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Terrible work, everyone.
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this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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I read a sci-fi novel recently where venezuela just went ahead and started dumping sulfates into the atmosphere without permission and the global north had a huge tantrum over governance and censured them constantly in the un etc, but nobody dared to actually stop them bc it was literally the only thing stopping the planet from turning into an oven 💀
Geo engineering is peak liberalism because it is only a rational fix and not a suicidal thing to do if you believe liberal ideas of infinite sustained economic growth and civilizational progress being linear march forward while ignoring collapse happens at least once a century with total collapse every few centuries. A ~250 year average on the churn of history. I find it nuts there are people who believe human history is a steadily march of forward progress and economic growth rather than a series of stumbles, falls, and lurches.
Am daytime drunk...
The big problem with all these magic geoengineering fixes that allow petrol states to continue existing (looking at you Venezuela, US and Russia too) is when we have a global economic collapse or major conflict, the industrial mass production of sulfur compounds to pump into the upper atmosphere (a costly economic activity at any meaningful scale, not a minor undertaking) comes crashing to a halt and things are 10 times worse than they would have been without doing it in the first place. Everyone pushing this suicidal bullshit always leaves out the caveat that the mass production and release of geoengineering chemicals into the atmosphere if done for any significant period of time has to continue for the rest of human civilization or everything dies. Geoengineering allows us to kick the can down the road (something human civilizations strive at) on abolishing petrol states and enables a level of atmospheric carbon that couldn't happen otherwise because the changing climate would have caused wars and civilizational collapse that mean a lot of people die, empires fall, but most life on earth (and humans) still survive.
The geoengineering ideas and even people on the supposed "left" supporting it is what has me at this point believing all life will be gone from earth within three centuries max. That rather than 2 to 5 degrees we are going to trigger a greenhouse warming cascade like happened on Venus (earths twin) that early on crossed an atmospheric water vapor and methane tipping point. I'm sure there will be more magic fixes that attempt to mask rather than undo or stabilize. Carbon cycle breaks forever, is done. Issue isn't with the technical fesability but human behavior to date on a macro scale, I have to believe geoengineering will happen while the petrol states continue increasing their rate of carbon production due to the breathing room it creates. US keeps pouring money into discovering new fossil fuel reserves around the world, US Dept of Energy keeps inventing novel methods to find and exploit previously unreachable fossil fuel ie how to extract shale oil and gas via fracking. Global warming will be masked for 50 years to a century or two until there is a world war or economic collapse, at which point that century of global warming happens in less than a decade triggering a rapid series of catastrophic tipping points (endgame ones being inverted carbon sinks, clathrate gun, water vapor, etc) faster than anyone has means to respond.
I did my postdoc on geoengineering, and I'm sorry to tell you that I basically agree with all of this.
What's your take on the weather being unusually bad this year and that correlated with the banning of some container ship exhaust products?
It's definitely a contributing factor. Ironically, the shift away from coal and toward natural gas--which is "cleaner" from the perspective of GHGs--is also a significant contributor, as coal produces way more aerosols. The bigger deal this year is probably the fairly strong El Nino that we've got brewing for the first time in several years (2017 was the last significant one). You can see the pretty significant sea surface temperature anomaly between the coast of South America and the central Pacific. Strong El Ninos tend to cause higher-than-normal global average surface temperatures, and strong La Ninas tend to cause lower-than-normal global average surface temperatures. Since we've been in a pretty strong La Nina phase over the last few years, the average temperature has (in a sense) been artificially low.
Gonna be honest - if the Great Dying didn't kill off all life on Earth, I don't see even especially reckless human activity doing it either. CO2 from that period went from 400 ppm to 2,500 ppm for reference, and Earth got like 8-10°C warmer then. Even shitty capitalist market mechanics would have abandoned carbon emissions at this point. If you want to turn Earth into Venus, you need to actively make it your goal. I mean burning every single last drop of fossil fuel faaaar after it's stopped being profitable.
