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Comment by lebuffon | Hacker News Reader

There have been recent discussions that we were doing that kind of geo-engineering accidently, in the Atlantic shipping lanes, for many years, when ships burned high sulphur fuel oil. The sulphur dioxide in the exhaust was shielding the ocean from solar radiation keeping the water temperatures cooler.

We changed the fuel regulations for ships in 2020.

The atlantic ocean near North America is now at all time high temperatures. Could be related. ?

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...

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Science says yes. Cleaner fuels inadvertently led to more warming. https://www.science.org/content/article/changing-clouds-unfo...

Well, the Anthropocene is basically defined by "accidental geo-engineering" mostly via releasing CO2.

Getting good at it is one way out.

Seriously. I personally feel like we need a bit more ambition as a species. Saying that nothing can be done about global warming except to reduce consumption and degrowth is—honestly— a losing message. If more people tried to solve global warming instead of grandstanding over it, I think we’d be a lot closer to solutions. We’ve already accidentally geoengineered the whole planet.

I gotta say, I find articles like this to be brilliant. Not easy to write. But this one was emotionally spot on.

The stubborn refusal to slightly inconvenience ourselves by foregoing inessential consumption is much more telling of our lack of ambition. Fucking up the planet and the non-human life on it is simply too convenient.

Making it an emotional issue is much too convenient. Many people are trying to actively ban science on geoengineering, that’s the context.

https://www.uu.nl/en/news/call-for-non-use-agreement-solar-g...

"The stubborn refusal to slightly inconvenience ourselves by foregoing inessential consumption" is the force behind of all scientific, technological and social progress. Without it, we'd be just another animal species frolicking in the forests and dying horrific deaths at the hands of other predators or pathogens.

I used "inessential" as a shorthand for "expendable when judged by some sensible measure of ecosystem and QoL impact", not in an absolute sense.

I.e. antibiotics, home heating or some forms of transport wouldn't be inessential under that definition, but giant hoards of factory farmed meat, large private yacht fleets or the insanity that is the status quo of daily work commute would be.

Now we're just another animal species frolicking in urban jungles dying at our own hands. Progress!

Progress indeed, because even ignoring anything else, we at least live much happier lives, and die much less brutally, than we did in the state of nature.

For now!

I do think that energy can be shifted much more rapidly to low-carbon forms such as solar and wind. That can be done. And I don't view it as "degrowth" to stop wasting so much energy on pointless endeavours such as e.g. oversized single-occupant petrol-engine vehicles for a daily urban commute to an office.

But even if we achieve that tomorrow, that just one of the needed wins, e.g. the seas would still be full of plastic debris and fertiliser run-off. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

We’ve already accidentally geoengineered the whole planet. We might as well understand what we're doing and steer it better. As well as, not instead of.

At these local scales (and altitudes) it’s often called solar radiation management.

The MEER is another example but for humans (with mirrors): https://www.meer.org/

As always these only buy a bit of time if not coupled with massive and swift CO2, methane, chemicals runouts, etc etc etc reduction, didn’t check if mentioned in the article.

Oceans are big, and water has a high heat capacity.

IIRC the temperature in the oceans is lagging by decades, so they'll likely continue rising even if we fixed everything

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