The Nobel Peace Prize may be meaningless. That the most powerful man in the world has such a juvenile, psychologically rotten obsession with it that he grins ear to ear upon an illegitimate "secondary award" of it is absolutely not meaningless.
Realpolitik does not actually dictate that. It says you pay attention to your interests but with a focus on what is actually achievable, and not focused on things like national/regional pride or unrealistic notions of utopian good.
the situation where europeans feel they are in conflict with their best ally and economic partner says they actually need to relearn the lessons of realpolitik.
Critically, it actually builds tension and the risk of a “climate snapback”. Where if humans can’t perpetually dim an ever-increasing amount, then the entire global system snaps back and destroys actually all or nearly all life on earth.
i think we should be exploring all. carbon tax would be great, but currently seems politically impossible outside of Europe (and even challenging within)
You’re missing the point: if we can’t find the political will to implement solutions today, why would we find the political will to implement solutions tomorrow?
because technological progress means things that were costly and expensive are easier in the future. imagine telling people to stop using gas in 1950. it would have been fully impossible, now avenues are opening up.
You should do some reading on why there are few actual climate scientists pushing this idea, and instead it’s mostly people with totally unrelated backgrounds like marketing or economics.
Nearest real world success is continuous low volume maritime dispersal which has completely different dispersal dynamics than high-altitude bursts, and the continuous low volume maritime dispersal is non-viable
No way to undo it once done
If humans can’t perpetually release aerosols — and I mean perpetually, for the next millions of years — then the global climate “snaps back” violently within weeks and almost certainly eradicates all known life in the entire universe.
The climate shock from stopping aerosols would be a crisis for the planet, but we would have more than weeks to stop it. First it would take months for the aerosols to leave the upper atmosphere, and then years for the earth to heat up to its new equilibrium temperature - catastrophe, but not likely the end of all life.
My understanding is that also volcano eruptions have temporarily cooled down global climate. So, such an abrupt, high-volume dispersal seems to work too, although probably not what we would want. If both sudden volcano eruptions and maritime emissions cool down the climate, I can't see why spraying stuff from airplanes wouldn't work too.
Of course there are going to be unknown side-effects, and suddenly stopping it would be bad. But it might still be better than doing nothing at all. It's a shitty band-aid fix, but I would still take it over "hothouse earth" type scenarios.
I'm no expert in this subject and I don't have any strong opinions on it. The point of this comment isn't to debate one side or the other.
That said, your comment stands out to me to be self-contradictory and unscientific (by way of being alarmist and not backing up an extraordinary claim ).
> Unknown second order effects
This sounds right.
> Nearest real world success is continuous low volume maritime dispersal which has completely different dispersal dynamics than high-altitude bursts, and the continuous low volume maritime dispersal is non-viable
Since I don't know a lot about this topic I'll take your word for it.
> No way to undo it once done
This doesn't sound quite right, my intuition says more likely "no known way to undo it once done".
> If humans can’t perpetually release aerosols — and I mean perpetually, for the next millions of years — then the global climate “snaps back” violently within weeks
Wait... So, to undo it all we have to do is stop doing it? Doesn't this contradict the statement right before it?
> almost certainly eradicates all known life in the entire universe
This statement makes me suspicious of the credibility of the rest. This is an extraordinary claim and I think deserves way more explanation if you want to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you. It would be a lot easier to accept "decimates human civilization" than "eradicate all life on earth". Life is extremely resilient.
Read on maritime SO2, it was stopped because it's second order effects were too negative (mostly acid rain if i recall right)
The stuff about aerosols: The "plan" isn't that you dump a one time "treatment" of aerosols and then climate is reset. It's a continuous aerosol injection advitam aeternam to offset the warming - constant upkeep.
About comments on destruction of all life: the biosphere is so conplex it's hard to even grasp the gist of it. Global temp affects every level of it. Were this "treatment" be a little too strong/maladjusted, it could very well cause runaway mass death.
And we only have proof of life on earth - if we kill life on it, as far as we know, it's over for life itself. Can't be careful enough, and aerosol dispersal isn't that.
there is absolutly no possibility of injecting enough of anything into the atmosphere in such a way as the CO² cost of doing so dosn't cause more heating than the "airosol" reflects into space, which in itself is purely conjectural, there bieng, absolutly zero engineering paractice or experience to go from,.... well, not counting an unlimited supply of hubris
It's the aerosol levels that "snap back" (although that takes months to a few years, not weeks).
The effect that has on the climate depends on how much CO2 is in the atmosphere at the time.
