I think people are understandably cautious about large scale interventions in complex systems. It's not like we've got a test Earth ready to do a dummy run on. We're making changes directly to production here.

(I do think we'll ultimately need to do something like this simply because the cost of not doing it is too high but I understand why people are scared by it, and it's not just down to belief in wood spirits).

Also it means we won't actually solve the core problem that is greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead we'll just continually pump up some aerosols to ensure the heating doesn't get too bad. And if we ever fail to do so then we'll face incredible heating.

We can just produce more greenhouse gasses to make the aerosols we pump into the atmosphere to undo just one of the many effects of the greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere.

No one wants to tell us fatties to not eat farmed animals, and not drive cars okay? /s

Fossil fuel companies knew about climate change and deliberately spent decades obfuscating the issue and warping discourse.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-cl...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62225696

Etc, etc, etc.

So, blaming people for having stupid opinions that various companies spent billions injecting into the discourse seems misguided. At best.

we're we supposed to all stop driving cars?

Or not build out a continent to suit cars and not people? Disgusting city planning that lead to not having a car being nearly impossible in the US.

Bus line was closed for 2 years from Covid. Absolutely no chance I’ll trust a city enough to give up my car.

We are supposed to stop designing cities around cars, yes.

It's pretty universally accepted that investing in public transport and trains 40 years ago would have led to an awesome economic boon, while dramatically lowering emissions. As mentioned, planning could have been much better. And every poor decision there has some car or oil corporation's fingerprints on it.

We could have spent much more on solar, nuclear, and other cleaner power.

We could have punished media and politicians that helped sell out our planets future for some slimy oil dollars.

There's a lot we could have done. But instead we have takes like yours; a direct result of 40 years of FUD and misinformation. Do you have the faintest idea what those cars, those cows, those oil spills and methane leaks cost us?

And they're going to cost much much more.

I guess not everyone realizes that /s means sarcasm?

I don’t disagree that oil and use of oil has caused a negative impact on Earth lol.

I don’t think we could’ve done anything in the last fourty years nor do I think we can do anything to stop. It’s too late.

There’s no way we can stop the use of oil and cars now. Sure we can switch to electric, but I don’t think that will stop the snowball.

It’s too entrenched and part of our life now. Sure we can be altruistic and ban the sale of non-EVs but what about all the millions of cars that are already in the streets?

The oil pockets are too deep for government to just ban existing vehicles. In fact the governments have caused wars to protect their oil assets…

We can definitely switch to driving electric cars. Especially when most people drive just 20 miles to reach their job, and a significant amount of that is in traffic.

Destroying the air we breath and the planet for an average 20 mile drive, that takes an average 25 minutes, is plain insanity.

otoh, greenhouse gas emissions will eventually drop anyways, from running out of fuel. Even our best somewhat realistic plans of stopping emissions aren't that much better than what we should be doing in preparation of impeding scarcity anyways... Mitigation is no substitute for prevention, we'll need both anyways (unless we fast-track ourselves into oblivion using the nuclear arsenal cheat code)

We don't seem to need to emit much more greenhouse gases, the amount present in the atmosphere is going to keep Earth heated for a long enough time.

But if we wanted more, think about all the methane that thawing Siberian and Canadian permafrost will release.

We can't address the GHG issue fast enough, so that pretty much means we'd have to try other stuff. They could certainly be worked in parallel.

We had conversations about going to the moon and we got there in 10 years.

Talk about producing less disposable crap, driving less, flying less, and cutting military budgets, everyone gets “exercise their 2A rights” in the US.

We couldn't get people to wear a simple mask.

Drying less? You have politicians that would attack you for even suggesting that.

We've been trying to talk about climate for a long time.

Clearly, a good portion of the country doesn't care.

Because even if every American stopped driving _tomorrow_, we are still going to have the effects of climate change anyway. We can't stop India and China from developing, so instead of trying to limit the rights of Americans to do something which might not even help, it's better to develop a solution such as in TFA.

Cost. The "cost" of all of those things is "too high" for the average American, as evidenced by the reaction to such proposals. So, we gotta do something else.

If the US drastically cut its military budget the world will go to war fast. China will take anything it wants.

Our huge over bloated military keeps a lot of countries in check.

WW1 we went home and ignored the world. 20 years everyone was back at it. We didn’t leave after WW2. Longest period of peace in history.

No, it's been a period of near-constant American-led war.

The US is just one of many countries. Not every country agrees that global warming exists. Some countries think global warming will be beneficial.

