Geo engineering is peak liberalism because it is only a rational fix and not a suicidal thing to do if you believe liberal ideas of infinite sustained economic growth and civilizational progress being linear march forward while ignoring collapse happens at least once a century with total collapse every few centuries. A ~250 year average on the churn of history. I find it nuts there are people who believe human history is a steadily march of forward progress and economic growth rather than a series of stumbles, falls, and lurches.

Am daytime drunk…

The big problem with all these magic geoengineering fixes that allow petrol states to continue existing (looking at you Venezuela, US and Russia too) is when we have a global economic collapse or major conflict, the industrial mass production of sulfur compounds to pump into the upper atmosphere (a costly economic activity at any meaningful scale, not a minor undertaking) comes crashing to a halt and things are 10 times worse than they would have been without doing it in the first place. Everyone pushing this suicidal bullshit always leaves out the caveat that the mass production and release of geoengineering chemicals into the atmosphere if done for any significant period of time has to continue for the rest of human civilization or everything dies. Geoengineering allows us to kick the can down the road (something human civilizations strive at) on abolishing petrol states and enables a level of atmospheric carbon that couldn’t happen otherwise because the changing climate would have caused wars and civilizational collapse that mean a lot of people die, empires fall, but most life on earth (and humans) still survive.

The geoengineering ideas and even people on the supposed “left” supporting it is what has me at this point believing all life will be gone from earth within three centuries max. That rather than 2 to 5 degrees we are going to trigger a greenhouse warming cascade like happened on Venus (earths twin) that early on crossed an atmospheric water vapor and methane tipping point. I’m sure there will be more magic fixes that attempt to mask rather than undo or stabilize. Carbon cycle breaks forever, is done. Issue isn’t with the technical fesability but human behavior to date on a macro scale, I have to believe geoengineering will happen while the petrol states continue increasing their rate of carbon production due to the breathing room it creates. US keeps pouring money into discovering new fossil fuel reserves around the world, US Dept of Energy keeps inventing novel methods to find and exploit previously unreachable fossil fuel ie how to extract shale oil and gas via fracking. Global warming will be masked for 50 years to a century or two until there is a world war or economic collapse, at which point that century of global warming happens in less than a decade triggering a rapid series of catastrophic tipping points (endgame ones being inverted carbon sinks, clathrate gun, water vapor, etc) faster than anyone has means to respond.

Ministry for the future? I should get around to finishing that

Drop the title!

what was that book called?

the global north can freeze to death from the meltwater or they can starve to death from the darkening (technically starves in both cases)

this is the future that we chose

Marine cloud brightening is surprisingly tricky on a technical level. There’s been some discussion of trying to retrofit cargo ships to create larger, more long-lasting wakes, which might actually be more effective. The albedo of calm seawater is VERY low (close to that of asphalt), and with the number of cargo ships out there, even a moderate change might have an impact.

Weird bit.