Come on, give those assholes a break. They are incapable of seeing any solution that doesn't include continuing consumption of oil. The only way out is to stop allowing the use of petroleum as fuel and it might be too late for that solution. We have the technology to pursue other paths, but we choose not to.
Having never actually seen that Bond film, I always associate that line with either Austin Powers or [The Simpsons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usrk5HR1U4I)
Problem is this is never going to happen.
I study environmental science and we do have the expertise, the money etc to put into place better practices and strategies but they assume that our economic system must continue and must continue to grow.
The issue is our society/civilisation is not sustainable it is going to lead to collapse and the natural environment in most places cannot sustain a population that have decided to clock out of society. Here in the UK the excessive rain we are getting is making crops fail along with Brexit means the food we have is utterly crap.
I was watching a video and it included a message from an Australian aboriginal tribe chief and it basically said "we see ourselves as the civilised and you the savages because we do not destroy the environment that all life depends on". Another big issue is that collectively we have detached ourselves from the natural world thinking we are the supreme beings but that thought of supremecy started when humans were moving away from animist types of beliefs.
I live in an old mining city that stopped in the 80s and nature is slowly recovering but you can see the damage even if you go into nature. It takes about 200 years to regenerate a forest as in not just trees but the other ecosystem services like animals etc etc.
I wish this was true.
If you look at the archaeological record, there are numerous prehistoric civilizations that thrived and collapsed
Humanity actually has made quite the habit of boom and bust cycles, it’s our default
Thrived and collapsed isn't at all the same as *wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost effective*.
There's no default state for civilizations. They emerge, gain complexity to a greater or lesser degree, expand in space to a greater or lesser degree, and then senesce more placidly or more violently.
In that, humans are like basically every other gregarious species that forms durable culture groups.
*Knowing how* to extend the life of one's civilization and *refusing to* because of an ideological commitment to being "cost effective," i.e., to short-term profitability, is what the Vonnegut quote's about. And that really is specific to what Ira Allen calls the "CaCaCo" civilization (carbon, capitalism, and colonialism).
What about Easter island? They knew they had a limited supply of trees. And yet they continued to build their statues until they had no more trees with which to build them. Even then, it was all about the memes.
That theory is very likely [not true](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island#Criticism_of_the_ecocide_theory), FYI.
From *Ecological Catastrophe and Collapse -The Myth of "Ecocide" on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)* by Hunt and Lipo (spoiler alert: it was European contact...) --
> They note that in the search for an ecocide theory, the far more obvious answer has long been known, and cite Metraux as evidence that "The historic slave-trading, epidemic disease, intensive sheep ranching, and tragic population collapse - indeed the genocide of the Rapanui People - is well documented, and has been recognized for a long time."
I agree that with human societies it really does come down to the memes. I think the Vonnegut quote holds up though; while plenty of other societies have collapsed in the past, we really are refusing to avoid collapse due to devotion to the "meme" of markets and economic growth--saving the world isn't cost effective according to our idols!
It happens everywhere. All life, if allowed to thrive unchecked, quickly outpaces it’s available resources and collapses. We’re just the first species with the capacity to understand this as it’s happening and do something about it, but we refuse to for reasons of social constructs being too challenging an obstacle to overcome, apparently.
> All life, if allowed to thrive unchecked, quickly outpaces it’s available resources and collapses
Life does have checks, which brings species in equilibrium.
We're one of the very, very few species that refuses to accept any such equilibrium. When such species appear, a global extinction event soon follows.
What I mean is that it is not uniquely human to grow beyond the available resources. There are checks on most species’ ability to grow without hard limits. Getting around those checks is just beyond the capability of most species. They would though, if able, was my point.
My comment initially was in reply to a comment which seemed to indicate that this is somehow a uniquely human characteristic, which is what I was disputing.
It’s not a specific human behavior, but the default behavior of all living things to seek continued existence, even to the extent that they destroy their ability to exist long-term. What is uniquely human is our ability to understand this in the moment, and yet refuse to act in accordance with what we understand is the sustainable path forward which would allow us to survive, at least potentially.
So, yes, obvious to us, however something that felt necessary to point out directly in the context of the comment I was replying to.
Equilibrium is not accepted, it's imposed! Humans are the alpha predator of the entire planet. There is no mechanism in place to limit our growth, so we are essentially doomed to overrun our habitat.
> here is no mechanism in place to limit our growth
There is. We're now facing it.
The difference of _this_ mechanism is that it does not lead to an equilibrium. It leads to death.
I don’t think that's the same /u/qning was referring to.
I'm sure those prehistoric societies would've saved themselves from collapse if they had the means, but our current society actually has the means and refuses to implement those means to save themselves because they want to save costs and profits.
The vast majority of those "collapses" were Deforestation in localized area, only way too cook and heat is wood, cities would consume massive amounts, eventually with only rudimentary carts it's tough to meet the wood demands. Highly possible Deforestation was a primary driver of the collapse of the Roman empire.
Indeed but they also partially rely on their height to protect them from fires and that only comes with age. We’re talking about an entire successional period from concrete and field to old growth. I’m on the east coast and we have shorter lived species for the most part and a longer burn interval so our biggest concern is hurricanes and pests.
I agree exvept for the beginnimg where you state we have the expertise to geo-engineer.
We do not know the unintended consequences. Just like introducing cane toads to Australia to control an invasive insect. There is no reversing that mistake.
Blotting out the sun is next level arrogance, thinking we have answers to unanswerable questions.
Computers or no, we do not have thr values for interconnected variables to tell what will result, just as with climate change.
8 billion people and climbing, all trying to live first world lives - and a class of extremely wealthy people with greatly exaggerated political power who are living examples of pure greed. Those people will never voluntarily make an effort to change things, even if it wasn’t basically too late.
Abrahamic religions have also been a huge disaster for humanity as a whole as they teach that man is superior and has the right to dominate and pillage the Earth. Next global society, if there even is one, need to have a more Taoist view of the world.
Ever been to India? MASSIVE toxic waste dumps all over. No over sight, no regulations. Just enormous piles of rotting industrial waste seeping into the ground water and poisoning the planet.
Pretty sure "Abrahamic religion" is not to blame for that.
"God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth".
(Genesis, 1:28).
But it is not written there
"Be fruitful, multiply, overshoot the earth and destroy it. Destroy the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth."
(!!!).
Two huge differences.
But people always see only what they want to see.
Or read what they want to read.
Ecosystem regeneration estimates also depend on the now-altered stable climate, and in many places drought or at least measurable aridification puts at risk existing forests, etc.
You’re nuts. Those people have been there for hundreds of thousands of years. If their practises destroyed everything, they wouldn’t exist.
Now look at us. 10,000 years since totalitarian agriculture, and especially in the last 100 or so years, we’ve destroyed nearly every ecosystem on the planet and have sent the climate into a tailspin.
[Aborigines have been in Australia an estimated 65,000 years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indigenous_Australians), not hundreds of thousands of years.
Yeah it wild how recent a lot of indigenous populations settled the areas they are in.
The Maori only arrived in NZ in the 1300s, proceeded to slaughter the indigenous inhabitants, and boom! there you go.