You could cut the US military budget to $0 and it would be less than a rounding error to what’s needed globally.

> Talk about producing less disposable crap, driving less, flying less, and cutting military budgets

That comment illustrates the problem pretty well. We could do all those things and we'd still be way, way behind on what climate scientists say we actually need to do, to avoid disaster.

What we need to do is reduce emissions to zero in less than thirty years, with steep declines starting now. That's not just electric grids, it's all transportation, industry, direct emissions from steel and concrete production, agriculture, everything. And then we need to start pulling massive amounts of excess CO2 back out of the atmosphere. Going to the moon was trivial by comparison; without a breakthrough in cheap fusion or something we're not likely to achieve all this.

SRM isn't a solution but it could buy us a little time, before higher temperatures get the planet releasing gigatons of CO2 and methane without any further help from us.

Just put a giant ice cube in the ocean every now and then

It absolutely does not mean we can't solve the core problem. You can work on two things at once. You can take medicine to treat disease while you work to fix the underlying root cause

Yes, definitely this is part of it for me. The other reason I’m concerned (although, agree it’s probably necessary) is that I’m wary of any solution that we can’t undo if it goes awry.

We'd be wise to ask, "What could go wrong?"

It's the question we didn't ask about burning fossil fuels. We got our answer the hard way. Have we learned from that?

The cost of not doing might be high. The cost of trying to further manipulate the atmospheric "market" might be worse. Then what?

We got the answer to that 80 years ago. It's not that we fail to imagine what could go wrong. It's that we don't act on our knowledge. If we had course-corrected when we became aware of global warming we wouldn't have a problem.

Or the cost of not doing geoengineering might be higher. You can't just look at one side of the risks.

Which makes sense, but we are already doing very large scale interventions with releasing a lot of greenhouse gases (and also other stuff).

Yes, I am confused how an intentional intervention is so frowned upon when unintentional interventions are done on a continuous basis: mass deforestation, mass greenhouse emissions, mass oceanic acidification, satellite deorbiting, mass air transit, massive water redistribution projects etc

Maybe the key to not face the scrutiny of non-interventionists is to mask the intervention as an unrelated commercial venture, in which case it should be pretty much good to go.

Most of the things you mention (e.g. deforestation, water redistribution) are things people worry about. In fact, the people worried about large scale interventions are usually also the people most worried about emissions, deforestation, ocean acidification, etc. So I don't think there's much hypocrisy here.

> Yes, I am confused how an intentional intervention is so frowned upon when unintentional interventions are done on a continuous basis...?

What's so confusing? By the nature of being intentional, an intentional intervention can be stopped before it does harm.

It's weird logic to think caution should be thrown to the wind because some bad unintentional things weren't prevented.

But a lot of people freak out about attempting geoengineering at all, even at a small scale. There's a UN treaty prohibiting it.

No treaty prohibiting the emission of 36 billion tons of CO2 every year though.

Further to your point, our history is littered with examples of, to steal the Jurassic Park bit, being "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should". Things like moving horrible invasive ecologically devastating species around to "solve a problem" or "it looks pretty" (Cane Toads, Rabbits, and Kudzu, for example) have had dire results.

Cloud seeding is definitely a well practiced thing by now, but it's unclear what the short and long term effects are if we do it at a significant (continent or hemispheric) scale.

I'd love for it to work out and for humanity to actually deflect the looming impacts of climate change.

we are quite primed to believe anything anthropogenic is bad, anthropogenic heating is bad, so antrhopogenic cooling is bad

The scientific community has a track record for bringing a lot of good in the world but also for being wrong quite a lot. Just think about your typical food pyramids. There’s now research that says cholesterol isn’t dictated by the food you eat.

Around climate change as well, there are now talks about some of the changes we are observing being part of the natural cycle of the earth based on core samples. No doubt we’ve made things worse but maybe not as bad as we think.

Isn’t Florida supposed to be under water now?

Also kind of funny top of Reddits environment Reddit had two top threads recently where one was saying we are losing water around some land mass due to climate change and another saying complete opposite. They were right beside another on the feed.

Scientific communities aren’t in consensus about global warming and climate change. I frankly now (being a hardcore believer in the past) am now on the fence about some aspects of it.

I really don’t think we’re as advance a species as some of our ambitions might lead us to think.

You can’t really test stuff like this in a small scale and it could have drastic impact on us as a single planet species. People would be right to be dubious.

