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Comment by teravor | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be too worried about it this century at least. if things look like they are going to get bad we will resort to geoengineering, and once we get a taste for it we will further optimize global temperatures to our liking.

perversely, global warming earlier than expected is a good thing [for us] as it will wipe away all meaningful opposition to geoengineering.

note how according to them having 50C days is a likely outcome. no one will tolerate this. sending the sulfur planes is assured at that point. you wouldn't even need to try and convince people with harvest yields.

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What we already have is uncontrolled geoengineering. Having said that, geoengineering might lead to geopolitical conflict. The current situation is making the tropical/equatorial area less habitable while creating overall benefits for the high latitudes.

    > geoengineering might lead to geopolitical conflict

I have heard of this but haven't heard a credible scenario describing it. if Europe or the US or China wanted to do it they could just be flying in circles in their own territory to deploy it safely (at the cost of some efficiency probably). only a nuclear power would likely dare to unilaterally do geoengineering.

it remains to be seen who will start the geoengineering effort, arguably Russia would benefit from global warming and so will Canada, so the US food supply should also remain secure.

I'm assuming that the most relevant geoengineering is worldwide stuff like blotting out the sun with microsatellites at L1 and dumping iron or lime into the oceans to increase CO2 absorption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...

We will develop geo engineering with our quantum computers, fueled by cold fusion reactors.

It's not like we just decide to solve something and then it just happens. There can also be serious outcomes of errors are made that are more serious than climate itself.

only if you want to do something really exotic/scifi. volcanoes have shown us how to do it relatively easily.

conservatively, "$18 billion per year per degree Celsius of warming avoided".

Reduce the efficiency of solar energy generation by 5-15%. Best build alternative energy sources before attempting geo-engineering.

That sounds like sci-fi and exotic and honestly quite crazy to put millions/billions/trillions of tons of more stuff into the ecosystem/atmosphere.

How often do you want to do that? Where? How? What's the effect on plants and insects and human?

I'm not convinced that geoengineering is feasible when we can't even seem to stop churning CO2 into the atmosphere. It's far easier to stop the fossil fuel burning than to scrub the atmosphere or set up huge space mirrors, so why do you think that we'll manage to fix the climate? Far more likely is a massive population die off and a collapse of our modern society. At least some people made a lot of money from burning our future.

It's far easier to start doing stratospheric aerosol injection than to stop burning fossil fuels.

However, we don't know the best substance to use and we certainly don't know what kind of side effects it would have. Historically, humans have been very bad at predicting bad side effects (e.g. cane toads in Australia) so I am sceptical, especially when businesses will be trying to make profit from it.

It seems to me like the start of a dystopian sci-fi story with humanity retreating from the surface as acidic rain destroys all plant life.

When the alternative is failing crops and hot bulb events - it will happen eventually. We did this for over 100 years btw., just as a by-product of burning fossil fuels. Cleaner technologies and air pollution regulations have unmasked real global warming scale in northern hemisphere.

Seems strange to go for the untested approach with unknown side effects instead of reducing and stopping the dumping of CO2 into our air. The best time to reduce emissions was 50 years ago, but the next best time is now.

I think we're currently in the situation that we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.

That's why we should be advocating for more research into SAI, but the reality is we will do it anyway when situation gets bad enough. Global warming has happened and will get only worse, if we ignore the possibility of geoengineering we risk losing not only human lives but also a lot of biodiversity after ecosystems collapse.

I'm not a fan of "we must do something, this is something,so we'll do it".

Wishful thinking, at best

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