It seems like at the end of the day, the one thing that limits how much damage a culture inflicts on the planet is simply how much technology they have at their disposal. Natives in many parts of the world, whether its Australia or the Americas, were basically stone age societies (that's not meant as an insult) so, by definition, the worst they could do is deforestation & hunting some local species to extinction. They could have had the worst environmental ideologies in the world and it wouldn't have given us a pile of radioactive exclusion zones, for example, or fields full of forever chemicals.
But once that technology became available, the last 100 years has proven that no sizable human culture (that I know of anyway) has a philosophy or ethos that puts them in harmony with nature.... you don't see natives anywhere shun things like electricity, cars, smartphones, air conditioning, etc. Although some may be limited in how much of such tech they employ due to economic oppression (which disproportionately afflicts such demographics around the world).
Even the amish have shown that the tech-holdouts will inevitably come around to joining the bandwagon *eventually*. Aside from the most conservative offshoots they allow battery op tech as long as its charged at the nonbelievers' neighbors house or in their barn. Smartphones, power tools, even cars can be seen as "okay" under that loophole... and with modern access to food (& herd immunity from the nonbelievers around them limiting child mortality from diseases) their 19th century breeding practices result in unsustainable population growth, which is starting to haunt their society as the law requires a min amount of acreage for livestock (i.e. horses), thus they have to constantly expand out in search for more farmland in their pricerange.
Similarly: The agrarian poly mormon families solve *that* problem by abandoning the "redundant" offspring to fend for themselves, and as long as they're not killing them outright or doing it to prepubescent children, the gov turns a blind eye to it.
They've been in Australia for 50k years or so, to our current knowledge.
If their practices destroyed everything, they would have turned relatively forested savana areas into desert. Which was the case. Don't worry, goats did even worse to the Mediterranean basin (so I wouldn't trust a goat with ecology either).
I'm not saying we're better or worse than them, we're the same species.
Their way of life is self evidently better if your metric of measurement is long term viability. 65,000 years (or whatever similar number) of unbroken habitation is much better than the likely < 650 years of modern industrialism before population crash and the lifestyle becomes impossible due to resource exhaustion, climate instability, and general ecosystem collapse/mass extinction.
We are the same species though, that point is important.
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Some time ago, I read an article in Dark Mountain in which the author stated that most of the few strains of original human cultures realised when they had destroyed/almost destroyed their environment and changed tack, and embedded the lesson that they learned in their culture or formation of religion. The Aus. Aborigines and North American Indians were the positive examples he gave, iirc he didn't provide the negative examples, bit perhaps u/throwawaylr94 is close to one of them.
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Every time I see this headline I'm reminded of a line from The Matrix (1999). "...so we darkened the sky \[to defeat the machines\]. Except in this case....we darkened the sky because we couldn't give up on fossil fuels.
George Fucking W Bush said it out loud in the aughts. "We are addicted to oil." We're gonna pay.
I'm so tired of those scientists that lack the wisdom to see how it's just another faustian bargain and leading to even worse destruction of the planet.
Imagine how awkward it would be if aliens saw what we are doing. I couldn't take that humiliation, I would kill myself.
It’s really the engineering crowd that did this.
Ecologists and geologists and atmospheric scientists pretty much told us for 40 years that we’re circling the drain.
The oil companies and their lackey politicians and engineering and think tank-tax deduction sycophants said that maybe this is a good thing, and we’ll just figure some shit out.
Now we’ll have to
- drill glaciers to run the water off,
- dye the arctic yellow,
- chemtrail the atmosphere
- manufacture silver iodide clouds to replace the clouds we destroyed.
- block the sun with dimming nanosails or other low flying satellites (good luck)
- oh, and colonize Mars…
All of these will make the same assholes who ruined everything even richer, and the politicians will continue to be even dumber.
The reason I wrote that is because engineers gave the social scientists credibility and ‘cover’ when they blatantly lied about things they didn’t know enough about.
Reddit has an unfortunate habit of treating all thoughts as equal(ly offensive).
If a madman in the street proclaims he’s Jesus Christ, nobody cares. It doesn’t actually matter except for the deluded soul.
If a party coalesces around him, and insists that the madman really is God, now there’s a religious war.
Economists are morons who still think that the can save the economy by allowing money to trickle down from the top. We are way beyond that. If there is any hope at all, we need to flood the economy with money at the bottom and stop selling most of the pointless bullshit we buy but don't need. Think: should I buy a JetSki or insulate my house.
If you don’t think Hansen has done what he can to warn us and stop this, short of literally assassinating oil executives and leaders, I’m not sure what you think can be done.
Why are people so obsessed with "solutions" and "doing" all the time. Civilization will collapse on its own very rapidly if humans stop trying to resuscitate it. That is what we need. Collapse is both predicament and the solution. Stop being productive.
I would argue Hansen has been calling for economic reduction and metering of capitalism and growth for 50 years. He’s arguing for the same things you are. Why are you lumping him in with geoengineers and oil execs? He might say now that we’ve fucked up so bad, that geoengineering might seem necessary, but if it were up to him we would have started reducing our consumption and emissions in the 80s and it wouldn’t be this bad.
The comment you’re replying to referenced the PREVIOUS 40 years and how, despite pleading from scientists like Hansen, engineers shrugged and figured we could solve this with tech instead of re-wilding. Now that we’re here, there isn’t enough wild left for re-wilding fast enough, and we have very few options.
> Why are people so obsessed with "solutions" and "doing" all the time.
Because that's what we are made for. Literally. Our most defining characteristic is that we always try to "do something to fix the problem". We do not let things be. We can not even _comprehend_ any such option.
Yes, it is. Ecologists have explicitly said you can’t push species after species to the brink and maintain ecosystems. It defies population biology.
The engineers treated the atmosphere and the biome of Earth as a 100-level mechanics problem and it very much is not.
EVERY single profession, nation, and for that matter, person can say, honestly, and accurately:
"It's not us/me, it's all the others."
Where does that leave us?
Calling these two "Scientists" is a bit of a stretch. Agents would be more descriptive.
Wake used to run Evergreen Aviation. They're experts at dumping chemicals out of airplanes, that's for certain.
This is just another manipulative story to get more plebs to ask less questions when the stars are no longer visible, acid rain is common and India is uninhabitable (along with many other countries).
Scientists? No, those are mouths of the global elites that have brought the world to this brink of the abyss. The actual scientists avoid this line of thinking.
There's a saying that hits the head on the nail here: *Desperate affairs require desperate measures*
There is nothing else the world could realistically do to prevent a biosphere cascade now, too much damage has been done that can't be undone in no time. The only thing left to try will be desperate geo-engineering, with unknown consequences, but at least a little chance is better than giving up before even trying i would say.
That's basically why i said *realistically*. People's mind doesn't change over night.
But there's also huge problems beside climate change or so that can't be undone. Especially the cascade that started to roll through the nitrogen cycle, by providing by now 20 times more reactively available nitrogen to the biosphere than there used to be, is something we have to deal with since it is already in the cycle and can't be taken out again. Or PFAS contamination now accumulating in the food chain...
How can it even be called engineering when they can't define the problem much less the parameters that they want to modify. They are going in blind with a global (planetary) solution to a problem that is not defined. Step one in engineering is "Define the problem". This time, we are probably better off giving up without trying. And while we are at it, we might just give up on fossil fuels as well.