As I understand it Venus is kinda locked in anyway at this point, halting all fossil fuel burning with nothing to mitigate the damage we've caused just roasts us faster because the exhaust literally blocks a bunch of sunlight
The copium is "new technology not invented yet might be engineered by China, who plans for the future beyond make line go up next quarter" since the alternative is we're all fucking dead and nothing any human being does has any point at all
It's not quite that bad. 2-3° is probably locked in (barring sci-fi technology like large scale carbon capture), but not the kind of runaway that would lead to Venus. You're right about aerosol masking hiding a lot of the impact, but that damage will be very front-loaded (since the residence time of the aerosols in the atmosphere is only on the order of months), and limited to probably a few tenths of a degree. Not nothing, but not enough for us to go Venus.
Could the old climate be restored over several generations using some large scare application of some future technology? After a rapid transition away from the carbon energy economy. I guess there is a lot of speculative coping in this question.
It'll fix itself over the next few tens of thousands of years, but obviously that doesn't help us at all.
From what I understand there isn't a model that suggests the earth becoming un-inhabitable by complex life no matter how bad we fuck up right now.
The sharks will be fine. They're older than Polaris. They got this shit.
Well, that's at least comforting. Any Venus model would probably push quite a few people into an existential crisis. Thank you for your response.
I used to very much share that fear until someone sat me down and explained that even in the absolute worst case scenarios we're not going to get a hothouse earth situation. Still plenty to worry about, but multi-cellular life will probably survive no matter what we do.
great, but I'm still worried about my life
I'm right their with you. I find the "eh, the earth will be fine" response many people have when i bring up global warming bizarre and upsetting. I am heartened that even if we're not able to mitigate this, there will still be life and with life, hope. A lot of what we do as leftists is trying to create good conditions for people who will come after us and never know our names. But I want to save this world. I want to stop the sixth great extinction. I want to try to save the amazon and the pacific northwest and many other places of beauty and splendor.
It is good that the world will survive, but the world that survives will be all the better if we struggle and mitigate the damage now.
Yeah. I kinda freaked out over the summer reading the posts. We just gotta live life and hope whoever comes after us learns from our mistakes. Maybe someone will build something from the rubble like Matt said.
In some ways yes, but in other ways we'll just have to find a new equilibrium. The extent to which this is fixable really depends on how many "tipping points" we've passed over. Lots of systems in the global climate are (at least) bistable, meaning they have at least two dynamical regimes that they can settle into--think two bowls separated by a high wall, with a ball rolling around in one of them. Since different stable states exist, if we push the relevant systems far enough, they'll "snap" into a qualitatively different state, and then won't return to their original state even if the forcings all return to pre-industrial levels. There are a number of big ones that we should be concerned about, but the global thermohaline circulation that drives ocean currents is probably the most obvious and urgent one. With enough of a disruption, the gradients of temperature and salinity (and thus changes in density) that keep the water stably circulating in the oceans can and will either disappear or change enough that most significant currents cease. It's hard to overstate how catastrophic that would be, and if it were to happen no amount of negative emissions would restart it in the short term.
For other systems, rapidly reducing the GHG content of the atmosphere would (almost) certainly work. That's part of why liberals are so gung-ho about carbon capture and sequestration technology research: it would let us rewind things without having to change much about our global economic system in the immediate term. So far, this is as sci-fi as saying "time travel would help." Capturing a trace gas (remember that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are on the order of 400 parts per million) is thermodynamically challenging, and we don't have anything like the technology to do this at scale for a reasonable cost of energy yet.
So the liberals are selling us a panacea that does not even exist to solve problems that should have been addressed a long time ago. Idk, I feel exhausted saying that. I need to start learning a lot more on this topic myself.
Thank you for your informed responses. I appreciate you helping all of us here understand this grave issue which is criminally neglected by the capitalist powers that be.
Fuck
Ministry for the future? I should get around to finishing that
No that was India in the book.
Drop the title!
what was that book called?
unfortunately it's just mentioned in passing, I pretty much described all of the detail you get