Climate geoengineering via stratospheric aerosol injection
deeplearning.ai
deeplearning.ai
Direct air capture is not looking promising. I bet there will be so little action that shit will hit the fan and we will need some kind of geoengineering. An eternally dark sky like in the Matrix? Hopefully not. But perhaps targeted control of the weather to prevent the worst droughts and storms. And a massive, forceful change to the planet to offset the additional warming.
Please someone convince me I'm wrong?
The rate of increase in CO2 emissions has seemingly slowed down dramatically. Emissions increased ~5% over the last decade while the decade before that was 32%.
On the surface increasing emissions is still terrible, but as oil, coal, and natural gas are only getting more expensive and the alternatives get cheaper. Many of the worst estimates are no longer relevant and people in 2070+ might not need dramatic measures to deal with climate change.
On one had that’s serious money on the other hand it’s not enough for tax payers to notice the expense.
For example the EU subsidized and encouraged diesel engined cars greatly, to reduce CO2 emissions, but the increase in diesel pollutants, other than CO2, over and beyond that of gasoline engined cars, likely decreased average health in urban areas.
Now with Euro 6 they are correcting the problem but the damage has already been done to at least one generation.
One such improvement people can make without government intervention is to stop eating meat.[1]
I'm not so optimistic that this is going to happen on a large enough scale, though, to make a difference. There's too much culture, habit, and identity wrapped up in meat eating for most people to give it up any time soon.
[1] - https://www.sciencenews.org/article/food-emissions-data-diet...
The Permian leak is listed at 55 tons per hour; that's less than a half a megaton per year. The EPA says one ton of CH4 is equivalent to about 30 tons of CO2, so the Permian leak is equivalent to 15 megatons CO2 per year. It sounds like a large number, but annually the world emits about 50 billion CO2-equivalent tons. That means the Permian methane leak contributes by 0.03% to the total worldwide greenhouse gas emission.
I think it would be a good idea to establish a means by which people who belong to various different tribes, both domestic and global, can communicate with each other and agree at least in principle (subject to various conditions, etc) to being open (in principle) to the idea of setting aside their differences and maybe cooperating with each other on genuinely/plausibly dangerous issues.
This would be step 1 in a multi-part long term strategy.
> An eternally dark sky like in the Matrix?
The Matrix is chock full of ideas that would have substantial utility in such an undertaking. And that's just one piece of art from one particular domain. Imagine if one brought to bear the power contained within all art.
Earth has been much warmer in the past -- IIRC in the time of the dinosaurs we had temperate forests around the poles.
Coastal settlements will need to be relocated. But robots can help with that too. Autonomous construction robots seem like an easier problem than self-driving cars.
There's also the political challenge of resettling the world's population away from the equator and closer to the poles. I'd like to see a normalization of countries selling off huge areas of land, the way Russia sold Alaska to the USA in 1867. Imagine Canada selling part of a province to India to resettle folks who are overheating there.
Charter cities like Próspera are also very cool: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera Balaji has some interesting ideas related to what he calls "network states": https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/07/13/networkstates.html
Imagine if Antarctica became a UN-administered zone, where any group which wanted to found a new country could claim a plot of land just by paying a Harberger tax to the UN. The tax could be used to fund a global basic income. So everyone would essentially have a choice between staying closer to the equator and getting a subsidy to help them afford AC, or living in Antarctica where it's nice and cool (but having to pay higher taxes for the privilege).
Why fight when you can innovate?
But sure, let’s blast fucking aerosols into the atmosphere. Fucking sad.
Also, and more to the point, if these sectors have such a large carbon footprint, then where did that demand come from? I don’t buy that cutting back on animal products or flying aren’t scaleable. Our global culture isn’t inexorably evolving to flying helicopters to work and eating meat 4x a day with a tall glass of milk, so why aren’t we talking about behavior change more in the West? We’ve always had a choice, and we know better now that these choices and path dependencies are destructive.
Furthermore, companies that produce these products are simply providing for demand. It’s silly to lay the blame at their feet when they’ve no incentive to stop.
you're not thinking systemically enough - the incentive system is also a choice
there's a reason big oil were the original champions of plastics recycling as a marketable non-solution that focuses on individual/peer consumer habits over anything that would challenge their position. this neoliberal approach ultimately ensures their power remains.
these replies are saying to take the solutions available to us individually, but you're promoting individual actor conscientiousness over organizing to effect systemic change at scale. I'm not saying only corps/govs have the power to fix this, I'm saying that by taking an individualist consumer solution perspective, we let corps/govs off their leash because individuals can't stand up to their level of organized power.
While the whole “carbon footprint” thing was clever misdirection by the fossil fuel industry, there is still value in examining what aspects of your life are causing problems for the planet and trying to rectify them.
