Can Geoengineering Fix Climate Change? | Hacker News Reader

Can Geoengineering Fix Climate Change?

nytimes.com

46 pointsdr_dshiv58 comments

We'll definitely need carbon removal of some kind. As the article states, we could shut emissions off today, but still deal with the effects of the cumulative emissions for centuries to come. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot that I personally can do other than to perhaps invest in some of these technologies.

The most important thing for the climate right now that most of us can do anything about is for anyone with Democratic senators to call their senators and express to them how important it is that climate provisions in budget reconciliation aren't watered down.

https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

Yes, I know the Democratic party is struggling to get its act together. But we have to make sure that come what may, the deal that gets struck is serious about addressing climate change. It may be a long while before the next time the US political system is even slightly in a state to develop meaningful climate policy.

I'm in favor of doing geoengineering research. We already are geoengineering, we've got 1.2C to show for it. We're just doing it very badly and with little understanding of what we're doing. The climate crisis is real and severe and it may be necessary to do something as terrible as spraying sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere for awhile.

The interesting thing about aerosols is they aren't particularly expensive. Estimates are $2B-$8B a year. Not pocket change, but not a major expense for a wealthy country. Also there's no technical need for global consensus. It seems quite possible to me that a country, say China, will decide to just go do it. That's terrible politically, and could be dangerous. But it may happen.

Here's a good book on the state of geoengineering, at least as of 2015: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26189312-the-planet-rema...

I've been beating this exact drum this past year. I recently had a discussion with a friend who is doing a dissertation on atmospheric chemistry soon. They agreed that solar geoengineering is an important thing to consider but informed me that injecting aerosols is a black sheep topic. It's highly controversial due to military cloud seeding operations, is banned internarionally, and mentioning it to the scientific field will get you shut down (it isn't funded). This isn't a surprising reality, but the game theory is that isn't just our decision. There are players that won't ask for consent when faced with an existential threat. We should be sitting up in our seats and making sure that if it's to be done then we have a bulletproof blueprint of doing it right.

"According to Keith and co-authors, “counter-geoengineering” could be effected through “counterveiling with a warming agent, i.e. injecting even more GHG into the atmosphere, and neutralising impacts with a physical disruption.”13

Counter-geoengineering represents the final step towards climate militarization and borrows directly from Cold War deterrence thinking. The authors are unfazed by this explicitly militaristic dimension: “Military action to stop SRM deployment by a powerful state would likely only be launched by another powerful state or states, potentially triggering a systemic war.”14

It is no coincidence that in the United States, geoengineering is supported by individuals and think tanks with ties to the military.15 At the end of 2017, a bill was introduced into Congress, which, if approved, would develop a strategic research agenda for Solar Radiation Management.16

The upshot of the US officially pursuing a geoengineering research agenda while simultaneously withdrawing from the Paris Agreement might be a strategic intensification of existing geoengineering research elsewhere, such as the government-led research programs in China and Russia.17 It is not only the deployment of geoengineering that has high-stakes geopolitical and security implications, but also the current pursuit of strategic technology development."

https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/geoengineering/geoe...

The easiest way to do "counter-geoengineering" would be simply lifting emissions limits, carbon taxes, etc., at least until the point where the economy is thoroughly decarbonized and we don't need to create pressure to emit less GHG, because right now emitting is cheaper than not emitting.

I think right now, any country willing to invest resources to fix our shared mess would at worst be met with some grumbling about unknown risks, but otherwise mostly with a "sure, knock yourself out", and possibly a silently muttered "thanks".

Counter-geoengineering is an interesting concept and long-term problem, but I don't think there are many powerful countries that don't want the planet to cool.

> Also there's no technical need for global consensus. It seems quite possible to me that a country, say China, will decide to just go do it. That's terrible politically, and could be dangerous. But it may happen.

it's not Chinese billionaires who are pushing their scary technofixes on talk shows.

https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-techn...

Well a Chinese billionaire who did would be disappeared

Carbon sequestration is one thing, but a lot of geoengineering ideas genuinely scare me. The side effects of clever attempts to cool the planet could easily be catastrophic. Yeah, the global climate "machine" is slowly heating up which could have irreversible effects over the next several centuries, but throwing wrenches into that machine to try to cool it down without the ability to precisely control it will likely have negative side effects much sooner.