Finally don’t be fooled. Scientific community, just like the Engineering field, does shit for their gain. They all fudge the numbers. They all change the lenses to shed light on what they want. This is why we’ve seen some scientific inaccuracies. For example Sugar studies being quashed in the past… I guess also with the vaccines recently lol

It’s condescending to think that a reasonable amount of dubiousism means people think the “wood spirits” will punish us.

> the changes we are observing being part of the natural cycle

I really doubt that is true, but in the end it doesn't matter. We need to climate control the Earth to keep things as static as possible. Even if we discount the doomsday scenarios, the economic and human costs to climate change are staggering.

It's remarkable how well the fossil-funded propaganda has worked.

Actually, some of the propaganda artist died of blood clots and aids like conditions when they took the vaccine. Unfortunately, they did not take five booster shots like we did. /s

"Some of" meaning a tiny fraction of the total population vs those that suffered no ill effects from the vaccination at all.

Yeah we don’t care about some because they aren’t us or our loved ones

As opposed to the other crowd who callously disregarded the dangers of the virus because it was primarily dangerous to the elderly.

I wonder what represents a larger group of people: those at risk from side effects of the vaccination or every human being older than 65?

What a clever turnabout! You must have so many reddit points

Sorry, did you expect everyone to be blown away by the litany of common (and widely debunked) talking points from fossil fuel apologists?

Nothing like the smell of sweet sweet jet fuel in the morning

This whole site is a CJ and hypocrisy. We’re all on our devices, made my minors in third world countries, using electricity powered by non renewable resources.

My original post was criticizing our blind trust in this research in a complex system that we understand very little of. Rather than changing our ways governments would rather gamble on fucking up the earth all together. Ands… criticizing this, let the tribes of YC means we believe in tree spirits…

> I guess also with the vaccines recently lol

The only mass fraud uncovered was supporting therapeutics, not vaccines, which work exactly as well as they are claimed to. (Go ahead, link the BMJ report about Pfizer, where shoddy practices were reported at a company operating 3/153 test sites).

> I really don’t think we’re as advance a species as some of our ambitions might lead us to think.

Well…

>> It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility.

It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflexively ignore the potential unknown side effects that can occour when messing with a complex system.

Have you ever thought that perhaps it's people like you who have it wrong? Are you capable of predicting ALL the side effects of such an extreme intervention?

Are you capable of reversing unwanted side effects like a global winter due to this intervation?

How can you know if you even can reverse it IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE UNWANTED SIDE EFFECTS WILL EVENT BE?

We are intervening with the complex system by injecting gases into it already.

When stopping the gas injections proved nearly inposs, trying a counter-intervention seems only logical.

> stopping the gas injections proved nearly inposs

Aka we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas :/

Seriously. To this day we're letting fossil fuel companies get away with literal murder. Acting like change is impossible is a view those companies actively promote. Don't fall for it.

Oh please, reducing emissions is super slow and painful and anyone could see that.

Every car switches to electric -> this is happening, but it takes 5-10 years to phase out a car. If 100% of new car sales are electric, we’ll have to wait until 2030. But we’re not at 100% yet. So we’ll probably only get there around 2040-2050.

Every house switches to non-gas water heating and climate control -> this one takes even longer, 10-20 years to phase out. It’s probably easier to get to 100% clean new sales

Every industrial process switches -> I don’t know enough to even speculate but this sounds like an even longer CAPEX cycle

Every plane & ship switches -> we don’t have the tech for this figured out yet. Ships are probably one of the biggest things we should switch over ASAP.

Every powerplant switches to nuclear/solar/wind/hydro: another multi-decade project.

I want all of the above, if only for cleaner air for health reasons, and because I’m an engineer and nuclear + electric seems more elegant. But it will take a very long time.

We could have started the switch to cleaner power and better planning and quality trains and public transport etc. forty years ago, but we were knowingly lied to.

Fossil fuel companies knew about climate change and deliberately spent decades obfuscating the issue and warping discourse.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-cl...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62225696

Well OK, but now that we are where we are, we have to take the most rational next step. I’m not poking myself in the eye to get back at the oil companies.

Power plants need to come first. Make electric so cheap that electric cars are a no brainer. Not California nonsense of electric shortages while demanding everyone uses electricity.

> literal murder

This is unfortunately not even a euphemism. If a killing is hard to precisely attribute to a single person, people don't categorize it that way. But that's exactly what it is.

"People like me" want research into the methods and don't call for not reducing the emissions. Both of this I explicitly said and both are largely ignored by people who are responding.