To say that the solutions to climate change are only large scale and available to massive corporations and governments is as foolish as to say that they are only small scale and available to individuals.
Whatever solutions are available to you, wherever you are in life, do the work to see them through. We need all the help we can get.
Just living somewhere with heat and electricity and water, posting on here is adding to CO2 emissions, unless you're doing it from a 100% renewables-powered off-the-grid location. Even if you are, the messages you send onto the internet are routed by entities that consume fossil fuels.
Every building you enter, all the food you eat, every product you benefit from has been made with fossil fuels.
If you seek any goods or services in today's world, if you use any aspect of industrial civilization, you're contributing to the warming of the planet.
And sure, a big part of emissions come from industry. But in the end, industries create products to be ultimately consumed by people. So, by changing our behavior we can also change industry. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t also hold producers accountable and pressure our governments to set the right incentives. But just saying we as consumers don’t have any power to change anything is wrong.
I don't like the idea of pumping stuff in the atmosphere either. I would rather make a space sunshade, although I can't say I understand the economics well enough to compare it with sulfur aerosol. Either way, we're not on track to control the climate right now, even if consumers do some nice things. We need more time.
That situation will remain exactly the same if we buy more time with geoengineering. But at least with geoengineering, hundreds of millions of people might not be driven from their homes by literally unlivable heat conditions in this century.
If those people want to live in your backyard, does geoengineering sound a little more appealing now?
My impression from the recent polls I've read about was that this is generally not true anymore, specially over here in western Europe after the summer we had.
> That situation will remain exactly the same if we buy more time with geoengineering. But at least with geoengineering, hundreds of millions of people might not be driven from their homes by literally unlivable heat conditions in this century.
This is just witchcraft. There's no way back from it and it's be a petty excuse to keep doing business as usual and generate profit. And keeping a stable climate isn't the only ecological challenge we're facing.
> If those people want to live in your backyard, does geoengineering sound a little more appealing now?
Absolutely not. And "those people" are already crossing the mediterranean ocean by thousands to live in my backyard.
This is not only about morality and profits. It is also about our actual Earth and what happens to it. It's still going to heat by several degrees even if humanity has the enlightenment that many people here seem to dream will happen soon.
We almost all profit from fossil fuel. Our entire lives are built around it and defined by it...
I don't really believe there will be an enlightenment, just a forced adaptation. And this will happen less quickly if we believe there is an easier solution than changing most of our ways.
We have countless examples of these. Did massively improved engines make car consume massively less petrol? No, they mostly got bigger. Improving farming? Just eat more meat and waste more food. Capable of building insanely dense but livable neighborhoods? We've never expanded our cities horizontally as much as now for cars and single family houses.
Getting a better control on the environment will just enable us to trash it more... just like usual.
Aside from that, while I agree that people have historically often used technology to consume more, some of your examples seem at odds with facts, especially recent developments:
1. Fuel economy has been improving for the last few decades https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/09/20190930-sivak.html
2. Birth control has greatly reduced fertility rates. This suggests that your fellow humans may not simply be mindless maximizers of resource utilization, eager to exploit every technological advance to increase their consumption. They want sustainable lifestyle like you, and will choose it if it isn't too difficult to implement.
People want to live sustainably, but will struggle to adapt on a rapid timescale dictated by the planetary greenhouse effects. Giving more time will provide a better result.
That's not always true.
My neighbours are true eco warriors. They have planted literally hundreds of acres of trees and they live a carbon negative life. Granted, they are unusual, but it is not true that everyone is contributing. Just 99% of us.
Carbon accounting and the real world aren't quite the same, and the bias is always toward underestimating someone's CO2 footprint and overestimating the impact of mitigations.
For example, who will guarantee that releasing sulphuric acid into the sky won't trash the monsoon and kill billions of people? The number of unintended consequences we could suffer as a result of this moronic idea boggles the mind.
This sounds like back in the 90s, when abstinence only advocates said if you can’t stop having sex then you deserve to die of AIDS, so we should stop wasting money on cures and better treatments.
People deserve a chance to live, no matter what their lifestyle.
I disagree, though I'm aware it's perhaps an unusual position to take and I would selfishly fight tooth and nail if my family were threatened.
There will never be a human invention as wonderful as the natural world that we are vigorously destroying. To me, we don't deserve to be here if we continue to destroy it. We are not special, just one species amongst millions.
We’re a decade or more away from peak emissions with best efforts, and that date will be pushed deeper into the future if there is a global recession.
Stratospheric aerosol injection needs more research as it is one of the only viable ways we have to stave off global catastrophe.
Squirting acid into the sky is pie in the sky. Nobody knows if or how this might go, because it's impossible to test at less than planetary scale. And again, we come back to the problem. Why does one country, mad person or whatever have the right to decide to spray this toxin across a whole planet?