If during the time we were doing the aerosol program we've also continued increasing CO2, using increasing aerosol releases to prevent that from causing warming, then when we stop with the aerosol we get that deferred warming over a few years or less.
We end up at the roughly the same place we would have been if we had not done the aerosols at all, except instead of getting from where we are now to them over several decades we get their over a few years.
Let's say that is 3℃ above current average temperature. A 3℃ rise over 2 years is a lot harder to handle than a 3℃ rise over 30 years.
Worse, if we started aerosols a lot of countries might decide that it is OK to keep increasing emission rates, so if we ever stop the aerosols were are looking at a rise to much higher than we would have had if we had not used aerosols.
Wow gee wiz, it’s almost like my original comment was: go do some reading.
Regarding the “no way to undo” and the “violent snap back”, we know the desire albedo effects dissipate and therefore require continuous maintenance.
However, these aerosols also cause hard-to-reverse reactions to other things like damaging the ozone layer and causing rain pattern shifts.
Yeah, most climate catastrophe scenarios are of the severity you describe. This one is not.
The entire point of SAI is to “save up” damage to the environment. So over 100 years of SAI and then stopping, you will incur 100 years of atmospheric and temperature changes within a few months.
And that’s only over a hundred years. If we depend on this and do it for a thousand years, now it’s a thousand years of damage applied in months.
This is far, far, far faster than any biological system evolves. Sure maybe some microbes that can survive in a gigantic range of environments could survive, but no, probably no complex life forms would.
> Wow gee wiz, it’s almost like my original comment was: go do some reading.
My understanding is that the whole purpose of HN is to discuss interesting topics with intellectual curiosity. "Go do some reading" type statements aren't really conducive. What would be more appropriate is recommending specific sources, or just taking a moment to elaborate since the whole point is discussion.
I appreciate your elaborations in this last comment. I don't appreciate the dismissive tone of your first line or your earlier comment.
> Regarding the “no way to undo” and the “violent snap back”, we know the desire albedo effects dissipate and therefore require continuous maintenance.
> However, these aerosols also cause hard-to-reverse reactions to other things like damaging the ozone layer and causing rain pattern shifts.
This makes sense. I guess where the logic breaks down for me is the conflation between the time it would take us to recognize the second order effects and stop the process, the amount of violent snap back that would occur, and the time to reverse the second order effects.
To be clear, I understand the risk you are pointing at and it is a significant risk, it still seems like you are exaggerating it.
It's either we do this for thousands of years (in which case the second order effects must be minor to make it sustainable for that long), or we do it for a short time because second order effects aren't sustainable.
It's the logical relationship between the reversibility, second order effects, and magnitude of snap back risks that isn't adding up for me.
All this said, as I've engaged in this topic and thought more about it, my current stance is that we shouldn't be introducing new things into the climate to address the consequences of other changes we have made. A safer approach seems like economically sustainable ways to undo the root-cause damage we have done. (E.g. CO2 capture sounds better than novel aerosol injection).
So I think we probably agree in principle, I just still find the comment I responded to originally alarmist and not very convincing.
> It's either we do this for thousands of years (in which case the second order effects must be minor to make it sustainable for that long), or we do it for a short time because second order effects aren't sustainable.
Just like building petrochemical-dependent societies!
Err, actually, there’s a third option: we put ourselves into a pickle.
Pretty much no hard problem would exist if the dynamic you’re describing were necessarily valid in general, and you’ve done nothing to demonstrate it’s valid in this particular case.
It is absolutely possible for the side effects to be hard to detect, widespread, hard to mitigate once detected, and for us nevertheless to be otherwise dependent upon continuing to produce those effects. See: fossil fuels.
But fossil fuels do not have the same snapback risk. This actually does.
> It is absolutely possible for the side effects to be hard to detect, widespread, hard to mitigate once detected, and for us nevertheless to be otherwise dependent upon continuing to produce those effects.
Oh I completely agree that it's possible, but there are some very material differences between those examples.
The purpose of fossil fuels is increasing access to energy and The downside is climate change. The purpose of the aerosol injection would be climate management and the downside would be unintended climate change. If it's not working as intended we are far more likely to stop doing it because of the direct relationship between the purpose and the issues.
Also, we got hooked on fossil fuels before we had the science to understand the long term consequences to the climate.
So to summarize there are at least two very material differences:
- fossil fuels were essential to reducing energy costs whereas I don't see a direct economic benefit to aerosol injection, just the purpose of managing climate damage. Am I missing something?