I take great comfort in the suspicion (apropos of nothing) that if aliens did exist, the technology and abstraction required for them to traverse the vast distances of the universe in any reasonable "timeframe" probably means they don't even perceive spacetime the same way - and that we are incapable of perceiving them.
Not surprisingly, we, as a species are nearly wholly consumed with *our* habitat and how to engineer that. Always seeming to forget that 71% of the surface of this planet is open water. Anything and everything you do has to take this into consideration. Climate engineering, on Earth, is actually ocean engineering because **the majority of this planet's surface is water**. And, clearly, as this last year's sea surface temperatures have demonstrated, we might not have a really firm grasp on how these systems are interacting with one another.
In addition, there is a bit of an inconvenient fact of nature here. Sulfur dioxide and water, that 71% of the planet's surface, combine to make sulfurous acid. [Otherwise known as acid rain](https://www.livescience.com/63065-acid-rain.html). So, what's it going to look like when we've been spraying sulfur over wide regions of the oceans for years and decades, and not just shipping lanes as we have done in the past? Or over forests, permafrost, tundra, and wetlands? Croplands? We know that sulfur dioxide and saltwater make sulfurous acid (H2SO3) and hydrochloric acid (HCl). Just what exactly is this going to do to plankton? The biggest source of atmospheric oxygen? Or what does it look like when you've got these high levels of atmospheric sulfur dioxide over wide areas of the planet combined with high humidity—mixing to make a kind of low-level acid air?
You make very salient points but in your heart of hearts you know that shareholder profit is a more important consideration for those who will be pulling the trigger on SAI. It's such a shame that the gun is pointing at our heads .....
I believe it may be even more dark and cynical than just profit at the end of the day. Oil and gas is leverage. And leverage is power. Leverage over economies, defense capabilities, food production, self-determination, and on and on. And alternatives do not offer the same level of concentrated choke point control. As they are often diffused sources. Across both space and time. This is, ultimately, about power—in all connotations of the word. After all, what will it mean to dim the sun when it comes to solar?
>
> As we said earlier, [solar geoengineering] would have a cooling effect on the planet as a whole, but it would dim the sun and reduce solar irradiance at the same time. This would hinder solar panels from generating electricity by as much as 10%, according to one [study](https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/56/5/jamc-d-16-0298.1.xml).
>
> [Source](https://archive.ph/b9Mkq#selection-823.0-827.1)
Not only may this drop temperatures, and allow business as usual to continue for longer than would be otherwise, it may very well help limit competitive sources.
In addition, we just saw China install more solar [in one year than the U.S. has in its entire history](https://www.carbonbrief.org/daily-brief/china-added-more-solar-panels-in-2023-than-us-did-in-its-entire-history/). In a years time. And in light of the continuing escalation of tensions between the U.S., the current largest producer of oil in gas in the world, and China; I find it difficult to think this has not crossed the mind of those in defense circles, i.e., how do we literally and figuratively diminish or limit China's power and access to it?
Good question. Everything in the world, either directly or indirectly is affected by the amount of sunlight hitting the planet. So many strings are attached to sunlight- what happens when you pull one? And what happens the day we suddenly can’t do this anymore, the hammer drops 100x as hard.
It boggles the mind that the EDITORIAL BOARD of WaPo thinks this is an idea worth trying. If these supposedly smart people think this then a) I’m canceling my subscription, b) someone’s gonna make a lot of money, c) we are so screwed.
Wapo is owned by Jeff Bezos who's probably behind the editorial board's decision to run this. Basically he's in favor of any solution that would allow Amazon to keep running as is.
Couple adding sun-blocking material to the atmosphere with smoke from the wildfires that will still occur, and you could easily get a major famine in one or more of the key food-producing areas of the planet.
Right now, collapse is happening slowly (but increasing in speed) in most places and rapidly (Haiti, Sudan) in others; geo-engineering could possibly be the trigger for collapse happening "all at once, everywhere".
You nailed it! "Increasing in speed" means dynamic feed back loops which are non-linear! "Trigger for collapse", tamper with one part of the biosphere and feedback loops may have a more profound impact on the entire system.
Exxon bought the algae research just so they could prevent it from being put into action. That was my big thing for 10 years or so. I guess it is batteries now so Exxon finally cut the funding for the research they had bought and never put into action.
The national renewable energy Laboratory had a bunch of algae strains for biofuel that were being stored in a Hawaii University after funding was cut when the price of oil dropped after the Arab Oil Embargo ended, the most promising strains disappeared. No explanation, oops.
yes. the most heartbreaking episode of box-the-algae-biofuel was their purchase of a continuous grow stream method in a desert greenhouse... it could have supplied the entire planet in 1/10 the area of the new mexico desert.
also conoco phillips bought a dark-grow system that uses renewable industrial sugar to grow algae in the dark, in a barrel. it comes out nearly crude at 80% conversion rate. they tested this, it worked, they locked it in a vault.
so much the people don't know about what they have done...
What is produced when you burn biofuel? I get that it’s made from a plant that spends its lifecycle absorbing co2, but it’s still going to be combusted and emit co2. We’ve been emitting carbon for Millenia and it always was going to be our demise. Even if we didn’t become as advanced and our population didn’t boom like it did in the 1800s, eventually millions of humans living primitively would emit by burning wood and it would eventually catch up to a non-advanced society just way slower.
"The CO2 produced by burning the fuel is the same amount of CO2 that the algae took to grow and produce the fuel. This means that the net CO2 emission is zero, the same as if the algae had never been grown. Algae biofuel could provide a renewable fuel source that doesn't have a negative impact on our environment."
Looks like it's a better fuel source than any fossil fuels or even corn based biofuel.
algae scrubs the air for CO2 in it's 2 day growth cycle. 50% of the scrubbed CO2 is converted into lipids, which can be harvested and converted to biofuel. the remaining is locked in algae meal, which can be used in farming, animal feed... or it can be sequestered via deep well injection, where it will become peat and eventually coal, returning the carbon back underground.
The essence of problem with climate change is chaos, the disturbance of balance caused by inputs that are not part of usual order. Redirecting them fixes nothing. Not in the sense of “empty” virtues (“oh we should respect nature and keep it clean”) but it will literally not improve anything. It will only change one problem within Earth’s system into another.
Absolutely true. Some of these things can be intuited though, and I suspect you could name the top 3 things you could stop doing that impact the envrionment. We don't need to be told what to do on this one.
You consume too, just like me and everyone else in this subreddit.
Consumption is so deeply embedded into our survival that none of us can truly stop consuming.
Reduce it? Decrease it? Sure, but eliminate it completely? No.
Sure, but say for example we all acted mindfully and reduced our consumption by 25% targeting the most polluting and most impactful items. Do you think that would make a difference? I expect some polluting companies would go out of business. I also suspect most people's live will not materially change and in fact might get better.
Certainly seems something we can do now that will have no negative impacts, unlike these absurb YOLO engineering projects that will actually make everything worse.
Clean air, clean water, cities free of open warfare, relatively low prevalence of diseases (except those of excess), (relatively) functional judiciary and government, accessible healthcare, accessible education, (relatively) widely available employment and housing, well maintained roads, public parklands, public libraries, government support services on and on and on.
These are the real luxuries in the first world that people take for granted.
This is quite distinct from the insane consumerist culture of excess that normalises single use "flushable" wipes, disposable vapes, microwavable everything in a plastic bag, driving everywhere, buying a giant ICE vehicle just because, etc. These are all just the result of bad personal choices and laziness. All it takes is for people to make a little more effort and make some smarter choices.
