Jokes aside, even if the technology works as intended (and that's a big if), the opportunities to abuse it are plenty and absolutely scary. I know that 'government weather control' is currently a realm of fantasy and conspiracy theories. But sunlight is the driver of climate and weather on Earth. Changing the incident solar power over a large enough region even by a little bit with respect to the rest of the world can bring about massive differences in weather patterns. While these particles are meant to spread around the world, it can bring about this effect if its degradation/dispersal times and release point into upper atmospheric winds can be engineered. It isn't as difficult as it sounds. And given that these people aren't willing to address the primary drivers of global warming - massive production of CO2 and the ever-increasing wealth inequity, there is absolutely no reason to believe that they won't misuse and abuse it to their own financial advantage. In some ways, it's actually worse than nuclear weapons, because there are a bunch of weather calamities that have very high costs in terms of lives.
Worst case, just send up a shuttle and sweep them all up.
You can’t undo a volcanic explosion.
Not necessarily. All the junk could kickstart Kessler Syndrome[1] and make earth’s orbit completely impossible to traverse. Then when you want to sweep them up, your shuttle would just get shredded by debris.
Kessler Syndrome has always struck me as a problem that, should it become an actual issue, we should be able to solve. There is even mention of a couple potential solutions on the Wikipedia page.
Now I've got a craving...
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/30/4/article-p3_1.xml?l...
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/31/1/article-p3_1.xml?l...
It's a wild read, that not only explains how this idea is technically horrible - he also analyzes the social and psychological effects this would have on humanity, and it's harrowing:
- We will be unable to see blue skies anymore, it will simply become white. This will be a traumatic event for humanity, and would have consequences beyond our understanding. Also, sunsets will be much more bloody-red, and we wouldn't be able to see the stars as clearly as before.
- The nature of aerosol deployments is that once we start this to combat global warming, corporations and governments will just rely on this instead of also reducing CO2 emissions. So as time passes, an exponentially larger amount of aerosols would be needed to block out the sun at every year, which makes the side-effects of geo-engineering grow immensely over time.
- Once aerosols hit a limit, then there lies the termination shock - once we "give" up on emitting aerosols due to it becoming exponentially expensive to maintain over time, the Earth's temperature will suddenly shoot up at unprecedented rates, quick rendering the planet inhabitable for humanity. His analogies to Freud's theory of repression is apt - we constantly repress our traumatic thoughts with stopgap measures, until the fantasy becomes too expensive to maintain and enter into the fully destructive phase.
> corporations and governments will just rely on this instead of also reducing CO2 emissions
They already rely on people wanting cheap gasoline and cheap beef and high profits to the companies that give generous political donations. So, no change in actual behavior.
Geo-engineering is already happening and has been for decades. It's just been as a side effect of industry. Doing a little bit of intentional work to counteract that is a reasonable response. Hoping that tomorrow everyone wakes up and decides to do the right thing about emissions is a fantasy.
If you're going take the absurd route of a planet-wide ecosystem engineering project, why not increase the albedo of the planet instead by covering a portion of its surface with thin, light, semi-transparent, semi-reflective films that we already know how to make? We already cover huge areas with artificial materials like cement, asphalt and paints. Since they just lie around motionless on the ground, they're easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and easy to modify or remove if something doesn't go according to plans. Why instead throw aerosols at huge logistic costs into the stratosphere where the air currents and aerosol dispersion patterns are difficult to predict and even more difficult to manage if something goes wrong?
Why do people promote these sorts of unwieldy sci-fi fantasies (high-speed rail vs hyperloop, anyone?), instead of addressing the fundamental cause at the least cost possible? You know, may be convince everyone that dumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere is not a good idea? Climate change is primarily rooted in politics and greed. That would be a good place to start. And if possible at all, find a way to absorb some of the CO2 back? Nature actually has some mechanisms that can absorb and sink CO2 in huge quantities. Getting them to work for us is a challenge. But I don't think it's worse than the hubris of imagining being powerful enough to control the planet altogether.
Compared to this, a planet-wide engineering project might be less absurd and more doable.
Even the EU is under strong internal pressure to water down its decarbonization project, because local effects have proven too inconvenient to voters. Green vote has gone down all across Europe, and that translates to reduced political influence of the ideas you are speaking about.
I don't think you need a reminder that their inconvenience is about to get a whole lot worse. When I said they should convince everyone, I meant the voters too. A renewed awareness campaign at this point is not such a bad idea. It's definitely not as costly as the fantasies as these people are proposing.
But I guess the prevention is too costly for the big oil money interests.
mitchbob•2mo ago
https://archive.ph/3RgfQ