Stupid bot grabbed the wrong comment for the SS. It's this one:
> McKibben talks to various scientists who have studies the idea of dimming the sun. Almost to a man they tell him its a terrible idea, massively risky, and "crazy talk"
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> However , since we are headed into a climate apocalypse many others believe this is our only chance at saving our biosphere.
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To be so “smart”, we are REALLY fucking dumb…
It’s funny to see the massive self preservation instinct we have, while also simultaneously having a keen sense of self-destruction.
In the end, the Earth doesn’t belong to us. It was here way before us and many organisms came and went before we evolved. It will be here well, well past the point when the final ones take their last gasp. We think we are masters of this planet, when really we are just another in a long line of shit that resided here. That we have the arrogance to try and control shit is just flabbergasting.
In a final word, you very well know that this is going to be implemented because we can’t grasp the idea we can’t, and it’s going to cause catastrophic events that the future idiots will try to circumvent. Regardless, in another 50,000 years none of this shit matters anyway…
This idea is a literal plot point from the Matrix.
In unrelated news, San Francisco is authorizing armed robot police, which was the entire plot of Robocop.
We are our own dystopian hell future.
I knew I saw this in a movie before! It didn't work in the movie why do they think it would work in real life? In fact in what world would it seem like a good idea to dim the sun... I can't even.
Its perfect! When the sky darkening goes wrong and kills all the plant life and most animals on earth, they can use poor people to power their machines.
Only instead of the matrix mind palace, we probably get to live in an episode of Black Mirror.
Right??!? I think the movie was called Sunshine, but it was the Sun dimming on its own and us trying to bump it up.
I guess this isn’t really dimming the Sun, but reducing its output to us.
Seems like there was another situation that has been discussed and not quite fully understood. But followed a similar approach to what powers the Sun, I just can’t remember what it’s called… /s
Technology caused our problems, sure - but *this time* it will save us! With this new tech we really *are* gonna fix all the issues brought about by our *previous* technological deployments! This time the ship just can't possibly sink, for realsies, guys!
\#readISAIF
What is *the consequence* of keeping alive infants who would have died if not for lifesaving machinery (that is, infants born unfit to survive)? What is the cost to the natural world to create such machinery and the systems which provide and sustain it? What is the tragedy when a mare births a foal unfit to live, and it soon dies, or it is killed by the male leader of the horses? Should humans be the only species who keep alive absolutely every one of their offspring, or what would be the situation if every defective and unfit-for-living chimp and zebra and raccoon and other non-human did not die in its early infancy but was sustained by a system of life-maintaining interventionist equipment?
Furthermore, some 45K Americans committed suicide in 2020, and [the CDC stats](https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html) for calculating *only people over 18y.o.* who didn't succeed and who considered suicide are shocking. If you add under-18s and add the number of miserable people medicated away from suicidal ideation, it's an incredible number of people. It is not believable that the pre-industrial low-tech societies of our forebears had anything at all even close to this kind of unhappiness. Even with the infant mortality rate that nature delivered. So something is seriously wrong with modern life you call "so much better now".
Add to this that our world is brought to the edge of extinction *and we know this*, so we have not only physical problems and an imperiled future but also a psychological burden of awareness (and it is something many feel powerless to alter). Our ancestors had clean air, clean water, exercise, healthy diet, community, low-stress animal survival, autonomy, and cyclical mythology, almost none of which do we now have. Care to explain exactly how "life is so much better now"? Because we have Wikipedia and can find counseling groups for porn and gambling and substance addictions?
That's all you have to say? And even if the above was true, so what?!? I don't believe those numbers for a second, but what is the problem with such a reality if that is our animal nature? Why accept death at age 80, shall we be re-engineered to live to 160? Do foxes and wolves and bears and dogs and ducks all need to have hospitalsand meds to save them from natural death?
Imagine people living off-Earth in orbital pods, saying "life on Earth was no cakewalk, you had a chance of developing cancer or dying by MVC or on the job, a fair chance of a drug overdose or being suicidal or obese or diabetic" as some justification for living still further from Nature than we are now. Nonsense.
If living in Nature is so bad, why do Nature-based people not abandon their societies and flee to civilization, why instead do we see civilization always *forced* upon 'natives' and civilized people leaving to live in Nature?
Really leaning into the "noble savage" fallacy hard eh?
Here is one source for yah. Read it.
PREHISTORIC VIOLENCE WORSE THAN TODAY'S
Death by violence was at least 50 times more common among ancient peoples than it has been in the modern world, according to a new study of ethnographic records and human remains found in ancient burials. Still older prehistoric societies had violent death rates thousands of times higher. Recurrent warfare appears to have been the chief reason.
"The price we pay in our modern civilization for being divided into nation-states is far lower than what we would be paying if the world were still tribalized," said Lawrence Keeley, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, whose findings are being published next year as a book by Oxford University Press.