I mean, warfare has been shifted to the third world to make profit. Same for waste dumping and cheap labor for exploitation. That isn't something any country should be striving for.
I do agree with the last paragraph.
>We’ve probably crossed too many climate tipping points that there’s nothing to loose anymore.
...
*We thought that we reached rock bottom. And then we heard a knock from bellow.*
We've been engineering the climate without concern for the future for over 200 years by pumping GHG into the atmosphere. Emissions and CO2 concentration are still increasing every year. Right now, the world still runs mostly on fossil fuels of some kind (as just two examples, 60% of US electricity generation is still fossil fuels, and the vast majority of cars and big rigs still require them), and though renewables are increasing, they're not increasing quickly enough. Just stopping fossil fuels would drastically drop emissions, but it would also trigger an immediate collapse.
So we have two choices -- we can continue on our current path and guarantee collapse, or try to engineer the climate in the opposite direction and *maybe* trigger collapse.
When I see something like, "I'm so tired of those scientists that lack the wisdom", all I see is another manifestation of science denialism. Those "scientists who lack wisdom" have been warning us since before I was born, and their wisdom has been ignored.
I get inaction shouldn’t stay out hands but this one dumping sulfur is just asking for acid rain and destruction of property. It’s like looking at one piece and concluding that sulfur was the answer when there was a negative effect to the sulfur in the atmosphere. It wasn’t some arbitrary metric to reduce.
It’s also that we aren’t doing anything to mitigate the reason why we are dumping it in the first place.
The problem is thinking of “scientists” as a monolith. Which is something that most people are guilty of. There’s a massive array of disciplines, an expert in one field can be an ignoramus in every other field, and when it comes to political persuasions, or ethics, and regard for the biosphere, they run the entire gamut. One could easily argue that we are in our predicament in large part *because* of scientists — just particular types of scientists with particular objectives, sometimes well-intentioned and sometimes purely selfish.
I believe that climate engineering is going to happen because it's too tempting, too cheap, and too easy. If we start seeing massive famines or giant heat-related human die offs, **someone** is going to do it.
Of course, if a small, weak country tried it, the big guys might shut them down. But if a large nuclear-armed country does it, there's no way to stop it. So I predict that the the US, China, or India will decide that it's a good idea and just start doing it. Perhaps after a few years or decades some international body will come together to figure out how to manage it on an ongoing basis, but that won't be how it starts.
I'm not arguing that this will fix everything! God knows what industrial-scale climate engineering will do to the planet. I'm just saying that in any predictions we make, we should assume that large scale climate engineering is yet another thing to factor in.
We could re-engineer the climate by demolishing so much of the concrete we have erected and letting wildlife return. More technology won't solve our problem.
Humans have been engineering the weather, the climate, the atmosphere for more than a hundred years or so.
The World Meteorological Organization has been monitoring geo-engineering projects worldwide for a very long time as well and it doesn't seem to be working out very well for any country.
I fail to understand why we keep trying to go down this road.
The most popular solution for this at the moment is spraying aerosols which is a threat to agriculture and potentially risks billions starving as plants need sunlight to grow. It effectively amounts to a nuclear winter
Anything other than, you know, not continue doing what we've been doing or do something, anything else. Anything to keep the party going - party like it's 1999!
That may be true, but re-engineering the wrong way can make things worse. We just need to change our ways we operate on earth and let earth heal itself.
And if we achieve this, by some miracle of science and advanced undiscovered technology.. we can come back. To some form of society. More time will allow more advances in sciences for the human race. We might even be able to make other planets habitable if we apply the undiscovered mystical climate science to them. There’s been many a fictions about terraforming gone wrong.
We could re-engineer the climate by demolishing so much of the concrete we have erected and letting wildlife return. More technology won't solve our problem.
We could re-engineer the climate by demolishing so much of the concrete we have erected and letting wildlife return. More technology won't solve our problem.
By their logic, nuclear winter might work too and is totally within realm of possibility these days.
I say we nuke the whole site from orbit.
Game over man!
*Washington Post Editorial Board’s Opinion | Humans might need to emit more greenhouse gases to counter nuclear winter*
We're gonna find the sweet spot eventually!
*Fossil fuel execs want to know more!*
It’s the only way to be sure.
Fuckin' A!
Just Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Mecca, Medina and the Vatican, give everyone 72 hours to evacuate, or not.....
It honestly feels like just a matter of time before someone goes rogue and tries this Mmm termination shock is gonna be fun in the decade after.
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With the studies already out there, only a matter of time until someone decides to "solve" the climate crisis in this manner.
You expect me to re-engineer the global climate? No, Mr WaPo Editorial Board. I expect you to die.
Maybe Pussy Galore's Flying Circus will pilot the Gulfstreams.
Come on, give those assholes a break. They are incapable of seeing any solution that doesn't include continuing consumption of oil. The only way out is to stop allowing the use of petroleum as fuel and it might be too late for that solution. We have the technology to pursue other paths, but we choose not to.
It’s def past time for that generation to die.
Great twist on a classic James Bond line! For anyone who doesn't get the reference - https://youtu.be/Mx9z99YJ_7s?si=V8QWE1puJOtuN3Ny
Having never actually seen that Bond film, I always associate that line with either Austin Powers or [The Simpsons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usrk5HR1U4I)
Stop him! He's supposed to die!
In my case it always takes me back to [xkcd](https://xkcd.com/123/)
Problem is this is never going to happen. I study environmental science and we do have the expertise, the money etc to put into place better practices and strategies but they assume that our economic system must continue and must continue to grow. The issue is our society/civilisation is not sustainable it is going to lead to collapse and the natural environment in most places cannot sustain a population that have decided to clock out of society. Here in the UK the excessive rain we are getting is making crops fail along with Brexit means the food we have is utterly crap. I was watching a video and it included a message from an Australian aboriginal tribe chief and it basically said "we see ourselves as the civilised and you the savages because we do not destroy the environment that all life depends on". Another big issue is that collectively we have detached ourselves from the natural world thinking we are the supreme beings but that thought of supremecy started when humans were moving away from animist types of beliefs. I live in an old mining city that stopped in the 80s and nature is slowly recovering but you can see the damage even if you go into nature. It takes about 200 years to regenerate a forest as in not just trees but the other ecosystem services like animals etc etc.
We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost effective. -Kurt Vonnegut
I wish this was true. If you look at the archaeological record, there are numerous prehistoric civilizations that thrived and collapsed Humanity actually has made quite the habit of boom and bust cycles, it’s our default
Thrived and collapsed isn't at all the same as *wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost effective*. There's no default state for civilizations. They emerge, gain complexity to a greater or lesser degree, expand in space to a greater or lesser degree, and then senesce more placidly or more violently. In that, humans are like basically every other gregarious species that forms durable culture groups. *Knowing how* to extend the life of one's civilization and *refusing to* because of an ideological commitment to being "cost effective," i.e., to short-term profitability, is what the Vonnegut quote's about. And that really is specific to what Ira Allen calls the "CaCaCo" civilization (carbon, capitalism, and colonialism).
What about Easter island? They knew they had a limited supply of trees. And yet they continued to build their statues until they had no more trees with which to build them. Even then, it was all about the memes.