What's the argument against researching it? Especially marine cloud brightening. I could imagine something where containerships were mandated to have devices that would loft salt aerosols in their exhaust. Investment in R&D seems wise.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening

> What's the argument against researching it?

It's a diversion. They're all stopgap measures with no real long term application. You can paint all the road white and add artificial clouds, if you continue to live like resources are unlimited and pollution isn't an issue you'll sooner or later hit another problem.

If we don't take care of the root cause we're bound to fail. Unlimited growth and exponential energy usage isn't possible in a closed system. All these new "green" economy, "green" growth, &c. are perpetuating the idea that we're going down the right path and simply have to tweak a few variables to go from "catastrophic failure" to "idyllic paradise"

I don't think people truly understand how fucked we are and how deep the problem runs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA

> no real long term application

That's just not being creative enough. Terraforming other planets to be more Earth-like is the most obvious long-term application, but there are certainly much more near-term applications for advances in energy, heat management, transportation, agriculture, ecology, weather control, etc.

> Unlimited growth and exponential energy usage isn't possible in a closed system.

Absolutely. Thank goodness we're not in a closed system!

If we had access to an unlimited zero-emission power source and as much matter as we wanted, I wager that some people would still say growth is unsustainable. That reveals in their hearts they're about controlling behavior, not fixing a problem.

> Terraforming other planets to be more Earth-like is the most obvious long-term application

If you live in a sci-fi book maybe. Colonizing other planets isn't a silver bullet, we can barely maintain a space station for 10 dudes, we're faaaar away from anything remotely close to terraformation. We can't even maintain earth even though it's been terraformed for us during billions of years, what makes you think we'd be able to transform a dead planet into something as good as earth

> Absolutely. Thank goodness we're not in a closed system!

Right, in the meantime 90% of every object you own is made of petrol derivative and we won't find that on Mars. Earth is 100% a closed system and we're not anywhere close to escape from it. After 200 years of industrialization we used most of the easy to get energy sources and fucked up the environment to a point of no return.

To state the obvious, in case we're talking past each other: terraforming other planets (i.e. Mars) is certainly not a way out of our climate problems on Earth. I meant that the tech to fix Earth will help us on other planets—a one-way tech transfer.

> If you live in a sci-fi book maybe… we can barely maintain a space station… We can't even maintain earth

In 100 years, people will be complaining to their representative that the solar shade is causing their petunias to grow sideway, having forgotten that said shade was science fiction back in 2021.

Also it's kind of unfair to say "barely" for the ISS—it's only the 9th space station ever and it's intended to be a giant experiment.

> In 100 years, people will be complaining to their representative that the solar shade is causing their petunias to grow sideway, having forgotten that said shade was science fiction back in 2021.

I hope your solar shade will take care of ocean acidification, deforestation, the end of petrol, CO2 levels, decline of soil quality, &c. Once again, you're fixing one of many symptoms and not the root cause. Closing your kitchen door because the stove is on fire will save you a few minutes but if you don't call the firefighters your house will still burn down.

I don't think the "tech will automagically save us in a future I won't live to see" works anymore to be honest, it's just too easy and morally dishonest, especially when the solution is not even remotely close to be technically feasible

> it's just too easy and morally dishonest

Again, we're back to this being less about fixing the problem and more about controlling behavior.

I completely reject this argument. Dismissing geoengineering downplays the seriousness of our situation, which is the last thing we want.

I'm not dismissing it, it's just that a lot of people seem to genuinely believe that throwing 3 windmills and a few artificial clouds will be enough to continue to live like we do in the west right now.

These things only work if we make drastic changes in all aspect of our lives and economy, they're necessary but not sufficient.

The reason geoengineering is necessary is because transition to renewables isn't good enough, even if it were implemented more rapidly. We would still stand to see exacerbating climate-change and temperature uptick. You're discounting geoengineering as though it's intended to be a substitute for green transition; it isn't. It's to save our asses.