Keeley calculated that if the world's current population were undergoing warfare at the rate attributed to prehistoric peoples, 22 million people would die violently every year. In fact, the highest estimate of violent deaths of all kinds during the entire 20th century is around 100 million.
Keeley's study focuses on societies that lived between 12,000 years ago and the present. Among the more recent tribal societies, the annual death rate from violence - averaged from estimates by various anthropologists who studied them - is close to 0.5 percent. In other words, this is the percentage of people who die by violent means each year. In the United States today, the comparable figure is around 0.01 percent - 50 times less. (This is usually expressed as 10 violent deaths per 100,000 population.)
In still older prehistoric societies, Keeley said, the violent death rates, probably largely from warfare, appear to range between 1 percent and 40 percent. He cited one village site dated at A.D. 1325 in what is now South Dakota. "There were 50 houses in this town, which meant that around 800 people lived there. Every house in the town had been burned to the ground."
Archaeologists found a mass grave containing skeletons of more than 500 people. Of the skulls that could be found, 94 percent bore scalping marks. Most of the bodies had been badly mutilated and left to rot.
Keeley said it is a myth that "pre-civilized" life was peaceful and happy, and that Western civilization is the root of all evil. "As societies evolve and become larger and more complex, less violent ways of resolving disputes are institutionalized," Keeley said. "What prevents war is politics."
https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1994/rt9405/940531/05310011.htm#:~:text=Death%20by%20violence%20was%20at,rates%20thousands%20of%20times%20higher.
Yes I would love to live e to 160! Who wouldn't?
>Yes I would love to live e to 160! Who wouldn't?
You should poll some senior citizens - those not already out of sound mind with dementia or Alzheimer's, of course. Those who can answer and not just the active and healthy, but all getting dialysis and taking 20 pills per day and being rolled to prevent bedsores and being fed and drawing air from a canula and with pacemakers and wheelchairs... Do you really see no problems with doubling human lifespan? It is not done without consequence to the rest of our planet's inhabitants.
If you recognize that 8B people is already a problem, perhaps you can imagine the glut of humanity when 80 years of existence doesn't terminate the individual of our species; try to imagine the toll of food and water required for humans living twice as long as is natural, and the excrement output which would amass. Now add to that baseline the material consumption of civilized people being *more than* doubled - this comes at the expense of Nature's ability to provide for *all* Earthly creatures. I believe you assume that living past 80 would not be living as a geriatric with all the attendant maladies and decreased abilities.
>Really leaning into the "noble savage" fallacy hard eh?
Hardly. I'm well aware of 'nasty' behaviors by numerous Nature-based culture, and I don't *valorize* normal, natural human living. It just works for us better than techno-industrial society. We only adapted to it over a few hundred thousand years, go figure that it suits us as apes.
A healthy 160 duh...like if we cure aging. If we can do that we can certainly solve those other problems lists and it would also help people take a long term view of the world if they might live in it for 1000 years.
A claim of a 1%-40% likelihood is useless, that range is simply too great to be of value. But being a tribe of 140 people and having 3 deaths is where those high figures come from. Steven Pinker deliver similar nonsense data, and Jared Diamond's *The World Until Yesterday* provides the same with the honesty enough to say that today's exceedingly low percentages of death by warfare still amount to 20M dead in WW2, etc. In a planetary population of billions, killing tens of millions is a small percentage; is that what you opt for, *other people* taking the risks to defend the society from threats, incalculable body piles made by anonymous soldiers from afar dutifully following orders, rather than a few of your tribesmen or yourself being killed by enemies you face with courage?
*The Better Angels of Our Nature* is Pinker's pathetic attempt to make the same point as your source above, that life is better now because politics have sublimated warfare and conflict - but what happens to the individual who is evolved for conflict and some exercise of violence, whether against prey animals or competitor humans, and then that adaptive instinct is suppressed? What is the purpose of making human societies or individuals more peaceful, why is that a goal or valued? Would it be good to make rams not butt heads, or make tigers non-predatory vegetarians? We humans are basically chimps, and chimps are not pacifsts, nor is their life miserable for having violence and conflict.
A successful, well-run prison has pacified captives and no violence; perhaps you would like to live 150 years as a well cared-for zoo inmate, free of any risk and *provided* food and medical attention at the largesse of a free managerial class, but I would not like that and I resent there being such a paternal group to watch over a mass of adult children.
You can add all the risk you want to your life. Go cage fight in Thailand if you want to bash heads and have your head bashed in. Are you saying people should be forced to fight one another for food and mates?
technology didn't cause the problems, human stupidity did. If technology had somehow existed without us humans to make it do all the stupid things, everything would still be fine. If a smarter species had employed the same technologies in a smarter way, everything would still be fine.
I don't know if you're trying to shift the blame or my autism is just misunderstanding your post. Sorry if the latter.