- our scientific understanding at the beginning of adoption will be materially different and we are a lot more likely to detect issues earlier on. Not certainly, but materially more likely.
To me the combination of these two things makes it a fundamentally different dynamic.
I am sure it sounds like I'm advocating for aerosol injection, but I'm actually just playing devil's advocate and trying to strengthen my understanding by pointing out the holes I'm seeing in your explanations.
If there's ever a specific source that you think would help fill a gap in my understanding I am receptive to checking it out.
> Wait... So, to undo it all we have to do is stop doing it? Doesn't this contradict the statement right before it?
It's not quite that simple.
The intuition that you're subtly relying on is the idea that the response or effect of one of these geoengineering treatments is linear. But unfortunately, that's not something you can assume about a dynamical system. In reality, the climate system can undergo certain types of hysteresis where "undoing" the forcing doesn't revert the initial perturbation, because you're suddenly on a different response curve. Probably the most famous example of this in climate dynamics is the way that the ice-albedo effect sets up a hysteresis in the trajectory towards a "snowball Earth" scenario. Apologies for the lack of links/references; Wiki has decent write-ups on this, and it's typically covered in the first chapter of a climate dynamics textbook.
The potential response to suddenly stopping a climate change mitigation strategy has a very well-popularized name: a "termination shock." In fact, Neal Stephenson used exactly this concept in his titular novel on the topic in 2021.
As a climate scientist, my mental model to better understand the risk of termination shocks and unintended consequences boils down to how fast the response of the climate system is. Marine brightening is "less risky" because the meteorological response to these interventions is extremely fast; a cloud-precipitation system will respond on the order of minutes to hours, and unless the intervention continues unabated, it will clean the air quickly, limiting the repsonse. Stratospheric aerosol injection is more complicated, but we have a very good analogue - very large scale volcanic eruptions like Mt Pinatubo. The response to these sorts of events is measured more on the timescale of 2-5 years, although knock-on effects (such as a shift towards more diffuse solar radiation reaching the surface, which has significant effects on terrestrial and oceanic biogeochemistry) could very much persist longer than that - and don't "snap back" nearly as quickly. A continuous, Pinatubo-like intervention would compound and introduce coupled atmosphere/ocean responses that could decade years or longer to fully play out. And that's _in addition_ to the near immediate (1-2 year) response in global average temperature, which would bounce back to most of the pre-intervention level very quickly.
These things are complex. There's a lot we don't know. But, there's also a lot we _do_ know. I would encourage anyone who does not have significant experience in climate dynamics to remain curious and avoid jumping to conclusions based on simple intuition; they're probably wrong.
Thank you for this response. Of those that replied to me, yours seems the most balanced and scientific, and I learned the most from. I wish more often people engaged on HN like you have here.
Given your expertise in this, I'm curious what your take is on CO2 capture, not in terms of economic viability, but in terms of climate risk...
For example, if we were to discover a process that removed CO2 from atmosphere and converted it into a product profitably such that there was an economic incentive/positive feedback loop to remove CO2.
My intuition is that if we removed the CO2 too quickly or too much of it we may have unwanted consequences, but if the rate was managed and we slowed down and stopped at a certain equilibrium, would this be a theoretically ideal way to address the problem?
First, what is "too quickly" with reference to CO2 removal from the atmosphere? At present, human civilization emits over 40 gigatons - or 40 trillion kilograms - of CO2 per year. And that increases the atmospheric burden by about 2.5 parts per million per year. So today, before you even start _reducing_ atmospheric CO2, you need to be sucking down at least 40 trillion kilograms of CO2. I struggle to imagine a scenario outside of total science fiction where that would be remotely possible.
Second, the equilibrium climate response to changes in greenhouse gas forcing take on the order of decades or centuries to realize. This is because the dynamics of the climate system are heavily buffered. For example, the ocean acts as a giant heat capacitor that slowly interchanges with the atmosphere. Were you to instantaneously halve the CO2 in the atmosphere, you'd likely see a pretty classic exponential decay in global average temperature (and other more nuanced responses); in the present climate, it's not clear we have already passed specific "tipping points" that would induce that hysteresis I described in the previous comment (in fact - one could read "climate tipping point" as a synonym for dynamical system hysteresis). Theoretically, one could try to "dial in" some particular equilibrium climate state, but it's not obvious over what timescale you'd have to intervene and what the cost of such an intervention would be.
