcano) https://www.ecowatch.com/fracking-wyoming-2475758304.html https://billingsgazette.com/news/opinion/mailbag/could-fracking-awaken-yellowstone-supervolcano/article_85e30062-b3bf-5e6c-a345-5446412792af.html https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2bz1ij/could_fracking_near_yellowstone_caldera/
Also might find this interesting; they already planned to use nukes for "constructive" purposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare And the Soviet programme to do the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_National_Economy
Aggressively curtailing carbon emissions while investing into higher efficiency farming and getting people onto a healthier and more carbon efficient diet?
Realistically we are gonna have to do this or go extinct. I don't see us making any significant changes to reverse climate change in the next 50 years
no clearly we must nuke the planet repeatedly until we have a global nuclear winter
Right we go down that route we are committed to pumping aerosols into the atmosphere forever. It’s not like things will change on the CO2 front and in fact this will create an illusion that we can just keep going on business as usual. They mix out after about a year and if you let it do that we get a massive snap upward of a few degrees C within a few years. Eventually crop yields fall with poor counties being hit first, although I’m sure the mad scientists at Monsanto are working on GMOs that do well under low lighting. Also weather gets strange in other ways, just look at all the strange weather events after volcanic eruptions. We don’t fully understand the climate system as it is, but of course we would fuck with it to make the capital machine keep going brrrrrr
Frostpunk, here we come. Won't have to stop burning coal, neither.
We gonna get Religious Fascism or Secular Fascism?