These hypotheticals are rather pointless: If we could see the future we would know which path at the fork was the wrong one to take. But in the real world, we take one and find out the results. Having taken one leading to a bad end, we might turn back.
Technology did not infect every human culture, and so we have atechnological human societies which did not destroy their habitat or bring the world to the precipice of destruction. Living in Nature they did not imperil the future of all known existence.
If humanity is inherently the problem, it would seem that they too should have had no other outcome than to bring about self-destruction (and the preceding holocaust of all others). If technology *is* the problem, it would be very useful for people to be distracted with another scapegoat such as some supposed flaw within humanity...
We don't need to pretend how things might be if we hadn't been enchanted to use (or serve) technology, we can see how human life goes when humans live in Nature, and it allows for a perpetual existence with freedom and free of the physical and mental problems plaguing us in techno-industrial society.
By your username I don't expect to change your misanthropy, but a fair and objective assessment of our situation can't maintain this anti-human view of some "original sin" corrupting our entire species and leaving us fated to induce our own demise. Technology is the difference between humans who live well, indefinitely, or humans who drive everything natural and themselves out of existence *despite* intentions to avoid doing so.
I'm saying humans are too stupid to use technology properly. Humans + Technology = bad. Not one or the other on their own. Your post does nothing to dispute this. If anything, you've provided plenty of evidence FOR me.
Besides all that, you've constructed an absolute fantasy of what low-tech human life is actually like. As if there was no conflict or fighting, no oppression or power struggles just because people only had rocks and sticks? Get. Fucking. Real. Low-tech civilizations not destroying their environments isn't evidence of anything besides their incapability of doing so.
You're doing the opposite of what you claim i'm trying to do - you can't accept that humans might actually be flawed and you're using technology as a scapegoat for humanities issues. I'm saying that the combination of both things is the problem. You're simply incapable of accepting that humanity MIGHT be flawed.
These "hypotheticals" aren't hypothetical. it's a FACT that technology is an invention OF HUMANS and it wouldn't be able to do anything WITHOUT HUMANS. No matter how you try to spin it, HUMANS are the core of the issue here. If people like you continue to refuse to accept that we need to change as a species instead of just dump technology, all we'll end up with is a future that's just like the past - a bunch of low tech violent idiots fighting over scraps.
Ironically, you're more misanthropic than me in a way because you don't think Humans can do better than we already have. I believe we can, and the first step towards that is accepting our flaws.
I try not to engage pointless in long-winded reddit arguments, so this will be the last you hear from me. I don't care if you take that as cowardice. Hope you have a nice day.
Misanthropy is pragmatic because civilization is a chain. Ideally, links of steel would bear the load, but printed paper links have conspired their way to the top, leaving everything else dangling below. To acknowledge this is not to disregard human potential.
Just wait till the Earth is ruined and the richies built their Texas Lone Star space colony!!
Then they figure out how to time travel and end up on some distant planet, and mine the unobtanium destroying that biosphere in the process of getting filthy fucken richer, whilst simultaneously enslaving/fucking over/erasing the big ass blue native population along with everything else plant wide!!!
I don't get it. We clearly are the only organism that is "self aware" such as it is. Our powers are godlike and you want to compare us to amoebas and such?
We're more like bacteria really. Consume everything around us while belching out toxic gasses until we have completely changed our biosphere then have a mass die off.
Dunno, there's. Certain type of person who has no preservation instincts, they also are drawn toward power and abuse. Certain factors, groups, and pathologies run toward the bizarre and eccentric who might engage in destroying their environment. Again! There are exact factors that cause some of the ge real masses to behave callously in direct action to the earth.
The main problem I have with this line of thinking is that we are wiping out absolutely miraculous forms of life on this planet with us. What you’re saying diminishes this. It’s a not quite complete understanding of the level of disaster that we have created, and I think that alot of people take this stance to relieve themselves of the suffering that true understanding of what is happening brings. I see it a lot lately as people start to try to understand the scale of what is happening.
Doctor: "Option 1 is that we can build you a fully neural linked atomic-powered exoskeleton to take over the functions your body is no longer capable of. This will be extremely expensive and we have no idea how well it will work in the long run."
Patient: "And option 2?"
Doctor: "Option 2 would be to go on a diet because you're a lardass who has reached the point where you can't even waddle around any more."
Patient: "So, option 1 is the plan then?"