The cool thing is none of this needs to be purely "theoretical." You could simulate all of this _today_ if you had a setup to run a global climate model. A "4X CO2" experiment where you branch from an equilibrium spin-up climate state and immediately apply a global quadrupling of CO2 has been a completely standard experiment as part of CMIP for over two decades. The opposite experiment is an established protocol for both the Carbon Dioxide Removal Intercomparison Project [1], which features an annual ramp down of CO2 at a 1% per year rate, and the Cloud Feedback Model Intercomparison Project [2], which features a more direct counterpart, with an abrupt decrease of atmospheric CO2 by 50%. There is a large body of literature discussing the results of these classes of experiments, but this is outside of my primary research focus and I can't turn you to particularly good papers off-hand. But they're easy enough to find.
We literally have not. We have tested low-altitude, low-saturation, continuous maritime dispersal.
You can go look up the differences in dissipation dynamics between that and what’s being proposed by the BS in Econ student and his growth marketing cofounder.
I don't now who the BS in econ student you're referring to is, as it's not the context of the article. We have had massive SO2 emissions from past stratovolcano eruptions.
Sure - there is definitely some gap between these natural processes and the artificial processes being proposed, but it is a narrow enough gap that it does preclude a fair number of second-order effects, compared to almost all geoengineering ideas that do not have such natural experiment equivalents.
Is it your impression that scientists should be considered the paramount experts on climate change policy questions? Even though their expertise is on the climate side and not the policy side?
What exactly does the science say that makes it definitively a bad policy choice, regardless of the fact that policy requires the consideration of political and economic feasibility?
I do. My question is whether you are willing to share the justification for your claims with the room. By your own account, it is trivial, no? How long does a Google Scholar search take to pull up an article for a person such as yourself who is versed in the topic?
And again, my question is: does the science show that this is objectively bad, regardless of bog standard policy considerations? For example, comparison with the status quo?
That’s actually not the question that you asked, lmao. You can scroll up to see the question you actually asked.
No, the science doesn’t show it is “objectively bad,” which is why I didn’t claim it was. I said it is not an idea endorsed by many climate scientists (which it’s not), and that’s mostly because of the numerous unknowns involved with perturbing a highly complex system, the expected irreversibility of many of its effects, and the path dependence of making us perpetually dependent upon dumping aerosols lest we risk a global climate snapback effect.
This is a summary of the current posture of the climate science community towards this idea, which is not “it is objectively bad,” nor is it something I can spend my time linking you to a singular paper on.
That is why my suggestion, from the very very top, was to get curious about why so few climate scientists support this idea for climate intervention.
Any good faith curious person should pretty immediately ask themselves this question to begin with.
It does not mean we need to listen to said scientists in and have them exclusively dictate policy, but if “climate community doesn’t like climate solution” doesn’t set off enough alarm bells for YOU to go open up Google Scholar, then you are not earnestly interested in the problem and your “just asking questions” approach here is actually just profound laziness.
Hmmm. Well, if you won't give us an article, perhaps I should provide us with one.
Here is an article by a climate scientist at Cornell and the head of a climate nonprofit, which is positive towards carefully scaled piloting of solar radiation management:
I am curious if you can cite an article that is responsive to the specific plans articulated here, especially the plans to help ensure safety by scaling slowly and gathering lots of data. Which is a normal practice in all reasonable policy rollouts.
It seems you've forgotten the thread here. I'm totally fine with experimenting with this idea.
The comment I replied to said, however, "this pretty much proves we can somewhat slow down climate change by spraying certain chemicals into the air".
No, it doesn't![†] In fact, your article mentions how much we don't know and how many risks there are. I.e. it is not proven. There are still unanswered questions of literally existential magnitude. That's why the consensus view toward this amongst people who think about our options on climate all day long do not see this as a great option, never mind a proven one.
Anyway, as for your article, merely breaking an experiment into 3 phases does not make it like a clinical trial. This experiment has nowhere near the controls nor the limited blast radius of even the riskiest clinical trial being conducted today. So that's my commentary on that. Seems naive and/or dishonest to compare it to a clinical trial.
† Technically of course it's possible to lower the temperature of the earth via aerosols. But this article/observation didn't "prove it," it's not new information, and it doesn't address the main reasons not to do this otherwise obvious idea. Which again is why the scientific consensus is not currently behind it
> Is it your impression that scientists should be considered the paramount experts on climate change policy questions
Yes.
We should listen to people who use evidence and reason to suggest the best course of action. We should listen to people who have spent decades of their lives studying this issue for relatively little reward other than trying to make the world better.
We should NOT listen to semi-literate goobers who gained authority by being popular with simpletons they manipulated into voting for them, mostly through graft and trickery. Those people's opinions should be regarded as being equivalent in value to the opinion of your weird conspiracist uncle who helped vote them into power.