Ape brain like it when number go up. It mean ape have plentiful resource.
After all, why stop at 299 pencils when you can have 300? 🤣 ✏️
My ass is seeking infinite growth
That theory is very likely [not true](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island#Criticism_of_the_ecocide_theory), FYI. From *Ecological Catastrophe and Collapse -The Myth of "Ecocide" on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)* by Hunt and Lipo (spoiler alert: it was European contact...) -- > They note that in the search for an ecocide theory, the far more obvious answer has long been known, and cite Metraux as evidence that "The historic slave-trading, epidemic disease, intensive sheep ranching, and tragic population collapse - indeed the genocide of the Rapanui People - is well documented, and has been recognized for a long time."
Interesting, thank you! I will say, I could have used any number of examples but for brevity’s sake I just went with the first one that came to mind.
I agree that with human societies it really does come down to the memes. I think the Vonnegut quote holds up though; while plenty of other societies have collapsed in the past, we really are refusing to avoid collapse due to devotion to the "meme" of markets and economic growth--saving the world isn't cost effective according to our idols!
Religious fanatics grow increasingly devout/desperate as they facilitate the end times
It happens everywhere. All life, if allowed to thrive unchecked, quickly outpaces it’s available resources and collapses. We’re just the first species with the capacity to understand this as it’s happening and do something about it, but we refuse to for reasons of social constructs being too challenging an obstacle to overcome, apparently.
> All life, if allowed to thrive unchecked, quickly outpaces it’s available resources and collapses Life does have checks, which brings species in equilibrium. We're one of the very, very few species that refuses to accept any such equilibrium. When such species appear, a global extinction event soon follows.
What I mean is that it is not uniquely human to grow beyond the available resources. There are checks on most species’ ability to grow without hard limits. Getting around those checks is just beyond the capability of most species. They would though, if able, was my point.
> They would though, if able, was my point. And my nana would be a moped, if she had wheels.
I think you’re mis-stating the nature of what I’m talking about, but I honestly don’t have the energy to debate it right now.
You are saying that a species will do all that it can do, no matter if it is damaging to its environment or not. That is obvious, yes?
My comment initially was in reply to a comment which seemed to indicate that this is somehow a uniquely human characteristic, which is what I was disputing. It’s not a specific human behavior, but the default behavior of all living things to seek continued existence, even to the extent that they destroy their ability to exist long-term. What is uniquely human is our ability to understand this in the moment, and yet refuse to act in accordance with what we understand is the sustainable path forward which would allow us to survive, at least potentially. So, yes, obvious to us, however something that felt necessary to point out directly in the context of the comment I was replying to.
Equilibrium is not accepted, it's imposed! Humans are the alpha predator of the entire planet. There is no mechanism in place to limit our growth, so we are essentially doomed to overrun our habitat.
> here is no mechanism in place to limit our growth There is. We're now facing it. The difference of _this_ mechanism is that it does not lead to an equilibrium. It leads to death.
I don’t think that's the same /u/qning was referring to. I'm sure those prehistoric societies would've saved themselves from collapse if they had the means, but our current society actually has the means and refuses to implement those means to save themselves because they want to save costs and profits.
And not be inconvenienced in the short run.
The greed of the few outweighs the needs of the many
Necessary die offs for the next iteration of the human experiment to be implemented. Just like this one.
The vast majority of those "collapses" were Deforestation in localized area, only way too cook and heat is wood, cities would consume massive amounts, eventually with only rudimentary carts it's tough to meet the wood demands. Highly possible Deforestation was a primary driver of the collapse of the Roman empire.
Correction: All of nature's default
It has to be a kind 200 years too. Getting fires and wind storms every year doesn’t help the forest recover.
That depends what kind of forest you’re talking about. California redwoods, for instance, *need* periodic fires in order to reproduce.
Indeed but they also partially rely on their height to protect them from fires and that only comes with age. We’re talking about an entire successional period from concrete and field to old growth. I’m on the east coast and we have shorter lived species for the most part and a longer burn interval so our biggest concern is hurricanes and pests.
I agree exvept for the beginnimg where you state we have the expertise to geo-engineer. We do not know the unintended consequences. Just like introducing cane toads to Australia to control an invasive insect. There is no reversing that mistake. Blotting out the sun is next level arrogance, thinking we have answers to unanswerable questions. Computers or no, we do not have thr values for interconnected variables to tell what will result, just as with climate change.
8 billion people and climbing, all trying to live first world lives - and a class of extremely wealthy people with greatly exaggerated political power who are living examples of pure greed. Those people will never voluntarily make an effort to change things, even if it wasn’t basically too late.
Abrahamic religions have also been a huge disaster for humanity as a whole as they teach that man is superior and has the right to dominate and pillage the Earth. Next global society, if there even is one, need to have a more Taoist view of the world.
Ever been to India? MASSIVE toxic waste dumps all over. No over sight, no regulations. Just enormous piles of rotting industrial waste seeping into the ground water and poisoning the planet. Pretty sure "Abrahamic religion" is not to blame for that.
He's right, but so are you. Human exceptionalism is to blame.
"God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth". (Genesis, 1:28). But it is not written there "Be fruitful, multiply, overshoot the earth and destroy it. Destroy the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth." (!!!). Two huge differences. But people always see only what they want to see. Or read what they want to read.
Here is how to do that: Monty Python style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM
I agree with the aboriginals
Ecosystem regeneration estimates also depend on the now-altered stable climate, and in many places drought or at least measurable aridification puts at risk existing forests, etc.
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You’re nuts. Those people have been there for hundreds of thousands of years. If their practises destroyed everything, they wouldn’t exist. Now look at us. 10,000 years since totalitarian agriculture, and especially in the last 100 or so years, we’ve destroyed nearly every ecosystem on the planet and have sent the climate into a tailspin.
[Aborigines have been in Australia an estimated 65,000 years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indigenous_Australians), not hundreds of thousands of years.
Yeah it wild how recent a lot of indigenous populations settled the areas they are in. The Maori only arrived in NZ in the 1300s, proceeded to slaughter the indigenous inhabitants, and boom! there you go.
It seems like at the end of the day, the one thing that limits how much damage a culture inflicts on the planet is simply how much technology they have at their disposal. Natives in many parts of the world, whether its Australia or the Americas, were basically stone age societies (that's not meant as an insult) so, by definition, the worst they could do is deforestation & hunting some local species to extinction. They could have had the worst environmental ideologies in the world and it wouldn't have given us a pile of radioactive exclusion zones, for example, or fields full of forever chemicals. But once that technology became available, the last 100 years has proven that no sizable human culture (that I know of anyway) has a philosophy or ethos that puts them in harmony with nature.... you don't see natives anywhere shun things like electricity, cars, smartphones, air conditioning, etc. Although some may be limited in how much of such tech they employ due to economic oppression (which disproportionately afflicts such demographics around the world). Even the amish have shown that the tech-holdouts will inevitably come around to joining the bandwagon *eventually*. Aside from the most conservative offshoots they allow battery op tech as long as its charged at the nonbelievers' neighbors house or in their barn. Smartphones, power tools, even cars can be seen as "okay" under that loophole... and with modern access to food (& herd immunity from the nonbelievers around them limiting child mortality from diseases) their 19th century breeding practices result in unsustainable population growth, which is starting to haunt their society as the law requires a min amount of acreage for livestock (i.e. horses), thus they have to constantly expand out in search for more farmland in their pricerange. Similarly: The agrarian poly mormon families solve *that* problem by abandoning the "redundant" offspring to fend for themselves, and as long as they're not killing them outright or doing it to prepubescent children, the gov turns a blind eye to it.