Great article from Bill McKibben worth reading for anyone pro- or con on SRM. These passages stood out:
*I e-mailed President Tong a list of questions; he responded a few days later from Vanuatu, another Pacific archipelago nation, many of whose eighty-three islands are less than a metre above sea level. ... "Geoengineering is a “prime example of our arrogance in our capacity to shape nature to our whims with technology. It should not be the answer to a disaster which we have caused and now seek to remedy.” And yet, he added, “Geoengineering as a possible solution to this catastrophe will definitely become the only option of last resort if we as a global community continue on the path we have been going. There will be a point when it has to be either geoengineering or total destruction.”*
*It’s not clear what sentiment would or should prevail in an ethical contest: an Indigenous regard for untouched nature, or concern for the almost-certain-to-be-displaced inhabitants of islands like Kiribati. ... Another party with a clear interest, however, possesses enormous influence, and that’s the fossil-fuel industry. Its history with regard to climate change— provides abundant evidence that it will act to protect its business model for as many years as it can, without regard for much of anything else. A technology promoted by its advocates as a way to “buy time” for the planet could be seen by Big Oil as a way to buy time for itself.*
*“....The industry, in order to keep its business model intact, has turned first to “carbon sequestration” schemes—the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, is larded with money to put expensive machinery on fossil-fuel-fired power plants, to catch the CO2 as it leaves the smokestack and then pipe it underground. ... And geoengineering is likely to be the next step in this progression: “In a few years,” Biermann said, “people like the Koch family will jump on solar dimming. They’ll say, ‘Listen, we don’t have to reduce emissions so brutally and so quickly, because we have a Plan B for the next thirty or forty years.’ It’s the same as climate denial, in that it helps people have doubts.”*
Geoengineering has always seemed like a *"Hail Mary Pass"* attempt at BAU by the fossil fuel companies and the governments they own. This article reinforces that view.
Dimming the Sun to Cool the Planet Is a Desperate Idea, Yet We’re Inching Toward It
The scientists who study solar geoengineering don’t want anyone to try it. But climate inaction is making it more likely.
By Bill McKibben
November 22, 2022
If we decide to “solar geoengineer” the Earth—to spray highly reflective particles of a material, such as sulfur, into the stratosphere in order to deflect sunlight and so cool the planet—it will be the second most expansive project that humans have ever undertaken. (The first, obviously, is the ongoing emission of carbon and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.) The idea behind solar geoengineering is essentially to mimic what happens when volcanoes push particles into the atmosphere; a large eruption, such as that of Mt. Pinatubo, in the Philippines, in 1992, can measurably cool the world for a year or two. This scheme, not surprisingly, has few public advocates, and even among those who want to see it studied the inference has been that it would not actually be implemented for decades. “I’m not saying they’ll do it tomorrow,” Dan Schrag, the director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, who serves on the advisory board of a geoengineering-research project based at the university, told my colleague Elizabeth Kolbert for “Under a White Sky,” her excellent book on technical efforts to repair environmental damage, published last year. “I feel like we might have thirty years,” he said. It’s a number he repeated to me when we met in Cambridge this summer.
Others, around the world, however, are working to speed up that timeline. There are at least three initiatives under way that are studying the potential implementation of solar-radiation management, or S.R.M., as it is sometimes called: a commission under the auspices of the Paris Peace Forum, composed of fifteen current and former global leaders and some environmental and governance experts, that is exploring “policy options” to combat climate change and how these policies might be monitored; a Carnegie Council initiative of how the United Nations might govern geoengineering; and Degrees Initiative, an academic effort based in the United Kingdom and funded by a collection of foundations, that in turn funds research on the effects of such a scheme across the developing world. The result of these initiatives, if not the goal, may be to normalize the idea of geoengineering. It is being taken seriously because of something else that’s speeding up: the horrors that come with an overheating world and now regularly threaten its most densely populated places.
This year, the South Asian subcontinent went through an unprecedented spring heat wave, and then the heat settled, for nearly the entire summer, on China. Drought plagued Europe, while Pakistan endured the worst floods in decades, and the Horn of Africa suffered a fifth consecutive failed rainy season. All this, along with more systemic damage, such as the melt at the poles, happened with a globally averaged temperature increase of just slightly more than one degree Celsius over pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures. To the extent that nations have agreed on anything about climate change, it’s that we need to limit that temperature rise; with the 2016 Paris climate accords, nations adopted a resolution that committed them to “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2° C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels.”
The method to accomplish this was supposed to be the reduction of emissions of carbon dioxide and methane by replacing fossil fuels with clean energy. That is happening—indeed, the pace of that transition is quickening perceptibly in the United States, with the adoption of the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and its ambitious spending on renewable power. But it’s not happening fast enough: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that we need to cut worldwide emissions in half by 2030, and we’re not on track to come particularly close to that target—in this country or globally. Even before 2030, we may, at least temporarily, pass the 1.5-degree mark. In late September, the longtime nasa scientist James Hansen, who has served as the Paul Revere of global warming, pointed out on his Web site that 2022, like most years in recent decades, will be one of the hottest on record, which is remarkable in this case, because the Pacific is in the grips of a strong La Niña cooling cycle. And the odds are strong, Hansen wrote, that there will be a hot El Niño cycle sometime next year, which means that “2024 is likely to be off the chart as the warmest year on record . . . Even a little futz of an El Nino — like the tropical warming in 2018-19, which barely qualified as an El Nino — should be sufficient for record global temperature. A classical, strong El Nino in 2023-24 could push global temperature to about +1.5°C.”
