In addition to actual reporting, the NYT creates newslike ads for the fossil fuels industry. This results in disproportionate attention on high-risk approaches that involve anything other than phasing out fossil fuel use.
Hey, I’ve seen this one
There are a bunch of issues:
- It requires maintaining technical infrastructure for longer than civilizations last
- It changes the pole-to-equator temperature gradient, altering weather patterns worldwide
- It changes rainfall distribution in ways that we’re not clear on yet, potentially risking agriculture
- If we keep on burning fossil fuels but limiting temperature increase with a scheme like this, we still end up with ocean acidification, killing off pretty much everything with hard body parts in the oceans
Never in the history of humanity did any experiment cause unintended harm, ever. Except that one time. Oh and all the other times, fair. But… Well yes, there were those toads. And the camels. But that’s it! And … Well, all the rabbits as well. Ah screw that, I’m going home.
If you let a sabretooth tiger loose into a playground full of unsuspecting children in order to catch the rats that are eating all the shrubs, does it fail catastrophically? Or was it just catastrophic to begin with?
In the struggle against human-caused climate change, this is a completely new avenue for humans to change the climate.
This type of geoengineering feels real ripe for the law of unintended consequences.
I don’t doubt that. However, mobilizing a truly sufficient “mundane” response may fail. If it does, the end result may indtead be a global response in the form of drastic geoengineering when the consequences of climate change are truly starting to have an effect.
The fact that these sorts of solutions exist is also why I really don’t vibe with doomers. Climate change is not going to be the “end of the world”, or even the end of civilization. Humanity will prevail, the real question is how. Climate change is a (relatively) slow catastrophy, and the worst case isn’t everybody dead, but rather a miserable existence where where global standard of living is thrown back maybe a hundred years with the added bonus of our enviroment being generally miserable to live in.
Isn’t that what an umbrella is for?
This petro puppet proposes perverse pseudoscientific prattle
The Simpsons did it already.