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Comment by datameta | Hacker News Reader

To geoengineer or not to geoengineer, that is the question. Can we build models that six nines assure us of a small stable improvement that stays near linear behavior, or asymptotic better yet?

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My prediction: a country which has the political and technical ability to do so and is located somewhere where global warming starts being a major threat to it. Likely candidates: India and neighbors (wet bulb events depopulating large area) or China (inundation of the biggest population centres). This country eventually says "fuck it" and just does it, international opinion be damned. Everyone else in the world will proceed to performatively freak the fuck out. But, they'll all be watching closely and if it works, they'll all be doing it fairly soon. Again, if it works, in the eventual biopic, it'll be mentioned as an aside that they weren't 100% sure if the atmosphere would be destroyed or not, but they forged ahead.

The good news, since an internet forum's commentariat opinion isn't relevant to whether it happens or not, is that humanity is a couple of teratonnes into a 200-year experiment of many kinds of atmospheric modification and nothing critically non-linear has happened yet. Though we certainly don't have many sigmas of confidence that it isn't going to go non linear (but in the "hot" direction) at some point!

We're even doing a cute little cross-over trial specifically on atmospheric sulphur dioxide injection (just entered the second placebo phase)

In the scenario that China and India barrel into atmospheric experiments, they may be able to secure group funding from the larger island nations with high levels of buildup near the coast. I think you make a good point that we are centuries into an experiment (or longer if one wants to group all anthropogenic change like megafauna extinction) and I think that people living in places that have a high coastline to area ratio will be more likely to see it this way - perhaps even considering themselves primary subjects.

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