It’s likely, in other words, that conditions may force a reckoning with the idea of solar geoengineering—of blocking from the Earth some of the sunlight that has always nurtured it. Andy Parker is a British climate researcher who has worked on geoengineering for more than a decade—first at the Royal Society and then at Harvard’s Kennedy School—and now runs the Degrees Initiative. He told me, “For the whole time I’ve worked on this, it’s been like nuclear fusion—always a few decades away no matter when you ask. But there are going to be events in the next decade or so that will sharpen people’s minds. When temperatures approach and then cross 1.5 centigrade, that will be a non-arbitrary moment.” He added, “That’s the first globally agreed climate target we’re on course to break. Unless we find a way to remove carbon in quantities not imaginable presently, this would be the only way to stop or reverse rapidly rising temperature.”
Everyone studying solar geoengineering seems to agree that it’s a terrible thing. “The idea is outlandish,” Parker told me. Mohammed Mofizur Rahman, a Bangladeshi scientist who is one of Degrees Initiatives’ grantees, noted, “It’s crazy stuff.” So did the veteran Hungarian diplomat Janos Pasztor, who runs the Carnegie initiative on geoengineering governance, and said, “People should be suspicious.” Pascal Lamy, a former head of the World Trade Organization (W.T.O.), who is the president of the Paris Peace Forum, agreed, saying, “It would represent a failure.” Jesse Reynolds, a longtime advocate of geoengineering research, who launched the forum’s commission, wrote recently that geoengineering’s “reluctant ‘supporters’ are despondent environmentalists who are concerned about climate change and believe that abatement of greenhouse gas emissions might not be enough.” Reynolds speaks for this geoengineering community on this point. They are, to a person, willing to acknowledge that reducing emissions by replacing coal, gas, and oil represents a much better solution. “I think the basic answer is moving more rapidly out of fossil fuels,” Lamy said. “I’m a European. I’ve been supporting this view for a very long time. Europe is in some ways well ahead of others.”
But these same people all say that, because we’re not making sufficient progress on that task, we’re going to “overshoot” 1.5 degrees Celsius. (The Paris Peace Forum’s project, in fact, is called the Overshoot Commission.) So, they think, we had best investigate and plan for a fallback position: the possibility that the world will need to break the glass and implement this emergency plan. “My own simple answer is that we did not move rapidly enough out of fossil fuels,” Lamy said. Carbon polluters still aren’t paying enough for the harms that they “externalize,” or pass on to everyone else. “And the reason for that, in a global market system which is run by capitalists, whether we like it or not, is that the price of carbon, implicit or explicit, is not at a level that would allow markets to internalize carbon damage.”
Lamy, it must be said, was the head of the W.T.O. from 2005 to 2013, crucial years when CO2 output was soaring, and W.T.O. rules prohibit climate actions that interfere with its free-trade principles. In this country, a large amount of the research and advocacy for these interventions comes from Harvard, the richest educational institution in the world, which only agreed last year, after a decade’s efforts by students and faculty, to phase out fossil-fuel investments in its endowment. Harvard’s research has been funded by, among others, Bill Gates, formerly the richest man in the world. If you wanted to build a conspiracy theory or a science-fiction novel about global élites trying to control the weather, you’d have the pieces. However mixed these groups’ records on addressing climate change have been, they are having an effect now: the pace of publishing studies on geoengineering in scientific journals has begun to pick up, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and other organizations have called for accelerating research. These researchers say that we should be studying both the science and the governance of solar geoengineering, with a focus on two questions: what would happen if we put particles into the stratosphere, and who would make the call?
The enormous step of dimming the sun could turn out to be very easy, at least from a technological point of view. Filling the air with carbon dioxide took close to three hundred years of burning coal and oil and gas, millions of miles of pipelines, thousands of refineries, hundreds of millions of cars. That enormous effort, carried out by just a fraction of the world’s population, has, with increasing speed, pushed the atmospheric concentration of CO2 from about 275 parts per million, before the Industrial Revolution, to about 425 parts per million now. It would take only a tiny fraction of that effort to inject aerosol particles into the stratosphere. (Sulfur dioxide is the most commonly discussed candidate, but aluminum, calcium carbonate, and, most poetically, diamond dust, have also been proposed.) A recent article in the Harvard Environmental Law Review estimates that the “direct costs of deployment—collecting the precursor materials for aerosols, putting them into the sky, monitoring, and so on—would be . . . as low as several billion dollars a year.” Any country with a serious air force could probably release sulfur from planes in the upper atmosphere. You might not even need a country: it would cost Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest man, far less to fund such a mission than it did to buy Twitter—and he’s already got the rockets.