As to the main point, as sibling has said, at this point regardless of what we do the climate will be anthropogenic (unless you believe people who say we don't influence it much). There is no return to being naive and innocent about it. The notion that there is some privileged way to act "in harmony with nature" is fictitious and purely human cultural psychology. The current mainstream solutions are also based on thinking that we understand some things and can predict what would happen if we do X or Y.

If I wanted to be cheeky I would say we know very well now how to heat the atmosphere if need be, but actually I defer to climatology research and modeling to resolve any of this.

> People can suspect that if the activists are so choosy about the methods, this cannot be that serious and this is not how truly desperate people act.

This is a standard climate denier talking point. It doesn't make any sense unless you believe in a massive conspiracy on the topic.

Yet, ironically, you seem appalled that anyone might doubt your noble motives for attacking the people who would prefer the widely accepted and known solutions to climate change be used first.

First, I related this as a perception problem for random members of the public who cannot be expected to go deep into the science of the problem. Second, no conspiracy would be needed, just hypocrisy of individuals. If someone tells you you'll go blind if you rub your privates, it doesn't necessarily mean they truly believe that, they may just want to influence your behavior by scaring you. It could be the case (or might seem so) with some climate activists, who predicate action on also realizing their social projects that might even be noble in themselves. This has nothing to do with legitimacy of the whole climate issue.

My initial comment probably appears harsh because I was surprised by the fairly uniform tone of comments back then. I'm not appalled by anything, I know one can expect no quarter in this kind of hot button discussions :)

> Second, no conspiracy would be needed, just hypocrisy of individuals.

To quote your first sentence:

> It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility.

Which is definitely conspiratorial. It's not just that they might have incomplete or lacking science training, or are defaulting to incorrect common-sense intuitions, no, they have been trained.

Second, the hypocrisy of people benefiting from the status quo, defending a stupid idea to squeeze a few years of carbon emission, and accusing the other side of being ideologically driven is quite striking.

You insult the other side by summoning the idea that they are simple peoples believing in gods and wood spirits, dismiss their opinion by projecting your own ideologically-driven hypocrisy, engage in conspiratorial-adjacent thinking by considering that their opinion is the result of propaganda.

Note how close this is all to the usual climate skeptics rhetorical toolbox. After having to finally conceded that there is an issue, they are trying to justify their insane beliefs by saying that "people were not nice enough when explaining the problem and agreeing with my politics".

Don't claim to advocate for science-based approach by using such rhetorical devices.

I doubt I should really continue discussion on these increasingly personal terms, but you're reading my first sentence in a very uncharitable way. (I mean fine, it was combative.) I could maybe accept your formulation "that they might have incomplete or lacking science training, or are defaulting to incorrect common-sense intuitions", except I'd feel that it would sound (even more?) patronizing, as we are no doubt all trained into some opinions in some way. Just by participating in culture. To be honest, I doubt that many people deeply engage with outright propaganda in any direction, I think bigger factors are inertia and not engaging with world affairs that much.

If I tried to be milder and more specific, I could have said: I'd like people to have circa null prior for any technology (i.e. also not blindly enthusiastic), and what I was seeing was, I think, reacting with disaster movie tropes and vaguely mythological worldview. The rest of your post is unclear on whether you accusing me of stuff and/or people you lump me with because of your discourse analysis. I won't be addressing that anyway.

> widely accepted and known solutions to climate change

No such solutions exist. Cutting back CO2 emissions by a few percent is not enough. Anything else is ignoring significant economic and political realities. There are no widely-accepted and known solutions to climate change that don't involve major ecological devastation and the destruction of all our coastal cities.

That's why we're looking at options like this.

The IPCC has looked into this in some detail and regularly updated their summaries of the latest science for years. They consider solar radiation management a high risk option compared with all the other options they have documented in detail:

https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/04/04/ipcc-ar6-wgiii-pressrelease/

Because you can implement a solution gradually and measure the gradient. The gradient strongly informs the final outcome.

It's not foolproof, but it's better than what you're implying.

Literally this is about research to figure out more about how to control these things. It isn't a plan to ignorantly execute the actual idea. If you are correct, the research should enable us to be informed and NOT build this out. You should be against not doing research.

We're already making massive interventions to a complex system. It's way too late to get all precious about not messing with it; now we have to muddle through and make our best guess about what set of interventions will do the least harm.

It reminds me of people that end up on a long list of prescriptions. Each next drug counteracts the negative side effects of the ones before. We all know this is not the best course.

