Re:Rogue geoengineering startup attempts to affect atmospher...
by thatguy0900 on Wednesday December 28, 2022 @10:44AM
(#34162095)
We will be playing global nuclear war in this scenario. What happens when a countries rainfall is deemed not enough so they start seeding rainclouds and stealing the rainwater from neighboring countries that needed them for agriculture.
Once it seems sort of OK for anyone to do it, it'll become a massive free-for-all, with geoengineering schemes that overlap or compete with different goals. We could easily end up with unintended consequences — dueling programs with net near-zero result but massive new pollution, mutually reinforcing programs that massively overshoot, etc. Then a bigger program to fix that one, and another to fix that one...
I deeply feel the urgency to get started yesterday, and there's an initial feelgood rush reading this. But thinking for a few seconds on the cascading results of allowing rogue efforts and it turning into a free-for-all — sure, let's just play "move fast and break things" with the entire global climate.
No thanks.
We'd be better off choosing to play Global Thermonuclear War (it'd be over in ~48 hours and the global effects would be more brief).