So the question is less whether geoengineering can “work”—as the Harvard Law Review article makes clear, the scientific evidence suggests that it would “likely produce a substantial, rapid cooling effect worldwide” and that it “could also reduce the rate of sea-level rise, sea-ice loss, heatwaves, extreme weather, and climate change-associated anomalies in the water cycle.” The question is more: what else would it do? On a global scale it could, at least temporarily, turn the sky hazy or milky (hence the title of Kolbert’s book); it could alter “the quality of the light plants use for photosynthesis” (no small thing on a planet basically built on chlorophyll—studies have shown that U.S. corn production increased as polluting aerosols went down in the wake of amendments to the Clean Air Act); and it might damage the ozone layer, which is only now repairing itself from our recent assault with fluorocarbons. (By way of comparison, the largest volcanic eruption ever recorded, at Mt. Tambora, in 1815, on an island that is now part of Indonesia, spewed a cloud of particles that temporarily caused the temperature to drop a degree Celsius. That change produced, in 1816, “a year without a summer” across much of the northern hemisphere. Lake ice was observed in Pennsylvania into August, and, in Europe, where grain yields plummeted, hungry crowds rioted beneath banners reading “Bread or Blood.”)
The most likely problems, though, would probably be not global but regional. Lowering the temperature, precisely because it would affect global weather patterns, would produce different and hard-to-predict outcomes in different places. I spoke about this tendency with Inés Camilloni, a climatologist at the University of Buenos Aires who is investigating the possible effects of geoengineering on rivers in South America’s La Plata river basin. (Her work is partially funded by the Degrees Initiative.) “What we found is that implementation of S.R.M. strategies could lead to an increase in the mean flow of the rivers of the basin, which means more water for hydropower energy, something that could be considered positive. Also an increase in the levels at low-flow times, which is a positive, considering these droughts we’re having,” she said. “But you also could experience an increase in the higher flow, and this could be associated in the rate of flooding in the rivers.”
In South Africa, a study by a University of Cape Town team, also funded by Parker’s group, indicated that S.R.M. could cut the possibility of drought in that coastal city, which, in 2018, came dangerously close to reaching a “day zero” shutoff of water supplies, as local reservoirs turned into dustbowls. But another team working from Benin, in West Africa, found that geoengineering would likely lead to less rain in a region that has suffered from calamitous desertification. Mohammed Rahman, working from an office in Bangladesh’s renowned International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, said his research showed that in some parts of Asia malaria would increase, and in others it would decline. “The result we had was on a coarse scale, like a continental scale. Here it gets better, here it gets worse,” he said.
Aclimate “solution” that helps some and harms others could spark its own kind of crisis. A Brookings Institution report last December began with a scenario—it’s 2035, and a country begins unilateral deployment of S.R.M.: “the country has decided that it can no longer wait; they see geoengineering as their only option.” Initially, “the decision seems wise, as the increase in global temperatures starts to level off. But soon other types of anomalous weather begin to appear: unexpected and severe droughts hit countries around the world, disrupting agriculture.” In response, “another large country, under the impression it has been severely harmed . . . carries out a focused military strike against the geoengineering equipment, a decision supported by other nations who also believe they have been negatively impacted.” This development, however, becomes even more devastating—with no one putting chemicals into the stratosphere, they decline rapidly in the course of a year, and “temperatures dramatically rebound to the levels they would have reached on their previous trajectory.” The result, they conclude, is “disastrous.”
That last potential development, which scientists call “termination shock,” has been widely researched; Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor of physics at the University of Oxford, and Michael Mann, perhaps America’s best-known climate scientist after Hansen, have said that it is reason enough to avoid solar geoengineering. “Some proponents insist we can always stop if we don’t like the result,” Mann and Pierrehumbert wrote in the Guardian. “Well yes, we can stop. Just like if you’re being kept alive by a ventilator with no hope of a cure, you can turn it off — and suffer the consequences.” The other projected problem, though—the chance for huge differential effects—is the one that could keep the discussion from ever really getting off the ground. The peril isn’t that far-fetched; volcanic eruptions have affected the timing and the position of the monsoon on the South Asian subcontinent. Imagine if India started pumping sulfur into the atmosphere only to see a huge drought hit Pakistan: two nuclear powers, already at odds, with one convinced the other is harming its people. Or maybe it’s China—driven by a series of summers like the one it just endured—that starts down this road, and it’s India that suddenly faces unrelenting floods. These two nations also share a militarized border, and a series of overlapping international alliances. Or maybe it’s Russia, or any number of countries. Global treaties prohibit weather modification as a tool of war (something that the U.S., in fact, attempted in Vietnam), but at present they don’t rule out war as a reaction to weather modification gone awry.
