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You could make the same argument against medical care. "If we start healing the sick, people will stop taking care of their health".

That's not even considering potential side effects of therapies, medicines, etc. Any action has a balance of good and bad, both directly and indirectly.

And that's essentially what has happened. We are sicker than ever because we have easy cures. The problem is that modern medicine works on the symptoms, not on root causes. So the more we "cure" symptoms, the more sick we become, overall.

That's a lovely bunch of non sequiturs you got there.

Most primarily we're more sick than ever because of two things that have absolutely nothing to do with "curing symptoms":

* We're so good at curing diseases and conditions that used to be fatal that people get a lot older than they used to, and old people get sick far more often.

* Automation and increased productivity make a sedentary lifestyle possible and even incentivize it.

This is very, very much not true. Do vaccines or antibiotics "work on symptoms"? Do knee replacements "work on symptoms" of our bodies being unable to regenerate cartilage? The only superficial "work on symptoms" treatments I can think of are palliative cancer care or cosmetic treatments like fillers.

I overall agree with you, but a much bigger counterexample would be the widespread availability of painkillers

By what specific measure are we sicker than ever?

Show your work.

The problem is that modern medicine works, so people are alive rather than dead.

Usually you don't consider health insurance to be a moral hazard in this way. However, in healthcare, a moral hazard can occur when people use more healthcare services because the cost for them is low.

The difference is that geoengineering affects the commons. I don’t mind people doing things to their own bodies, I do mind them messing with my atmosphere.

Infectious disease epidemics certainly affects the commons.

Typically spreads through the atmosphere even.

Surely you could see a case where an unwell person coughs on you or around you being comparable, right?

Exactly.

1. Industrial civilizations have been using the sky as an open sewer for emissions. Before that it was soot and lead (TEL).

2. No quick fixes with solar shades, adding chemicals, or fractioning air gases (good luck with scaling that). Get the carbon out of the air by growing stuff and sequestering it at the bottom of the ocean.

Didn't the broad availability of the antibiotics made people stop caring about syphilis? It's easily curable now in most cases.

Kind of? I think people don't really fear it the way they might fear, say, AIDS, but they still practice protected sex regardless (because it's a good idea for many reasons). If people cared more about syphilis they probably wouldn't change their current behavior much. I think there might be better examples for this, like polio vaccines making people stop caring about polio (and then skipping the vaccines).

I think it depends on how much you think climate change’s temperature increase will negatively affect the world.

Since it’s impossible to reverse the predicted temperature change through behavior, if you want to limit or reverse the temperature change then stuff like geoengineering is the only way to limit temperature change while the world takes a century or two to go from industrial to renewable.

If the idea is to make everyone suffer for their sins, or fantasize about Armageddon, then we can prohibit all geoengineering.

There are difficult trade offs and stuff like changing the atmosphere to cool down has negative effects as well. But it may be better than 3 degrees warmer in 2100.

I think these ideas have been explored, pretty realistically, in recent sci-fi books by Neal Stephenson and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Every solution can potentially have side effects. My attempt to improve a work process by making a new UI could cause an incident, no matter how many reviewers and testers we have.

It'll never be the case that "all parties are working towards the same thing". So the actual choices are between continuing on the current trajectory or trying to change things for the better.

And honestly the track record of the latter (e.g. electricity, heart transplants, campfires) is more good than bad, even if it is always a mix.

It is really a difficult ethical dilemma. Reminds me of "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." from Jurassic Park. I think we need to continue trying to experiment and see what we can do and what we can't. However, there needs to be full disclosure, transparency (before and after) plus safety precautions and controls.

> If we start sending up sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere and it fixes the problem. What do you think we’re going to do? Stop caring about global warming entirely, and pump way more green house gases… why wouldn’t we? We can just fix it with more sulfur dioxide.

This is precisely why there are such immense amounts spent on geoengineering research - the big polluters do everything they can to keep making money out of fucking over the planet.

The solution to climate change is not waiting for some kind of "tech miracle" (be it carbon capture, sulfur dioxide, H2 electrolysis, nuclear fusion, ...), it is to get rid of fossil fuel usage.

> The solution to climate change is not waiting for some kind of "tech miracle" (be it carbon capture, sulfur dioxide, H2 electrolysis, nuclear fusion, ...), it is to get rid of fossil fuel usage.