So your belief is that scientists are the people of evidence, reason, and selfless dedication to goodness, while policy people who are not scientists are incompetent and despicable?
I don't know. Is such a black and white group based worldview plausible? It's possible I guess, but I find it hard to believe?
Decisions made based on science are more effective than those based on politics in almost 100% of cases. Especially when the subject of those decisions itself is science (the climate).
I wouldn't argue that all scientists are selfless that would be silly. I would argue that the average scientist is less selfish than the average politician, yes.
Examine the motivations. Few people go into pure science seeking power or money. Most or all politicians do.
That brings us back to the original question: does the science tell us what to do? Or is it your contention that the scientists tell us what to do, and whatever scientists say about a decision is presumably the right way to make decisions based on science?
If there is scientific consensus that this is worth trying, and that the risk/reward ratio works out then I'm in favor of it.
Right now though, my own limited guess would be that the risk/reward doesn't justify it. The climate is a chaotic system which exemplifies the concept of sensitive dependence upon initial conditions. We could easily kill millions or even billions of people with a little "whoopsie". It might be better to wait until the alternative is worse than that potential cost.
I would, of course, defer to a consensus of experts on the subject if such a thing exists. I am not one.
I mean... Cursor is the CEO's first non-internship job. And it was a VSCode Extension that caught fire atop the largest technological groundswell in a few decades.
The default assumption should be that this is a moderately bright, very inexperienced person who has been put way out over his skis.
Unfortunately for them, I've seen things go very very wrong in this situation. It's very easy to mistake luck-based financial success for skill-based, especially when it happens fresh out of university.
3x27” high-PPI displays in portrait orientation is the winner and no one does it
The center display is always actually centered. The short edge of a high-PPI 27” screen is wide enough for actual normal width browser or IDE usage, but now you get much more vertical real estate on that window.
Not nearly as much neck movement as an ultra wide and since the entire array is pretty square, the neck movement is way more balanced.
Good example because Liquid Glass is obviously preparing for the next paradigm shift in computing which will actually require/open up a lot of innovation on the UI front again.
Apple has the unfortunate burden of needing to shepherd millions of developers over to this new paradigm (AR) before it really exists, and so is shoving Liquid Glass onto devices that don't really benefit from it.
But in practice people are generally not happy about lots of new experimentation going on. By definition, most of the results suck. In retrospect we get to stand in awe of those that survived the evolutionary battle and say "wow browser tabs" and "wow pull to refresh" and forget the millions of other bad ideas that we tried.
> Good example because Liquid Glass is obviously preparing for the next paradigm shift in computing which will actually require/open up a lot of innovation on the UI front again.
Bruh, I just want to be able to read the text on my phone.
Yeah: most experiments fail and even the ones that ultimately succeed have rough edges.
That's my point about people swooning about the days of UI experimentation. There's a reason we don't do it once we figure out good solutions to problems (experimentation is hard and mostly bad).
Vista/Aero 2.0 was purely for aesthetics. Liquid Glass is obviously to enable UIs overlaid on top of uncontrolled content (i.e. camera input from the real world, or be used through fully transparent displays).
Apple really has to bite the bullet somehow here if they want to get everyone over to what they see as the next computing paradigm.
Much like transparent glass tablets in sci Fi movies, this looks pretty cool but I think makes text hard to read and gets old immediately. Is it really a compelling new paradigm?
I think if I had a really improved version of Apple vision I would still want non transparent windows that are clean and easy to read, not floating holograms with glass like distortion?
All important questions to answer and problems to solve.
It would be interesting if someone had a way to throw a couple hundreds thousand designers and developers into an environment where they have to find solutions so we could get a head start before the relevant hardware goes fully mass-market...
Right, which is why they're pushing the developer community to solve the problem on the iPhone before the next transition to a form factor that's totally dependent on this probably being solved.
I already have a physical keyboard! So what will a touchscreen do for me?
Turns out that interaction shift actually enabled a lot.
IMO any individual (like you or I) are unlikely to immediately conjure up every possible high-value idea that AR makes possible.
Not saying those ideas necessarily exist (though I suspect they do), just that your lack of imagination isn't evidence against them existing and being discoverable in the next 10-20 years.
In case you haven't come across the idea yet, this concept is all the rage among the VC thoughtbois/gorls. Not sure if Jaya Gupta at Foundation coined or just popularized it but: context graph.
Could be a good fundraising environment for you if you find the zealots of this idea.
reply