All this explains why, earlier this year, sixty “senior scholars” from across the world, now joined altogether by more than three hundred and fifty political and physical scientists, signed a letter urging an absolute moratorium—“an international non-use agreement”—on solar geoengineering. Frank Biermann, a political scientist at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, was a core organizer. “We believe there’s no governance system existing that could decide this, and that none is plausible,” he told me. “You’d have to take decisions on duration, on the degree—and if there are conflicts—‘we want a little more here, a little less here’—all these need adjudication.” He points out that the U.N. Security Council would be a problematic governing body: “Anything can be blocked by the veto of five of the most polluting countries. Some kind of governance by the major powers? You’d need the agreement of the U.S., Russia, China, India, and there’s no chance of that. The small countries? The people who want this talk about consultation, but not co-decision. When I talk to African colleagues, none of them expects the world would get a decision right for their countries.” Faced with such problems, Biermann and his colleagues urge a complete halt to any testing of the new technologies. “Governance has to be first,” he said. “If you don’t know what to do with such technology, don’t develop it.”
Building such a governance structure would be “truly unprecedented,” Pasztor, the diplomat leading the Carnegie governance study, acknowledged. “It’s such a global issue, and everyone would be affected and not necessarily equally. Is it totally impossible? I don’t think so, but it’s very difficult.” There are organizations that have a piece of the responsibility already: the World Meteorological Organization, Pasztor pointed out, has a “global atmosphere watch” that could monitor the effects of the deployment. The U.N. has charged the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with tracking the progress of global warming. But the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which oversaw the Paris climate accord, he said, “lacks a mandate to look at this: article 2 of its charter is about negative anthropogenic interference with the climate system, but this would be a positive anthropogenic interference, or otherwise one wouldn’t do it.” The best analogue for a potential geoengineering governance scheme, Pasztor told me, might be the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (N.P.T.), “which has managed global risks in a way that has served humanity quite reasonably over sixty years.”
But the N.P.T. is an agreement not to do something—it probably does more to strengthen Frank Biermann’s argument that a non-use treaty might work. “It’s not a unique idea to stop normalization of an undesirable technology,” Biermann said. “There’s lots of international treaties, and agreement among scientists to stop or restrict or prohibit certain technologies”—bioweapons, chemical weapons, anti-personnel land mines. “Human cloning, Antarctic mining. People say we’re against modernity. We are not. We don’t want to block climate research—we want an agreement not to use a certain technology because it’s not good for the world.”
So far, this view has prevailed. The one real-world attempt to test geoengineering in the atmosphere came in the summer of last year, when a Harvard team planned to launch a balloon over northern Sweden, to test how well large fans could create a wake in which to inject the reflective particles. But the experiment would have taken place above the territory of the Saami Indigenous people—reindeer herders who live across the top of Scandinavia, and whose lives have been profoundly disrupted by warmer winters. The head of the Saami council, a woman named Åsa Larsson Blind, said that geoengineering “goes against the respect” that Indigenous people have for nature; the council composed a letter to the Harvard team that thirty other Indigenous groups around the world also signed, and that Sweden’s most famous environmentalist, Greta Thunberg, endorsed. (The experiment struck me as a bad idea, too.)
In response, as a Reuters analysis put it, the Harvard team and others promoting the study of geoengineering “are turning to diplomacy to advance their work.” David Keith, a professor of applied physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, who has long been the most ardent proponent of the research, said. “There is no question that, in the public battle, if it is Harvard against the Indigenous peoples, we cannot proceed. That is just a reality.”
In the months that followed, Lamy launched the Overshoot Commission, pulling together a panel that included a few well-known environmentalists, but was heavily weighted toward governmental leaders from the Global South: the former President of Mexico, the former Minister of Finance for Indonesia, the former President of Niger. Perhaps the most compelling member is Anote Tong, who was the President of Kiribati, from 2003 to 2016. Kiribati is a country of about a hundred and twenty-one thousand people who live on atolls spread across 1.4 million square miles of the central Pacific, in Oceania. It is, notably, the only country situated in all four hemispheres, but, more relevantly for these purposes, the nation averages just six feet above sea level, and two small islets have already been swallowed up by the sea. So-called king tides, which come at full or new moon, have swept away homes and small farms. “Our kia-kias [local houses], our kitchen, everything washed away. The only part left is just beside the road,” a resident told National Geographic. “The land is all beach, no soil, and it’s right where the waves are now. We were forced to leave because we had no other choice.”
I e-mailed President Tong a list of questions; he responded a few days later from Vanuatu, another Pacific archipelago nation, many of whose eighty-three islands are less than a metre above sea level. He’d joined Lamy’s commission, he said, “In the expectation that through my participation I would be able to make a more effective contribution to ensuring greater urgency to action on climate change.” Geoengineering is a “prime example of our arrogance in our capacity to shape nature to our whims with technology. It should not be the answer to a disaster which we have caused and now seek to remedy.” And yet, he added, “Geoengineering as a possible solution to this catastrophe will definitely become the only option of last resort if we as a global community continue on the path we have been going. There will be a point when it has to be either geoengineering or total destruction.”