There’s a kinda fundamental tension between “we’re fucked” and “we shouldn’t investigate this strategy because it doesn’t handle the root cause”. If it’s such a big issue, don’t we need to throw the kitchen sink at it?

What do you think about the argument in the NYT piece? He suggests the necessity for geoengineering even if/when we stop emissions.

https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-techn...

https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/geoengineering/geoe...

Yeah, i don't trust him either. After all, bill gates is also responsible for the COVID-19 vaccine nanobots and has yet to compensate me for that chain letter i sent to everyone i know.

hey you forgot 5g

China has a lot of people and they want to live like we do in the west.

The rest of Asia, and Africa too... and, spoiler alert: it won't be possible.

This is where the problem gets even more complex than a pure energy/resources/pollution equation, now you have a world wide humanitarian issue. Add climate change and environmental refugees to the mix and you're in for a very bad time.

Put it this way. Say we goof up with global cooling, just a bit over but not disastrously so (i.e. not existential, just expensive to fix). We just use more fossil fuels for awhile to offset.

This wouldn't work with a simple mask (blocking sunlight) and Jevon's paradox would be something to watch for.

This is a fantastic, well-reasoned article that I agree with. The danger of methane release, particularly methane hydrates, is beyond scary. We must use whatever tools we have in our toolbox to contain this, and geo-engineering is by far the fastest and possibly the simplest. I think what holds us back on this front is fear, fear that we don't understand the impact as dropping sulphur or salt into clouds is the mother of all environmental impact statements. But holding off one degree of warming? That's some insane impacts right there, which include the catastrophic danger of methane release, the raising of sea levels by 2-7 meters, and other unknowns such as the halting of the gulf stream, ocean acidification, coral reefs and god knows what else. These considerations must be included in COP26 and similar summits for serious consideration, starting now.

Silly hypothetical: Once we’ve stopped GHG emissions, say we Mr. Burns block out the Sun. But from space and just a portion of it. The idea being that you just reduce the total insolation by a bit and let orbital mechanics and atmospheric effects even it out across the whole planet.

If the blocker reflects all insolation, how large does it need to be today to get us back to 1990 levels?

I also kind of love the ridiculous idea of this regular artificial eclipse that creeps around the planet’s surface and becomes part of our normal lives.

If we settle at about double the preindustrial CO2 level, we would need to block about 8% of the solar radiation [0]. You could do that eg with floating structures of ultra-thin translucent sheets that reduce light intensity in their shadow. To maximize effectiveness you can put them in a sun-synchronous orbit, so it casts it shadow always at high noon [1].

However this solves only the warming itself, it does nothing about things like ocean acidification.

0: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11993-solar-shield-co...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit

Sounds a bit dystopian to me. Want to shut down protests? Just block out the sun - no daylight for you!

The word 'dystopian' rings a bell quite often when it comes to so-called 'climate change' saving methods...

It sounds even more dystopian if we do nothing at all.

I agree. Shutting down protests by making it dark doesn't even work? OTOH, letting most of the people on the planet starve to death seems actually bad.

Actually, humans doing nothing would be the best thing for the environment

Industrial energy consumption feedback loops will occur in any system we attempt to build to curb the issue

Any machines, chemicals, processes, vehicles, etc, that need producing to “improve things” will all come along with chewing up resources at scale to provide the industrial pipeline

The only scientifically acceptable path is LESS industrial scale economic activity: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210312-covid-19-paused-...

I'm not sure what "doing nothing" would look like if we don't mean "continue on our current path".

The entire set of Western values as cemented by the Cold War seems incompatible with "less economic activity". And even if we somehow shake consumerism, modern agriculture is essential to feeding more than 1B humans and requires a significant amount of industrial scale economic activity.

The majority of the time "buy/make this thing to reduce climate change" is a mere distraction. But there are a lot of resources that we can afford to spend, some of which are near-limitless if you consider predictable advances like asteroid mining. If we find ways to spend those resources to get us at least part way out of this mess, or to buy us time for societal change, then those are paths worth pursuing.

Look at the current political leaders and ask yourself is something--anything--is going to happen. It isn't going to happen.