Well, I mean, I'd hope you wouldn't recommend they just take no drugs at all.

I don't think anyone thinks geo-engineering is the preferred solution (in the abstract). The question is what is a practical solution to the problem?

Germany, to me, is a cautionary tale. The shut down nukes and subsidized renewables. But here they are depending on a despot for energy -- with likely severe consequences this winter. And they are increasing coal energy production.

We need a new religion that worships civilization and condemns degrowth as a sin.

Catch me at the alter of neo-liberal globalism next Sunday /s.

Civilization is the meta-entity that emerged from us when we started writing and educating each other. It perpetuates itself, adapts to changing circumstances, and grows in complexity.

Economic systems and religions come and go, but civilization is here for good.

> People can suspect that if the activists are so choosy about the methods, this cannot be that serious and this is not how truly desperate people act.

That's quite the jump you are making there.

You'll note it's ironic we want to replace the natural albedo from the ice we are melting instead of trying not to destroy it in the first place. Espacially since said system has been proven to work and be life sustaining for millions of years.

To me it's like startups creating robot bees: finding an inferior expensive potentially dangerous solution to a problem that was already solved for free since forever.

But you can't make money with preserving the health of the patient. Better have it sick and sell him pills.

It would be nicer in many ways if we could just use the natural ice sheet, but AFAIK by now we cannot rely on it, even if we magically removed all the political problems and suddenly started doing the right thing. Based on available information it's possible, or plausible, that irreversible processes are already under way.

I'd say the priority should be against the threats to the existence of people. Consequences for the main guilty parties is an important but separate issue. I do hope that this whole crisis could contribute to curbing corporate power (by gaining widespread popularity and push for this, among young people especially). But the priority is keeping the patient alive, because without this the question of also making them a good person is moot.

edit: I also think based on the descriptions that some of the ideas could be straightforward enough to just be executed by government services (akin to firefighters or coastal guard) without any contractors, but this more of a question of how the governments function, possible corruption etc.

> But you can't make money with preserving the health of the patient.

Have you not seen the cost of a gym membership?

There's money to be made everywhere. And in our society, it will be made regardless of the cost.

The making robot bees analogy is good but I think you might be overlooking an important angle on the problem.

This is like inventing robot bee replacements, if bees were going extinct (which some people were worried about for a while, and some still are) … and while Bee populations may be collapsing but they don’t seem destined for extinction, just massive population losses that can in time recover like humans did from the Black Death… and it’s not even universally bad among all bee species.

However unlike Bees, of one species or another, which have a very clear path to repopulation and recovery overall if we don’t keep dumping pesticides on them (or at least keep looking for ones that don’t hurt them as much which has absolutely been an active area of research) … the climate may not be able to return to normal.

We’re not even sure that if we had a magic wand, and could change all human experience and industry across the whole planet so it was net carbon neutral (so neutral across co2, methane and all the other greenhouse gasses combined) starting right this very second. We might still have passed the tipping point and just be waiting for the current warmer climate based on current co2 levels to melt enough permafrost that we expose unaccounted for clathrates or deeply buried rotting bogs that will start putting out methane and continue the slide into all the predicted outcomes of uncontrolled climate change.

This system is so big and complex that we’re frantically trying to analyse it while simultaneously trying to frantically map the scope of the known unknowns meanwhile there are all the unknown unknowns that exist across the planet and every single major study acknowledges whenever they talk about the uncertainty in their measurements or their models or their survey data.

It’s one thing to invent something useless. It’s another thing to not have a plan B. Inventing robot bees is a plan B to help prevent mass starvation if bees were to go extinct, not very likely and even if they did not all crops need bees, plenty of other insects pollinate plants as well, which is why the robot bees is a little silly in practice but not in principle.

Studying geo-engineering is the Plan B for if we can’t turn back the clock due to either collective failure to change our ways enough, or fast enough, or soon enough… and when soon enough may have been yesterday and we may not even know it was yesterday until years from now when something else happens we didn’t fully understand or predict… it’s just stupid to not have been researching some plans B, C, and D. We shouldn’t necessarily give any of these more money than the current effort to actually fix the problem at its root cause but we should still be starting the research now before it’s too late for any possible plan to help. As to how much money, that’s a political issue thats too complicated for a simple HN comment that’s already getting quite long.

