At this point I think we just need to face the fact that we’re going to have to darken the skies with particulates in order to combat global warming.
There’s just no way we’re ever going to get corporations to stop killing us with greenhouse gasses.
It’s not out of the question that we’ll see that as a means of managing overshoot. It’s a very high-risk approach: it means killing everything in the oceans with calcium-based hard body parts, and it means maintaining technical infrastructure for longer than civilizations last, which humans don’t have a track record of doing.
It also creates the possibility of industries lobbying to turn a temporary solution into a permanent one.
“No need to do anything about the environment anymore, we can just keep darkening the skies”. Like that Futurama episode.
In the short term, maybe. In the longer term though, I don’t think that’s likely, for a few reasons:
Reducing sunlight reaching the earth a bit to cool it down only counters one environmental issue, rising temperature. That one issue may be the most dangerous one, for us, but it’s isn’t the only one, and so even if we just threw up our hands and stopped worrying about fossil fuel use, there still would be worsening consequences to other environment issues, like habitat loss, ocean acidification, soil erosion, overfishing, microplastic and other pollution that is not just a greenhouse gas, etc. Dealing with these issues, or the problems resulting from them, would force environmental issues to stay in the public consciousness. Some may even be made worse by whatever method we use to darken the sky, and so there will be incentive to use that technique less if we can manage.
Certain mitigating factors, like renewable energy in particular, have already progressed to a point where they are more profitable than fossil fuels in some cases. This should inevitably lead to an increasingly large industry around those things. This would both slowly force a transition away from fossil fuels anyways for the sake of profits, and also lead to a large industry whom harsh regulation on fossil fuel benefits, due to that harming their competition. Such industry could lobby for regulations that benefit their interest just as other industries have.
Fossil fuels are finite. Technically all energy resources are on some scale, but fossil fuels are limited on a much more human scale. Eventually, the oil and gas and coal will run dry, and long before that happens, it will get too expensive to keep using increasingly difficult to extract deposits for energy. Thus, while we would in almost any scenario need to maintain a geoengineering scheme for a long time, we would not need to maintain it forever. Unless we decide to use it not just to keep the climate from warming but to also change it into something that benefits us more than the previous natural climate did I suppose, like some kind of mild terraforming on earth itself, but if we ever had climate engineering developed to that degree, we’d probably have enough experience at it and what it’s pitfalls and limits are that keeping it up indefinitely is no longer a problem anyway.
I don’t see how we can avoid it. Did you see the paper the other day about how new evidence shows that were headed towards a 10⁰ C rise?
Can you point me to that paper? Google only turns up results stating that if we burned all fossil fuels on the planet we’d hit 10°C
Sure.
Might want to make yourself a stiff drink before you read this one.
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/Documents/PipelinePaper.2023.07.05.pdf
Saw it when it came out. It’s well outside the consensus from people who study the topic.
Better to go to our extinction with at least a shred of decency than to last a bit longer and mess things up even more like that.
I think sciencing our way out of the mess our grandparents made for us is fair play.
While I don’t really think it’s wrong, I think there could be controversy that it might go wrong and we get really bad results. Heck, it was Snowpiercer’s plot for the apocalypse, as soon we suggest doing something like that expect a bunch of references to that movie.
And on top of this we have Russia attacking grain supplies at Ukrainian ports, which will no doubt exacerbate the problem. Anybody have any good Soylent Green recipes?
They don’t know about my tendie stash in the freezer 😏