Blocking the sun enough to black out a protest for any length of time kills us all. Most of the proposals are talking like, 1% of the sun. The whole sun for a few hours is way too much, and would do all kinds of bad things.

Besides, they already tear gas and mass arrest protests if the cops don’t like the protestors, that’s already pretty dystopian.

The "right" way to do it, is to put something big at the L1 Lagrange Point.

That is permanently between Earth and the sun, and you'd see it as a black dot at the center of the Sun.

Downside is it needs to be real big. 2000 km, according to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade

This paper discusses the concept: https://www.pnas.org/content/103/46/17184

I think they were targetting "stop warming" more than "1990 levels", but they estimated 20 million tons/a few million square kilometers.

Supposedly this will have a negative impact on crop yields. They are photosynthesis machines after all.

There are always trade offs.

This issue will NOT be solved without substantial costs.

Why not over say, mid ocean or mid-desert, in a fixed spot?

Orbital mechanics.

The efficient (and probably only viable) way to do this is a solar shade at lagrange point 1 (directly between the sun and earth). There's an unstable equillibrium point there were things can sit permanently with some (but minimal) station keeping. But you don't get to pick which part you're shading, you're always directly between the earth and the sun (or really the center of the earth-moon systems gravity, and the sun).

I see, thanks. I guess I was thinking of something that 'moved' with the earth, but that probably isn't realistic.

Could something be placed at such a point that then only blocked sun on the far north/south of the planet, near the poles?

Not directly. You could place something in an orbit where it only ever blocked sun at the poles I think, but it would spend the vast majority of its time not blocking sun at all.

I think we're going to see equatorial countries doing geoengineering on their own if things get bad enough. Stratospheric aerosols, for example.

> Lest you dismiss me, I founded Carbon Engineering, one of the most visible companies developing technology to capture carbon... The company’s interests could be hurt if geoengineering were seen as an acceptable option...

> ... Cooling the planet to reduce human suffering in this century will require carbon removal or solar geoengineering or both...

It's good that he discloses this in the article, but I guess I'd prefer if he had no financial interest whatsoever. It complicates his position, which I happen to fully agree with. What he's really saying, the cynical media consumer who has metastasized in me says, is that you should continue investing in his industry, and also invest in a related industry that will raise the tide he's floating on.

It's impractical to demand both domain expertise and total impartiality - even academic researchers have strong proclivities. There are no neutral parties, and this is clearly labeled as one person's opinion.

Granting the premise that there are no absolutely neutral parties, we can still agree that there are parties which are less neutral than others. Having a direct financial interest is a pretty hard line: for example, if the author was heavily invested in geoengineering companies, or had even been paid by geoengineering companies to write the article, I hope everyone would agree that his opinion was suspect. In this case, the author does not have a direct financial interest, but he has (I suppose) an indirect one, which is why I say I appreciate the article, but would prefer the same argument from coming another source, if I had the choice.

Carbon capture schemes are over sold and so-far under deliver to such an extent that these schemes serve almost no purpose whatsoever other than green-washing the polluters it enables to continue to pollute. Most of these schemes have good old coal, gas, or oil companies backing them. Their only agenda: delay the shutdown of their planet destroying activity for as long as possible. They spend billions lobbying for that. It's actually way more than what they spend on actual carbon capture. Planting a few trees here and there and going to ridiculous lengths to put a few tonnes of actual captured CO2 in the ground while they continue to release CO2 by the mega tonnes.

The total amount of captured carbon (since people started doing that) is measured in tiny fractions of a percent of what we dump in the atmosphere every year. The best form of carbon capture is leaving it in the ground and not removing it from there to begin with. It would be cheaper to pay these companies to simply shut down their business than to allow them to keep making things worse and then funding the cleanup of their mess.

Before we start hacking our planet, we need to pull the plug on doing the things that are actively making things worse to a far larger extent than we can feasibly clean things up. Why spent billions re-capturing a fraction of what we actually still put out every year? Much cheaper to stop doing that. That's carbon we won't have to put back into the ground.