This is exactly the same faulty thinking about tech solutions that have stalled progress so far, and led to billions wasted on carbon capture tech.
Stop emitting CO2. If we were prepared to reduce our comfort and convenience, stop looking for constant 'growth' and start to plan for a sustainable future, we could turn things around really quickly. But we keep kicking the can down the road, and electing politicians who pay lip service to tackling the crisis.
You know how we know we could do this? Because our pandemic response was unparalleled and comprehensive by and large. And it reduced emissions as a by product by 17% or so.
Geoengineering is just another egotistical pipedream from the tech brigade.
Just cut emissions, man, it’s that easy! How many bong rips before you typed that out?
> The first thing we need to do is drastically cut our emissions every single way we can, as fast as we can. This is not comic pie in the sky, it's realism.
These two sentences. Round one. Fight!
We can’t even agree to do this in the United States. Russia doesn’t agree that it’s necessary to do this at all. To say you’re handwaving away the challenges here is the understatement of all time.
The answer to your question is - I never said it would be easy. That's fairly obvious. We cut emissions during the pandemic on a global scale. We survived. Possibly with the right social and political will we could do it again?
I don't have any answers to this, I'm just suggesting that we try the obvious before reaching for the crazy stuff.
No matter what happens, whether we squirt sulphur into the sky or not, we're going to have to reduce emissions. We can't keep pretending it doesn't matter.
Do you think that a political leader from there will ask global permission before doing this? Do you think a political leader from there could make any other decision when the society is facing an existential threat?
It's naïveté. This needs to be researched much more than it has been because the illusion of choice will be gone sooner than you think.
Whatever model the AI is fed is going to contain an enormous number of assumptions many of which we have a very limited ability to scientifically test and validate prior to using them as inputs.
If the inputs are faulty if doesn’t matter how smart the AI is it’s going to produce inaccurate results.
Can theoretically reflect Sun light? Of course yes. On scale? NO. We can't build a multi-million square km mirror in space, we can't spray gazillion of tons "powder" of any kind in the sky and so on.
Oh, surely when we start to experimenting fly most people say "that's impossible, a childish dream" BUT such experiments do take scale into account. Even in the recent past with experiments like lowering the sea level in the Mediterranean or re-fertilize again central Asia (also ignoring the vast amount of salty land there) was reasoned on scale and dropped because at scale they are simply absurd.
Having loss too much culture in reformed education systems to produce Ford model workers "useful idiots" in the ancient Greek language we are now unable to distinguish between "crazy but perhaps possible" and "childish dreams".
All the points listed in favor of deeplearning in this article only point towards the need for heavy calculations, but I would say it's not deeplearning that's required, but instead very precise physical simulations.
For example to help the deployment of drones to spread the aerosols, I don't think that you can model winds better with deeplearning than with current models used by meteorological agencies. Or, at least, it does not seem to me the bottleneck here. Or, OK maybe there will be breakthroughs that would replace physical simulation-based meteorology by deeplearning models, but I don't think it is helpful right now, or you would need to do a lot more explaining to convince me.
But 45 years from now we’ll be smart enough to reverse all the damage we did for almost a century.
What if someone created a mobile climate response team that dealt with floodwaters by injecting them into the air as aerosols? Kill 2 birds with one stone.
It's even possible that you could do it as a for-profit, by charging municipalities for the service. (For profit means more scaleable, easier to get capital)
I don't know what sort of approach might be feasible here. Could do something really imaginative like an inflatable tower with tubes running along it and pumps at the bottom. Or drones as described in the OP.
The author wants the scientists to be involved in the coming COP27, as if they were not already. As if no technical anf scientific solutions had been provided to climate change!
Plenty of solutions have been found already. We absolutely know how to resolve this issue on the technical aspects ; this doesn't mean that no research and development is needed: we can and will come up with even better solutions.
But we already have the solutions. No technical challenge here, just a political challenge: decide how to share the costs.
Because we are lazy and don't understand what game theory tells us about the current stand-still. This is a game where each country would benefit the most if it succeeds doing the least - as long as the others do enough.
Hence the need for a political COP27: the only issue is to find a consensus and start acting promptly at the required scale (which is a big one, but much smaller than WWII for example on the economic side).
Geo-engineering is a quest for the silver bullet.
As if technology had ever provided a solution to a political issue... It hasn't. When it looks like it has, it's always because the policies are embbeded into the technogly: cf "code is law" for example.
All the people pushing this idea truly dont understand the implications, think they are smarter than they are, and think this is the easy and obvious solution.
Geoengineering can be studied like anything else. If applied, it will have negative externalities like everything else. The few millions spent is a small bet on something that could have a big impact.
Or was your plan just to shoot down every solution proposed and to do nothing at all instead?