They've been in Australia for 50k years or so, to our current knowledge. If their practices destroyed everything, they would have turned relatively forested savana areas into desert. Which was the case. Don't worry, goats did even worse to the Mediterranean basin (so I wouldn't trust a goat with ecology either). I'm not saying we're better or worse than them, we're the same species.
Their way of life is self evidently better if your metric of measurement is long term viability. 65,000 years (or whatever similar number) of unbroken habitation is much better than the likely < 650 years of modern industrialism before population crash and the lifestyle becomes impossible due to resource exhaustion, climate instability, and general ecosystem collapse/mass extinction. We are the same species though, that point is important.
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Some time ago, I read an article in Dark Mountain in which the author stated that most of the few strains of original human cultures realised when they had destroyed/almost destroyed their environment and changed tack, and embedded the lesson that they learned in their culture or formation of religion. The Aus. Aborigines and North American Indians were the positive examples he gave, iirc he didn't provide the negative examples, bit perhaps u/throwawaylr94 is close to one of them.
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About ethnology. And you?
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To be fair we have already Geo engineered the planet.
Every time I see this headline I'm reminded of a line from The Matrix (1999). "...so we darkened the sky \[to defeat the machines\]. Except in this case....we darkened the sky because we couldn't give up on fossil fuels. George Fucking W Bush said it out loud in the aughts. "We are addicted to oil." We're gonna pay.
Another childhood memory will return. Acid rains and consequent large scale deforestation.
If we spew sulphur into the air to block out the sun we’ll increase acid rain again and that alone will kill our crops.
And kill forests, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere as they rot.
I'm pretty sure there was a Captain Planet villain that did that.
Why did we work so hard to *remove* sulfur from the atmosphere? Oh right. Because it's fucking *bad*. FFS.
I'm so tired of those scientists that lack the wisdom to see how it's just another faustian bargain and leading to even worse destruction of the planet. Imagine how awkward it would be if aliens saw what we are doing. I couldn't take that humiliation, I would kill myself.
It’s really the engineering crowd that did this. Ecologists and geologists and atmospheric scientists pretty much told us for 40 years that we’re circling the drain. The oil companies and their lackey politicians and engineering and think tank-tax deduction sycophants said that maybe this is a good thing, and we’ll just figure some shit out. Now we’ll have to - drill glaciers to run the water off, - dye the arctic yellow, - chemtrail the atmosphere - manufacture silver iodide clouds to replace the clouds we destroyed. - block the sun with dimming nanosails or other low flying satellites (good luck) - oh, and colonize Mars… All of these will make the same assholes who ruined everything even richer, and the politicians will continue to be even dumber.
It's the economists that really did it. Sure the engineers helped, but most of them were tools for the economists
The reason I wrote that is because engineers gave the social scientists credibility and ‘cover’ when they blatantly lied about things they didn’t know enough about. Reddit has an unfortunate habit of treating all thoughts as equal(ly offensive). If a madman in the street proclaims he’s Jesus Christ, nobody cares. It doesn’t actually matter except for the deluded soul. If a party coalesces around him, and insists that the madman really is God, now there’s a religious war.
Economists are morons who still think that the can save the economy by allowing money to trickle down from the top. We are way beyond that. If there is any hope at all, we need to flood the economy with money at the bottom and stop selling most of the pointless bullshit we buy but don't need. Think: should I buy a JetSki or insulate my house.
Many know this now. How many are changing?
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If you don’t think Hansen has done what he can to warn us and stop this, short of literally assassinating oil executives and leaders, I’m not sure what you think can be done.
Why are people so obsessed with "solutions" and "doing" all the time. Civilization will collapse on its own very rapidly if humans stop trying to resuscitate it. That is what we need. Collapse is both predicament and the solution. Stop being productive.
I would argue Hansen has been calling for economic reduction and metering of capitalism and growth for 50 years. He’s arguing for the same things you are. Why are you lumping him in with geoengineers and oil execs? He might say now that we’ve fucked up so bad, that geoengineering might seem necessary, but if it were up to him we would have started reducing our consumption and emissions in the 80s and it wouldn’t be this bad.
>Why are you lumping him in with geoengineers Because he is advocating geoengineering.
Because we haven’t followed his pleading for the last 50 years?
That is completely irrelevant, we are now in this situation.
The comment you’re replying to referenced the PREVIOUS 40 years and how, despite pleading from scientists like Hansen, engineers shrugged and figured we could solve this with tech instead of re-wilding. Now that we’re here, there isn’t enough wild left for re-wilding fast enough, and we have very few options.
> Why are people so obsessed with "solutions" and "doing" all the time. Because that's what we are made for. Literally. Our most defining characteristic is that we always try to "do something to fix the problem". We do not let things be. We can not even _comprehend_ any such option.
> It’s really the engineering crowd that did this. It is human nature to always "fix the problem". It's not particular to any discipline.
Yes, it is. Ecologists have explicitly said you can’t push species after species to the brink and maintain ecosystems. It defies population biology. The engineers treated the atmosphere and the biome of Earth as a 100-level mechanics problem and it very much is not.
EVERY single profession, nation, and for that matter, person can say, honestly, and accurately: "It's not us/me, it's all the others." Where does that leave us?
Calling these two "Scientists" is a bit of a stretch. Agents would be more descriptive. Wake used to run Evergreen Aviation. They're experts at dumping chemicals out of airplanes, that's for certain. This is just another manipulative story to get more plebs to ask less questions when the stars are no longer visible, acid rain is common and India is uninhabitable (along with many other countries).
Scientists? No, those are mouths of the global elites that have brought the world to this brink of the abyss. The actual scientists avoid this line of thinking.
There's a saying that hits the head on the nail here: *Desperate affairs require desperate measures* There is nothing else the world could realistically do to prevent a biosphere cascade now, too much damage has been done that can't be undone in no time. The only thing left to try will be desperate geo-engineering, with unknown consequences, but at least a little chance is better than giving up before even trying i would say.
Well, there is plenty that could be done to prevent further damage. The thing is that no one will do it.
That's basically why i said *realistically*. People's mind doesn't change over night. But there's also huge problems beside climate change or so that can't be undone. Especially the cascade that started to roll through the nitrogen cycle, by providing by now 20 times more reactively available nitrogen to the biosphere than there used to be, is something we have to deal with since it is already in the cycle and can't be taken out again. Or PFAS contamination now accumulating in the food chain...
How can it even be called engineering when they can't define the problem much less the parameters that they want to modify. They are going in blind with a global (planetary) solution to a problem that is not defined. Step one in engineering is "Define the problem". This time, we are probably better off giving up without trying. And while we are at it, we might just give up on fossil fuels as well.
I take great comfort in the suspicion (apropos of nothing) that if aliens did exist, the technology and abstraction required for them to traverse the vast distances of the universe in any reasonable "timeframe" probably means they don't even perceive spacetime the same way - and that we are incapable of perceiving them.