> has been proven to work and be life sustaining for millions of years

This statement is wrong for a few reasons. Firstly, this is a system that repeatedly produces minor ice ages that transform large portions of continents into barren ice deserts for tens of thousands of years. It is also capable of producing major ice ages that last millions of years and cover large portions of the entire Earth in ice and this happens if there isn't enough CO2 in the atmosphere. Not exactly life sustaining. Secondly, ice, the climate that produces it and the Earth at large have no concern for the life that lives upon or within them. They are decidedly unforgiving and will kill any lifeform that doesn't fight for its life against them. Life exists in spite of the abiotic world and in direct conflict with its perpetual slide towards entropy. Given a long enough timeline this system will change into a state that is largely hostile towards human life. It is a massive misnomer to call it life sustaining.

The ice is a reason for SRM. There are proposals to use aerosols specifically to protect arctic ice. Otherwise it's very likely to melt away before we're able to reduce emissions to zero, much less draw CO2 back down to safe levels.

Problem is that the only reason we don't push ahead with renewables is that governments would rather use existing infrastructure. They want to amortize sunk construction costs. They don't want to upgrade the grid.

Solar panels now cost just 20 cents a Watt and can convert sun into electricity with about 6 times the efficiency of photosynthesis.

If we make it cheap to punt, then the consequences could truly be dire.

The cost to "punt" is zero, and it is what we are doing today. It is what we will continue doing until there is a perfect magical technology solution with no side effects and very low costs. Something like a 100kW power plant that runs 24/7, creates no emissions, requires no fuel or maintenance, and can be set up in your backyard for $99.

There is no crisis coming that will be severe enough (in the developed world) to change this. Politicians don't care, because people don't care. Climate change doesn't even make the top 10 priorities of most US voters. Not even the people in Florida whose houses will be going underwater care.

I wonder how long we will be waiting for easy button-press perfection with no downsides?

I wonder how dire the consequences of our waiting will be?

> Politicians don't care, because people don't care.

Maybe(!) it's for a similar reason to why most of these people also don't do calculus, or juggle, etc: they do not know how to, because they were never taught how to.

I'm not sure what effort to teach about this has been spared in the past couple decades.

One big problem is that half the country has also been taught climate change is a hoax concocted for partisan political gain.

My point is rather abstract: if you are not pleased with the behavior of the agents in your simulation, it may be worth actually teaching them skills that are known to be beneficial, rather than just talking about it (and we often don't/can't even get this far).

As one example (and I genuinely don't mean it as an insult):

> One big problem is that half the country has also been taught climate change is a hoax concocted for partisan political gain.

This is not actually known, and is unknowable (to any substantial degree of accuracy). And yet: consider how often one encounters such claims, including in genuinely intelligent communities like HN.

If I could make a list of just three "stop doing this" rules, "premature formation of epistemically unsound beliefs (and seeding of those viral beliefs into the memeplex)" would definitely be one of them.

> I doubt that most of them even believe this, but it's illustrative of... some deeper issue, for sure.

This, on the other hand, is not only excellent, but it is also highly anomalous (I propose).

I guess it depends on your definition of "taught". I do think that some large percentage of the population, probably at least 30%, have received the hoax message repeatedly from popular conservative sources such as Fox News, Donald Trump's former Twitter account, and the TV show Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Now, all these sources don't care in the slightest whether what they're saying is true, and would happily say the exact opposite seconds later if it suited them. And their audiences may at some level understand this. It's not really about what is being said, it's about the way it affirms the in-group.

So there is perhaps room for genuine teaching - but I'm not sure what it would take to dig out of where we are today.

> I guess it depends on your definition of "taught".

Indeed - there are the labels we apply to things, and then there is what lies underneath. And then there is the question of whether we form a distinction between the two (or, the degree to which we [are able to] form a distinction, and whether this is a constant or varies under different conditions, and the degree to which and ways in which it varies, etc).

> I do think that some large percentage of the population, probably at least 30%, have received the hoax message repeatedly from popular conservative sources such as Fox News, Donald Trump's former Twitter account, and the TV show Tucker Carlson Tonight.

> Now, I tend to think that all these sources don't care in the slightest whether what they're saying is true, and would happily say (and even believe) the exact opposite seconds later if it suited them.

1. Do you believe that it is only conservative sources and conservative people who can be objectively observed engaging in this behavior:

a) on a relative scale?

b) on an absolute scale?

2. Same question, but replace "believe" with "think it is necessarily and comprehensively true (in a formal, Justified True Belief sense)".

