We should not let the Earth overheat

The article mentions that:

> Stratospheric SO2 rains out of the atmosphere after a year or so, so unlike CO2 emissions it is relatively easy to control the dosing and the magnitude of the desired effect

Is this not true? I'm curious about where I can read more about research about the lifetime of atmospheric SO2.

Edit: The best source I could find about stratospheric SO2 was based on measurements after Pinatubo at

https://www.osti.gov/pages/servlets/purl/1439705

(https://doi.org/10.1002/2017JD027006)

I see that the concentration declined to roughly 1% after 180 days (Figure 7). Volcanic aerosols seem to last a bit longer but seem to go back to background around 4 years (Figure 10).

I don't think carbon sequestration is even in the race at this point...

If our goal isn't zero emissions, our goal is missing the mark at this point.

always have been

Terraforming Mars. Marsoforming Earth.

One of the big reasons I support off world colonization is because that's probably the only way people will believe that the atmosphere is a thing. Similar to how people really didn't believe there was an "environment"[1] until "Earthrise" in 1968.

If they see "atmosphere" killing other people, all the time, on TV, because someone goofed the gas balance in the Muskdome, then they'll maybe crank up their critical thinking skills.

Also, voting for Space Umbrella. And whoever terraforms the Earth gets to charge rent - financial people need to think about that one.

[1] Like, "closed system" environment, not Walden Pond "environment"

I mean it's not exactly in the moneyed's interest if crops start failing and their valuable real estate is permanently underwater.

It can be also crowd funded!

(Not that I think terraforming earth is a good idea at this stage, though)

There are countries other than the U.S.A.

Nuclear winter can reverse global warming. We can sacrifice a country to save the planet.

You are thinking too small at the level of a penny wise miser.

Making things profitable just requires policy changes. Just look at the IRA in the US right now incentivizing all sorts of things that would otherwise not be that profitable right now rather successfully. Whole industries bootstrapping themselves because of it. And the best part is you can fund it through debt. There was no tax raise to pay for the 1 trillion $ IRA budget. And it's not a zero sum game of course. It's not a hand out but an investment with a positive return on investment. The investment is long term profitable.

Terraforming is going to require large scale investments and there will be plenty of opportunity to profit from that. All it requires is some policy. How do you think people got to the moon? Frugal people counting pennies or people just going for it and moving extreme amounts of funding to make it happen? History is full of moonshots.

We need to implement a global market for CO2 emissions. If the supply of rights to emit C02 is low enough (e.g., negative), the price will raise so high that these people can make a profit of removing CO2.

I used to think this, but if you look at the history of environmentalism, many unprofitable changes have been made (e.g. CFC production reduced, leaded gasoline replaced)

This is a dangerous idea to spread, because if you truly believe it then the only solution is dismantle capitalism. The irony is that regulated capitalism in the West has been the most effective at reducing emissions. The places with the worst emissions have the same economic incentives, but different policy (such as China).

> "The people who can afford to pay for this can also afford to avoid the worst effects of climate change, probably much cheaper while throwing the rest of us under a bus."

They think they can avoid the worst effects of climate change, but I'd wager they're shockingly wrong about that. They'll more likely only delay their misery for a while longer than the rest of us.

You're 110% right that they'll surely try their very best to "throw everyone else under the bus" though. They've already show their true colors pretty clearly. No reason they'll suddenly get their shit together and grow the hell up now.

This is a reflection of the political policy of the day. Economics and capitalism being political policies dressed up with quant models and endowed academic chairs to rubberstamp the distribution of money.

This is not universal physics.

Same for the "Limited Liability Corporation", protections from Ex Post Facto law enforcement, and the like. Political constructs.

Should people get pissed off enough, they won't matter. Now, the rich are good at not being the focus of the angry mob ... usually.

But the point is, the rich are playing games with the core stability of the world, to say nothing of the viability of the interconnected web of species on the planet. It's frankly pretty nuts.

The rich are insane. Sane people would not be doing this.

$20/ton CO2 for 1T tons is $20T. Paid over 40 years, this is less than the interest we in the US pay on federal debt.

Once you're talking about millions a year rather than billions or trillions I don't know if that's true. A government (or a group of several) could decide to do it because their citizens would benefit from a reduction in warming.

Whether there would still be appetite for the larger price tag of carbon sequestration once there was a band-aid for warming is another question though.

I don't agree with this line of reasoning. I would not expect a random commercial company to decide to do this on their own. I would expect the population and politicians of a country to realise this is what needs to be done, and to put into law public-funded initiatives to work towards these goals. In the non-US country where I live, we already do this with sustainable energy sources and vehicle types. We tax usage of fossil-fuel vehicles, and give subsidies on using 'clean-energy' vehicles. We execute policies on windmill farms and solar panel areas. We also publicly finance e.g. the common shared road network of asphalt, without having an owning commercial company directly profiting off our road network. The only reason I can see this would break, is to the extent public government law turns into a lobbying nightmare, where all law-making is reduced to paid-for-by-lobbyist initiatives. Outside the US, that is not where we are yet (though I am aware of the risk - money and power perpetually will corrupt). I don't see the problem as mainly a billionare-problem ('this is not a problem for billionaires.') Instead, I see the problem with countries that disagree on these policies - country A spending 100s of billions to fix climate issues, at the same time country B ignores it all and behaves like, well, the US and Russia.

So if

Go to the moon, man. Problem solved.

Well actually no. Heating is easy, all you need is a power source and a resistive wire. Cooling is hard because you need to radiate the heat away. If earth became 100°C it will be easier to live on Mars.

He's not advocating injecting smoke or ash into the atmosphere.

> the cretaceous saw co2 at 5,000-15,000ppm

Is this correct? The data I can see shows more like 1,000-2,000ppm.

Yeah, the earth has been cooling down and heating up throughout the history.

Yet, the spike in Co2 levels just after the industrial revolution is unlike any spike earth has ever had naturally. The Earth has never had this drastic changes to its climate as it had in this span of time. Earth's climate has always been changing, but the change was gradual. 200 years is just a blink of an eye in the context of a planet - changes as drastic as we observe today, have never taken place naturally before.

Previously the Earth was struck by a giant asteroid, causing a mass extinction event that more or less leads directly to the rise of mammals. Therefore, it's no big deal for us if that happens again.