Hacker News Reader

Comment by kgabis | Hacker News Reader

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".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com