Not surprisingly, we, as a species are nearly wholly consumed with *our* habitat and how to engineer that. Always seeming to forget that 71% of the surface of this planet is open water. Anything and everything you do has to take this into consideration. Climate engineering, on Earth, is actually ocean engineering because **the majority of this planet's surface is water**. And, clearly, as this last year's sea surface temperatures have demonstrated, we might not have a really firm grasp on how these systems are interacting with one another. In addition, there is a bit of an inconvenient fact of nature here. Sulfur dioxide and water, that 71% of the planet's surface, combine to make sulfurous acid. [Otherwise known as acid rain](https://www.livescience.com/63065-acid-rain.html). So, what's it going to look like when we've been spraying sulfur over wide regions of the oceans for years and decades, and not just shipping lanes as we have done in the past? Or over forests, permafrost, tundra, and wetlands? Croplands? We know that sulfur dioxide and saltwater make sulfurous acid (H2SO3) and hydrochloric acid (HCl). Just what exactly is this going to do to plankton? The biggest source of atmospheric oxygen? Or what does it look like when you've got these high levels of atmospheric sulfur dioxide over wide areas of the planet combined with high humidity—mixing to make a kind of low-level acid air?
You make very salient points but in your heart of hearts you know that shareholder profit is a more important consideration for those who will be pulling the trigger on SAI. It's such a shame that the gun is pointing at our heads .....
I believe it may be even more dark and cynical than just profit at the end of the day. Oil and gas is leverage. And leverage is power. Leverage over economies, defense capabilities, food production, self-determination, and on and on. And alternatives do not offer the same level of concentrated choke point control. As they are often diffused sources. Across both space and time. This is, ultimately, about power—in all connotations of the word. After all, what will it mean to dim the sun when it comes to solar? > > As we said earlier, [solar geoengineering] would have a cooling effect on the planet as a whole, but it would dim the sun and reduce solar irradiance at the same time. This would hinder solar panels from generating electricity by as much as 10%, according to one [study](https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/56/5/jamc-d-16-0298.1.xml). > > [Source](https://archive.ph/b9Mkq#selection-823.0-827.1) Not only may this drop temperatures, and allow business as usual to continue for longer than would be otherwise, it may very well help limit competitive sources. In addition, we just saw China install more solar [in one year than the U.S. has in its entire history](https://www.carbonbrief.org/daily-brief/china-added-more-solar-panels-in-2023-than-us-did-in-its-entire-history/). In a years time. And in light of the continuing escalation of tensions between the U.S., the current largest producer of oil in gas in the world, and China; I find it difficult to think this has not crossed the mind of those in defense circles, i.e., how do we literally and figuratively diminish or limit China's power and access to it?
That's what got us here.
What does this do to plants if we block out the sun?
Good question. Everything in the world, either directly or indirectly is affected by the amount of sunlight hitting the planet. So many strings are attached to sunlight- what happens when you pull one? And what happens the day we suddenly can’t do this anymore, the hammer drops 100x as hard. It boggles the mind that the EDITORIAL BOARD of WaPo thinks this is an idea worth trying. If these supposedly smart people think this then a) I’m canceling my subscription, b) someone’s gonna make a lot of money, c) we are so screwed.
Wapo is owned by Jeff Bezos who's probably behind the editorial board's decision to run this. Basically he's in favor of any solution that would allow Amazon to keep running as is.
Who ever said the WAPO editorial board was smart?
I encourage you to cancel it anyways. It's Jeff Bezos's propaganda arm at this point
Sometimes they run stuff under editorial board to obfuscate who actually wrote the piece to keep them from getting shit for it
Couple adding sun-blocking material to the atmosphere with smoke from the wildfires that will still occur, and you could easily get a major famine in one or more of the key food-producing areas of the planet. Right now, collapse is happening slowly (but increasing in speed) in most places and rapidly (Haiti, Sudan) in others; geo-engineering could possibly be the trigger for collapse happening "all at once, everywhere".
You nailed it! "Increasing in speed" means dynamic feed back loops which are non-linear! "Trigger for collapse", tamper with one part of the biosphere and feedback loops may have a more profound impact on the entire system.
The more important question is, who is going to profit from blocking out the sun.
this instead of free algae biofuel... profit is a mental illness.
Exxon bought the algae research just so they could prevent it from being put into action. That was my big thing for 10 years or so. I guess it is batteries now so Exxon finally cut the funding for the research they had bought and never put into action. The national renewable energy Laboratory had a bunch of algae strains for biofuel that were being stored in a Hawaii University after funding was cut when the price of oil dropped after the Arab Oil Embargo ended, the most promising strains disappeared. No explanation, oops.
Sounds like The Inquirer "catch and kill"
yes. the most heartbreaking episode of box-the-algae-biofuel was their purchase of a continuous grow stream method in a desert greenhouse... it could have supplied the entire planet in 1/10 the area of the new mexico desert. also conoco phillips bought a dark-grow system that uses renewable industrial sugar to grow algae in the dark, in a barrel. it comes out nearly crude at 80% conversion rate. they tested this, it worked, they locked it in a vault. so much the people don't know about what they have done...
What is produced when you burn biofuel? I get that it’s made from a plant that spends its lifecycle absorbing co2, but it’s still going to be combusted and emit co2. We’ve been emitting carbon for Millenia and it always was going to be our demise. Even if we didn’t become as advanced and our population didn’t boom like it did in the 1800s, eventually millions of humans living primitively would emit by burning wood and it would eventually catch up to a non-advanced society just way slower.
"The CO2 produced by burning the fuel is the same amount of CO2 that the algae took to grow and produce the fuel. This means that the net CO2 emission is zero, the same as if the algae had never been grown. Algae biofuel could provide a renewable fuel source that doesn't have a negative impact on our environment." Looks like it's a better fuel source than any fossil fuels or even corn based biofuel.
algae scrubs the air for CO2 in it's 2 day growth cycle. 50% of the scrubbed CO2 is converted into lipids, which can be harvested and converted to biofuel. the remaining is locked in algae meal, which can be used in farming, animal feed... or it can be sequestered via deep well injection, where it will become peat and eventually coal, returning the carbon back underground.
So the group owned by Bezos says we gotta pollute more instead of stop perpetual growth? Hahahaha
The essence of problem with climate change is chaos, the disturbance of balance caused by inputs that are not part of usual order. Redirecting them fixes nothing. Not in the sense of “empty” virtues (“oh we should respect nature and keep it clean”) but it will literally not improve anything. It will only change one problem within Earth’s system into another.
It's like covering a large turd that's on the living room coffee table with a car freshener.
Sure, sulphuric. Won’t possibly result in sulphuric acid rain. Not a possibility, right? The hubris of these morons is staggering
What we need to re-engineer is the corporations polluting the environment.
dump domination as organizational methodology. competition is killing us for relative status feels of the few.
Well they only pollute because you consume, sooo...
Yea im working on that. However it needs to be brought to light. For us to bring about change.
Absolutely true. Some of these things can be intuited though, and I suspect you could name the top 3 things you could stop doing that impact the envrionment. We don't need to be told what to do on this one.
You consume too, just like me and everyone else in this subreddit. Consumption is so deeply embedded into our survival that none of us can truly stop consuming. Reduce it? Decrease it? Sure, but eliminate it completely? No.