These aren’t exclusive options and it’s odd to see them in opposition. Wouldn’t it make sense to geoengineer while we get rid of fossil fuel usage?

I expect it to take 50-100 years to stop fossil fuel usage. If there’s a sudden stop then I think the wars and chaos will result in people who pollute a lot killing off and stopping the people who don’t.

> Wouldn’t it make sense to geoengineer while we get rid of fossil fuel usage?

No it doesn't because even the perspective removes the incentive on fixing our unhealthy dependency on fossil fuels.

So what do you think we should do about rising temperature change and the harm that causes?

Even if we stop using fossil fuels, models still show a temperature change. What do you propose about that?

> such immense amounts spent on geoengineering research

That's interesting. What's the best-funded example of this?

I really like the idea of solar geoengineering. It works[1], and we appear to be facing a literal existential crisis in anthropogenic climate change.

[1] Mt. Pinatubo

Sounds like you really don’t like the idea of solving problems in general.

I mean, these arguments seem to apply to pretty much any problems.

>I don’t think we should be messing around with the earth until we can actually say that all parties are working towards the same thing.

"Unattainable perfection of human nature must be achieved before we can even try fixing something."

Xkcd already debunked this type of argument.

https://xkcd.com/1232/

That's not a "debunking". That's just people having different priorities, some want to work towards sustaining humanity on Earth right now, and some don't want to solve problems on Earth and are just excited with the next new thing. Maybe the latter are firmly believing that they are doing something beneficial for humanity, and that's OK. I don't believe so, but I don't claim to be right, and so should you.

It's impossible for all humans to agree.

I'll go first: murder, rape, war, torture, and genocide are bad.

This isn't sarcasm.

They're not saying "we've solved all problems" or "we understand everything". They're saying "all parties are working towards the same thing".

For example, "Acme Sulphur Dioxide Corp" may not have the same goals as scientists, governments, or the general population.

I know what they're saying, and it's equally unattainable.

Funny enough I have zero problem with exploring other planets. My problem is when we start messing around with the only one we have without truly understanding every possible outcome. And having one country do it while it affects everyone.

Funny enough, me either. But that's missing the point.

How long until we "truly understand every possible outcome"? 10 years? 15?

When you speak in absolutes, you don't even need to move goalposts. Since we will (obviously) never understand everything, if we follow your criterion then nobody could ever start anything.

This weird double standard is only ever applied to geoengineering, but never regular pollution. Based on the relative conversational noise levels, apparently it's fine that we pollute as much as we want without "truly understanding every possible outcome." (cue the "I sleep/Real shit" meme image)

No need to be snarky. I’m just trying to have a discussion.

I also never said I support pollution, but if I support going to mars I must because a rocket is a lot of pollution.

My main premise is I tend to think we’ve messed up so much so fast (in regards to the earth), I don’t think trying brand new studies that are based off words like “presumably”, “promising makes sense.

Wikipedia says

> However, as of 2021, there has been little research and existing natural aerosols in the stratosphere are not well understood.

And

> It is uncertain how effective any solar geoengineering technique would be, due to the difficulties modeling their impacts and the complex nature of the global climate system.

Do you think based on those words we should just be firing up balloons and see what happens?

I’m not saying at some point in time with studies done, and people agree we cannot proceed. But this doesn’t seem like sound science just yet. And I prefer sound science before messing with the environment.

No snark. I thought we were having a nice conversation.

> Do you think based on those words we should just be firing up balloons and see what happens?

> I’m not saying at some point in time with studies done...

How can we possibly gain enough scientific confidence is nobody is allowed to perform a single experiment (aka do X "and see what happens")?

This all sounds rational on the surface, but underneath it's a paralysis-inducing catch-22.

Asking endlessly for "more studies" is a classic delay tactic, with a long history of use (you surely don't intend that, but the effect is the same). Unfortunately we've run out of time for further delay.

Unpopular as it is to say, "move fast and break things" will lead to the least overall damage and death. But we'll never be able to show it, because of paralysis by these curious Reverse Good Samaritan / Reverse Hippocratic Oath attitudes.

We comfort ourselves that it's about stopping harm, but with the pervasive geoengineering-vs-pollution double standard the de facto rule is "first, attempt no good."