Re 1 and 2, both sides do it, but I find the whole "false equivalence" and "which side is worse" discussion nauseating and refuse to compare the two on the same scale. I think it suffices to say that neither can be neglected in understanding the current situation.

Stereotypically, right-wing propaganda seems to manipulate through brute force, and left-wing propaganda through selective negligence of cognitive biases. But even this perception is influenced by who does the fact-checking and how.

I can certainly understand your frustration, and I share it...but if we are really serious about climate change and various other issues, shouldn't we not only be willing, but strongly desire to determine with certainty whether the methods we use to govern our behavior (which were designed in relatively archaic times) are adequate to face the challenges of the 21st century?

If this was any other kind of project, the quality of leaders and design of systems of leadership would absolutely be brought into question by most people - does it not seem more than a little weird that the political realm [1] is treated as if it is radioactive, beyond even simple discussion?

Does this seem rational?

[1] Well, ours that is - we seem to be more than happy to overthrow ones we do not like, and even consider it righteous.

Doomsday fear tactics doesn't move the needle. It's bad messaging and no one will ever fill fulfilled by following it. Change the message you might get more action.

Because humans are apes. Would you trust a bunch of monkeys to tamper with one of the most complex and critical systems in existence? No. Humans are not smart enough and too corrupt to be tampering with such complex and critical systems. The elites can spray as many aerosols into their homes as they like, they can inject whatever substance they want into their bodies and plug their brains into whatever infernal machine they want but don't subject me to these experiments.

But those apes already did tamper. For centuries. Even the worst hobby surgeon should better be allowed to finish the job than leaving the wound open if there isn't someone better qualified at hand.

Yes, and the result of this tampering doesn't inspire much confidence. I doubt humans understand what's actually going on. How can they come up with a solution when they don't even fully understand the problem? The problem of climate change is insanely complex with billions of variables.

Also, how can they possibly understand all the side effects of spraying aerosols into the atmosphere of a massive, highly complex planet which supports an incalculable number of living organisms? They didn't know that burning fossil fuels would lead to climate change when they started doing it, who is to say that spraying massive amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere will not lead to something else which they did not anticipate?

This proposed solution is akin flawed scientific practices of earlier times such as blood-letting or whacking people over the head with a stick to chase out daemons. At every point in history, people with fancy academic certificates have always been certain that they knew what they were doing and they've been proven wrong over and over.

Yeah tampering with the atmosphere is literally insane.

A passenger tampering with the flight controls of a 747 is also insane, but if there are no pilots and the plane is in an uncontrolled dive, then it's still not necessarily a bad idea.

My reflex is to consider edge cases. For example, what happens if this is launched, works, and then a Krakatoa 2.0 goes off. What's the game plan in that scenario? Sincere question, these systems are well beyond me.

Then we stop increasing albedo for a bit. Basically PWM-ing the Earth's solar flux. As long as the decay time of the albedo modification is known, it's quite unlikely that we could induce a snowball earth.

Sounds like a Hell of a risk when playing with a complex system that is not yet fully understood.

Don't worry- Russia has a vested interest in warming the earth a bit, so they'll put out CO2 to counteract the cooling.

Practically, the planet is very big and injecting reflective material into the stratosphere would be a ridiculously expensive proposition, with little or no immediate economic reward for those carrying it out.

Now, when Pinatubo blew in the early 1990s, it produced about a decade-long cooling effect relative to what otherwise would have happened, but that effect faded. So, you'd have to have a plan to inject a Pinatubo-scale amount of material into the atmosphere at least once a decade, and underneath that, the fossil CO2 and CH4 emissions would steadily be increasing in the atmosphere, so if the project was ever paused, you'd have a rapid heating period which would probably be worse in immediate effect than if you'd just allow the warming to progress more steadily.

Those are the practical reasons I think it's a nonsensical proposal, along the lines of parking a sunshade in space (getting that much material out to Lagrange 1 would be so costly as to be unimaginable). It's far cheaper just to replace, say, 1-3% of fossil fuel production per year with equivalent wind/solar/storage.

> Those are the practical reasons I think it's a nonsensical proposal, along the lines of parking a sunshade in space (getting that much material out to Lagrange 1 would be so costly as to be unimaginable).

But it's sci-fi nonsense, so full speed ahead because I believe in science!

Kurzgesagt covered this in one of their videos, it is not as hard as you make it out to be: https://youtu.be/dSu5sXmsur4

I imagine the "inject a Pinatubo-scale amount of material" idea gets many folks excited around the possibility of bringing back Project Plowshare.

