That's something of a straw man. Air pollution is one thing. Deliberate experimentation with hazardous emissions calculated to be scaled up on a global level with impacts on us all, is a completely different thing.

You have it exactly backwards.

Your semantics game is the "straw man." The atmosphere doesn't care what we call it, only what we dump in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34529944

>calculated to be scaled up on a global level

You say that like polluting industries don't try to scale up to a global level.

Industries don't try to scale up pollution. The pollution is a by-product of trying to scale up profits. And one wrong doesn't make the other a right.

>Industries don't try to scale up pollution. The pollution is a by-product of trying to scale up profits.

There's that word "try" again...

My exact point is that the atmosphere doesn't care about intent. It cares about emissions.

Humans care about intent. That's fine, but apparently the rule here is that you can hurt people (for amoral profit), but don't you dare try to help people!

My argument is that maybe we should rethink this ethical schema.

Not sure I follow you any more. In what way would you like to rethink this ethical schema? What schema?

The wildly disproportionate pollution vs geoengineering double standard that paralyzes us in the face of arguably the greatest existential threat to our species (perhaps second only to nuclear weapons).

>> apparently the rule here is that you can hurt people (for amoral profit), but don't you dare try to help people!

I think that's a big misunderstanding. Climate change is not exactly an immense existential threat to our species. It's threatening the livelihood and sustainability of life in almost all impoverished regions, and will cause the death and suffering of 100s of millions/billions of people.

The average 1-percenter who participates in this forum will probably see nothing more than a few tourist destinations changed, need to crank up the AC a bit more, less options for skiing in winter, and price of exotic fruits increasing.

The combination of climate change, loss of wildlife habitat, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, etc, could very well be a threat to our existence as a species, yes. Climate change is only one of them, and the injection of SO2 in the atmosphere only solves this one, with unclear and potentially negative consequences on all the other planetary boundaries.

Whataboutism