Even better: instead of spending money on that, we could simply stop spending public money on enabling the active adding of carbon to our atmosphere. I'm talking about the collective tax benefits, subsidies, government sponsored 'research', the odd bit of war fare in the middle east, etc. that the oil and gas industry continues to benefit from. That adds up to being way more than we're spending on renewable energy or indeed carbon capture. The amounts are measured in trillions.

The pure expert is someone who devotes their life to expertise, but never gets paid to do work in that field.

These people tend to not exist.

Warming is not the only negative effect of the excess GHG emissions. Ocean acidification for example is another one. Blocking the sunlight will not solve that.

He pretty clearly argues we need to stop emitting, remove/store the excess AND geo engineer.

Due to the rampant worldwide inequality in income, resources, etc. there's no solution. The answer is an unequivocal "no."

"Philanthrocapitalists are driving massively profitable schemes dressed up as eco-friendly, pro-poor solutions to climate disaster.

[...]

Geoengineering comprises of large-scale controversial schemes to intervene in the earth’s oceans, soils, and atmosphere in attempts to manage the effects of climate change.

Many of these schemes are extraordinary—such as blocking the sun to stop temperature increases, increasing the whiteness of clouds to reflect sunlight back into space, and sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere with industrial-scale fans.

In order to have any impact on the climate, they would have to be done on a planetary scale so the potential risks are many: they range from destabilizing weather patterns, creating droughts and floods in Africa and South America, and acidifying the ocean, to polluting the atmosphere and locking the world into unstoppable management of the atmosphere.

Many proposals for removing CO2 from the skies require huge amounts of energy, chemicals, infrastructure, and land in size equivalent to several countries. Yet crazy, inequitable, and dangerous as geoengineering may seem, it is currently been embraced by polluting industries and increasingly some governments as a supposed “solution” to an off-kilter warming world.

[...]

Gates’ approach to climate change is to champion the technofixes that will enable the fossil fuel machine to continue pumping more oil. He is after all personally invested in the infrastructure that relies on their success.

It is also unsurprising given the pervasive technophilia of our time, that even influential personalities like Trevor Noah whom many look to for critical analysis on global issues, would so willingly engage with Gates, offering him a platform for his climate solutionism.

It would do well for us to remember that Gates is not a scientist, or a public health expert. He is a mega-billionaire who made his fortune avoiding government regulations and dominating competitors with monopolistic practices. His money is now being channeled toward a wide range of projects that are deeply unpopular among many in the global South.

Beyond climate technologies, Gates is investing in controversial “extinction” technologies of gene drives, a biotechnology tool to re-engineer natural populations. This is ostensibly being developed for malaria prevention, but is being vehemently resisted by social movements in West Africa where a Gates funded project wants to test out their tools.

He has also been the principal funder of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, an agricultural program started in 2006 which claims to be working for small-scale farmers but, in fact, promotes high-tech market-based industrial agriculture in Africa. A report in 2020 revealed that the program had failed in a number of ways. Rather than improving farmer’s livelihoods, many went into debt in order to pay for the high costs of commercial seeds and synthetic fertilizer.

[...]

Mainstream media has been all too willing to uncritically engage Bill Gates’ preferred image as a well-meaning nerdy philanthropist in a cuddly sweater—offering him countless opportunities to share his “expertise” and promote his technofixes. It’s time to look beyond the rhetoric of this billionaire philanthrocapitalist and listen to those who realize that climate change will only be “solved” when we begin by identifying its primary cause: capitalism." [1]

[1] Bill Gates and his technofix dream for the planet, https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-techn...

In general, we need to be skeptical of people who claim that the only real solution to climate change is enacting their preexisting political agenda. It would be very surprising if our preferences about economics and society just happened by coincidence to address climate change - but there’s a lot of biases that might trick someone into thinking they do. In other words, would this author tell you about a potentially viable strategy for addressing climate change within capitalism and investigate further, or would they presume something must be wrong with it because they’re already confident capitalism is bad?

It'll have too.

We need to, no way around it.

Or we accept the death of millions or worse, even billions.

The lefty/liberal god complex of wanting to control everything, even the planet is getting really boring. You guys need to get hobbies and stop making life miserable for people who think differently.

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