Cheaper, and insufficient. We've got less than 30 years to reduce our emissions to zero. Replace a little more than 3% of fossil plants annually and you decarbonize the grid in that time, but there's also transportation. You'll need way more electricity for electric cars, and then there's ships and airplanes, for which we'll need some kind of carbon-neutral liquid fuel. We have to replace all the steel plants, and figure out some kind of carbon-neutral cement, and somehow stop all the emissions from agriculture, and do something about all the high-temperature industrial processes that burn their own fossil. Meanwhile, our energy usage is increasing by a couple percent a year, which is why with all the wind/solar/storage we've built so far, we haven't made a dent in decreasing emissions.

Without having actually done the research the White House is now funding, we can't just draw these conclusions and dismiss the ideas as impractical. Funding the research is good. Maybe there is a relatively cheap (can be funded by one nation) and reversible way to do this, don't we have to at least try to find it?

There is no rational reason to be against gathering more information.

> It's far cheaper just to replace, say, 1-3% of fossil fuel production per year with equivalent wind/solar/storage.

But this isn't going to happen, and even if it were, it's too little too late to stop climate change, a lot of which is already locked in due to past emissions.

It’s not a trained reflex; it’s being humble enough to recognize one’s own ignorance when confronted with the complexity of the system at end.

Undoubtedly there would be disaster with unintended consequences.

and undoubtably we are undergoing disasters with wholly unintended consequences.

When the house is on fire, you don't worry about water damage.

More aptly: if your house is on fire, you don't remove all of the oxygen from the planet.

That's more like, what's happening now with polluters indiscriminately emitting whatever into the atmosphere without any effective rules.

But I guess that's ok somehow? And trying literally anything to reverse it is met with horror and hyperbolic rhetoric like 'remove all the oxygen from the planet'.

> It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility.

It's good to have skepticism about anything additive, as these decisions affect everybody and can have unexpected outcomes, for example using detergent to break up oil spills can make the effects worse on coral https://www.livescience.com/4567-bad-worse-oil-spills-cleane...

I'm not saying the proposed solution is good or bad, but trying new things on a big scale can have unexpected outcomes, and it's good to be wary.

> It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility.

Yeah, massively ambitious whiz-bang technology has never had unintended consequences. /s

I reflex against this because its going to be a ton of money going into research/deployment of this, meanwhile theres still massive pollution and single use plastic production going on. Maybe spend the money to fix that first.

Meanwhile farmers in Brazil are torching one of the planets lungs and no one seems to be doing anything about it.

Single-use plastic is a serious problem, but it's insignificant compared to crossing the tipping point on climate.

I understand where you are coming from and agree that we need to know more about this to do it properly if required. However, I think some of this reflex is jusified by the known side-effects (not even the potential unintended consequences).

Greenhouse gases heat the surface and the atmosphere, but solar radiation management (SRM) mostly cools the surface. If you use SRM to get the surface temperature 'right' that atmoshpere is still warmer that it would have been. This means you get less rain. Many places care more about rain than temperature.

This is a well understood consequence, but the specifics are where it gets very tricky. There is a non-zero chance that using SRM to cool the planet may also kill the Amazon rainforest by reducing rainfall. This obviously makes things a whole lot worse and no longer buys us time. [0]

This is not even an unknown unintendend consquence, it is pretty clear already. Obviously this doesn't mean we shouldn't look into it, but we already know the consequences of geoengineering are ... not good.

[0] - https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/12/10887/2012/acp-12-108...

This is great because this is actually a practical solution over "lower all fuel emissions and stop eating beef" which may actually have zero effect over flooding and wildfires which are supposedly due to climate change but no one can say for sure.

Erring on the side of skepticism around deploying irreversible global changes is rational. Humans have a track record of deploying techniques and technologies well before the consequences are well understood, so it makes sense to actively attempt to counterbalance that tendency when the consequences of getting it wrong are extreme.

I was interested to see the relevant term in the IPCC report. If I was reading correctly (not assured) that's a human caused effect which is mitigating climate change.

It would also reduce the power output from solar installations worldwide. It’s like retroactively taxing those who invested in sustainable energy generation - and without permission, too.

Climate systems are chaotic. They display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Changing those conditions will have literally incalculable results.

I understand how people might be a bit shy to trust geo engineering since scientists will tell us we can’t precisely predict the results.

That being said, we’re currently conducting an uncontrolled climate experiment with the warming gasses we’re releasing. Reversing some of that is probably safe and sane.