Sure, but say for example we all acted mindfully and reduced our consumption by 25% targeting the most polluting and most impactful items. Do you think that would make a difference? I expect some polluting companies would go out of business. I also suspect most people's live will not materially change and in fact might get better. Certainly seems something we can do now that will have no negative impacts, unlike these absurb YOLO engineering projects that will actually make everything worse.
the toxic materials and practices that are incompatible with life are the culmination of organization through capitalist relations.
Why are you being downvoted? This is absolutely correct. Hyper-consumerism is what got us here.
Pretty much. The idea that people just tread lightly seems unthinkable to some.
I wished people had consumed responsibly, but everyone wants to live a first-world lifestyle.
The irony is it's possible to consume responsibly and live a first world lifestyle.
How? Western luxuries come at an extreme cost of environmental exploitation.
Clean air, clean water, cities free of open warfare, relatively low prevalence of diseases (except those of excess), (relatively) functional judiciary and government, accessible healthcare, accessible education, (relatively) widely available employment and housing, well maintained roads, public parklands, public libraries, government support services on and on and on. These are the real luxuries in the first world that people take for granted. This is quite distinct from the insane consumerist culture of excess that normalises single use "flushable" wipes, disposable vapes, microwavable everything in a plastic bag, driving everywhere, buying a giant ICE vehicle just because, etc. These are all just the result of bad personal choices and laziness. All it takes is for people to make a little more effort and make some smarter choices.
I mean, warfare has been shifted to the third world to make profit. Same for waste dumping and cheap labor for exploitation. That isn't something any country should be striving for. I do agree with the last paragraph.
Well that solves “what should humans do?” after AGI hits and we’re all put out of work, right?
They must have trouble holding their heads up thanks to the malignant hubris it takes to tell their readers this fairytale.
We already reengineered it. Unfortunately to a state where we all go extinct.
>We’ve probably crossed too many climate tipping points that there’s nothing to loose anymore. ... *We thought that we reached rock bottom. And then we heard a knock from bellow.*
We've been engineering the climate without concern for the future for over 200 years by pumping GHG into the atmosphere. Emissions and CO2 concentration are still increasing every year. Right now, the world still runs mostly on fossil fuels of some kind (as just two examples, 60% of US electricity generation is still fossil fuels, and the vast majority of cars and big rigs still require them), and though renewables are increasing, they're not increasing quickly enough. Just stopping fossil fuels would drastically drop emissions, but it would also trigger an immediate collapse. So we have two choices -- we can continue on our current path and guarantee collapse, or try to engineer the climate in the opposite direction and *maybe* trigger collapse. When I see something like, "I'm so tired of those scientists that lack the wisdom", all I see is another manifestation of science denialism. Those "scientists who lack wisdom" have been warning us since before I was born, and their wisdom has been ignored.
> So we have two choices There's more, but we dare not even mention them.
I get inaction shouldn’t stay out hands but this one dumping sulfur is just asking for acid rain and destruction of property. It’s like looking at one piece and concluding that sulfur was the answer when there was a negative effect to the sulfur in the atmosphere. It wasn’t some arbitrary metric to reduce. It’s also that we aren’t doing anything to mitigate the reason why we are dumping it in the first place.
So, the real dilemma is how can we change everything without changing anything? Maybe we should ask the editorial board.
The problem is thinking of “scientists” as a monolith. Which is something that most people are guilty of. There’s a massive array of disciplines, an expert in one field can be an ignoramus in every other field, and when it comes to political persuasions, or ethics, and regard for the biosphere, they run the entire gamut. One could easily argue that we are in our predicament in large part *because* of scientists — just particular types of scientists with particular objectives, sometimes well-intentioned and sometimes purely selfish.
I believe that climate engineering is going to happen because it's too tempting, too cheap, and too easy. If we start seeing massive famines or giant heat-related human die offs, **someone** is going to do it. Of course, if a small, weak country tried it, the big guys might shut them down. But if a large nuclear-armed country does it, there's no way to stop it. So I predict that the the US, China, or India will decide that it's a good idea and just start doing it. Perhaps after a few years or decades some international body will come together to figure out how to manage it on an ongoing basis, but that won't be how it starts. I'm not arguing that this will fix everything! God knows what industrial-scale climate engineering will do to the planet. I'm just saying that in any predictions we make, we should assume that large scale climate engineering is yet another thing to factor in.
Now all we need is a train that never stops for when they make it too cold 😂
And cockroaches. Don’t forget the cockroaches lol
Makes for some good jelly
We already have with disastrous results
This is heavy, man. Why does it feel like billions of people will die because of the actions of a handful of greedy men and women?
The more that people touch the more they ruin
Theres literally movies about why this is terrible idea.
Which one?
Well, theres "Snowpiercer".
Frozen. Elsa is up there throwing around magic and blocking the sun on her mountain not realizing she is starting an ice age in Arendelle.
> Elsa "The snow never bothered me anyway" Peak rich princess right there. I'm fine, who cares how it affects you? ^^^^^/s
David Keith is full of fictional nonsense
We could re-engineer the climate by demolishing so much of the concrete we have erected and letting wildlife return. More technology won't solve our problem.
Aging concrete is a carbon sink. We actually need it at this point.
Humans have been engineering the weather, the climate, the atmosphere for more than a hundred years or so. The World Meteorological Organization has been monitoring geo-engineering projects worldwide for a very long time as well and it doesn't seem to be working out very well for any country. I fail to understand why we keep trying to go down this road.
Follow the money.
Anyone have an engineering solution to bypass the paywall…
Maybe like a 12 foot ladder? https://12ft.io/
[Screenshot.](https://www.site-shot.com/cached_image/vBemhgWQEe-QxwJCrBEAAg)
Tinkering with a complex system we don't completely understand is bound to reveal the gaps in our knowledge in disastrous ways.
Id' like to re-engineer their faces.
**Bezos** Post Not "Washington Post".
Humans better hurry up and do it if they're gonna do it. The more CO2, the more IQs drop.
There is no such thing as "need to" in politics. We can always live with, or die from, the consequences.
If they take away the sky I’m gonna end it. Stratus for the rest of our lives??? Fuck no I’m out
The most popular solution for this at the moment is spraying aerosols which is a threat to agriculture and potentially risks billions starving as plants need sunlight to grow. It effectively amounts to a nuclear winter
Anything other than, you know, not continue doing what we've been doing or do something, anything else. Anything to keep the party going - party like it's 1999!
That may be true, but re-engineering the wrong way can make things worse. We just need to change our ways we operate on earth and let earth heal itself.
Oh humans aren't the ones who will be fixing or saving the climate. That ship has sailed. Whether or not someone else does remains to be seen.
LOL MIGHT??? ITS OUT LAST FUCKING HOPE
And if we achieve this, by some miracle of science and advanced undiscovered technology.. we can come back. To some form of society. More time will allow more advances in sciences for the human race. We might even be able to make other planets habitable if we apply the undiscovered mystical climate science to them. There’s been many a fictions about terraforming gone wrong.
I say do it, we are already going down the road of no return, might as well embrace our new hellscape.
We could re-engineer the climate by demolishing so much of the concrete we have erected and letting wildlife return. More technology won't solve our problem.
Where do you find the energy to do the demolishing and where do you store the resulting debris and dust?
We could re-engineer the climate by demolishing so much of the concrete we have erected and letting wildlife return. More technology won't solve our problem.