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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.