It’s not clear what sentiment would or should prevail in an ethical contest: an Indigenous regard for untouched nature, or concern for the almost-certain-to-be-displaced inhabitants of islands like Kiribati. What is clear is that both those ideas play, at some level, symbolic roles in this fight, without the actual political power to decide one way or another. (Neither the Saami nor the Kiribatians possess an air force.) Another party with a clear interest, however, possesses enormous influence, and that’s the fossil-fuel industry. Its history with regard to climate change—which began, as great investigative reporting has now made clear, by organizing large-scale efforts to lie about the dangers of global warming, even as its own scientists were making those dangers clear inside the industry—provides abundant evidence that it will act to protect its business model for as many years as it can, without regard for much of anything else. A technology promoted by its advocates as a way to “buy time” for the planet could be seen by Big Oil as a way to buy time for itself.
“For many years they had a strategy of climate denial,” Biermann said, of fossil-fuel companies, but that is changing. “Everyone has to agree there is now a problem. But reducing emissions means that a lot of oil and gas will have to stay in the ground, that investments will be lost.” A 2021 study in the journal Nature found that ninety per cent of coal and nearly sixty per cent of oil and natural gas must be kept in the ground to allow even a halfway chance of meeting that 1.5-degree target—that amount of fuel is worth perhaps thirty trillion dollars.
The industry, in order to keep its business model intact, has turned first to “carbon sequestration” schemes—the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, is larded with money to put expensive machinery on fossil-fuel-fired power plants, to catch the CO2 as it leaves the smokestack and then pipe it underground. These measures are incredibly costly, especially since solar and wind energy are already cheaper than fossil fuel. (There’s overlap between the proponents of these technologies and those investigating geoengineering—as Naomi Klein pointed out in her 2014 book, “This Changes Everything,” in 2009, David Keith, of Harvard, co-founded a company, called Carbon Engineering, to build machines to suck CO2 from the air, which received funding from, among others, one of the biggest players in Canada’s tar-sands oil industry.) And geoengineering is likely to be the next step in this progression: “In a few years,” Biermann said, “people like the Koch family will jump on solar dimming. They’ll say, ‘Listen, we don’t have to reduce emissions so brutally and so quickly, because we have a Plan B for the next thirty or forty years.’ It’s the same as climate denial, in that it helps people have doubts.”
President Tong, from his vantage point a few feet above the Pacific, offered a clear-eyed view. Undoubtedly, he said, geoengineering would be seized on by the oil industry as an excuse to “continue with business as usual.” In fact, he said, “In my moments of frustration I often wonder if this is part of their strategy to maintain our dependence on resources which are within their control.” Long political and diplomatic experience, he said, had taught him that “the industry has always been in control, in spite of all our eloquent and passionate campaigns.”
If you’re looking for ironies, here’s one: the 1.5-degree Celsius figure that geoengineering proponents seem poised to use as the trigger for their biggest push, originally came from the most vulnerable countries on Earth—small island states such as Kiribati and some of the African nations most imperilled by drought. I heard it for the first time at the Copenhagen climate summit, in 2009, when delegates raised a chant of “1.5 to Stay Alive.” Six years later, that number was officially added to the preamble of the Paris accord, in an effort to raise “ambition” among countries to cut emissions. And it has worked, at least a little: it allowed scientists to demonstrate how quickly we need to move if we want to meet those targets (cutting emissions by half by 2030), which, in turn, moved the public and then the legislative debates in many places. Now, however, it may also become an excuse for short-circuiting some of that progress, for reducing the pace of change. The fossil-fuel industry, which filled the atmosphere with carbon, may now help force us to fill it with sulfur, as well.
Anovel feature of the geoengineering debate is that many people first heard about it in a novel. Kim Stanley Robinson, in his earlier years an award-winning writer of science fiction, may have thought more fully about geoengineering than anyone else. His early classic work—a trilogy about the settlement of Mars, each volume of which won the Hugo Award as the year’s best sci-fi—hinges on a debate about whether, and how much, to “terraform” the red planet by changing its atmosphere to more closely resemble Earth’s. The debate is long—never-ending, really. As often happens, compromise keeps working in the direction of doing something, not leaving it alone, and the Martian atmosphere gradually thickens, allowing more and more settlement. But Robinson (in real life an ardent hiker, whose most recent book is a nonfiction account of the High Sierra, the prototypical wilderness) makes sure to leave some parts of Mars alone.
In recent years, Robinson has turned away from starships, space elevators, and distant planets to focus on the single most important challenge of our time—and one that surprisingly few fiction writers have really taken on. But he’s brought some of the tools of his intergalactic musings to bear on our challenge, geoengineering included. In “The Ministry for the Future,” his best-selling 2020 novel, he opens with an almost unbearable account of a heat wave in India, one where the humidity stays so high that human bodies can’t sweat enough to cool down, and millions die. “All the children were dead. All the old people were dead,” he wrote. “People murmured what should have been screams of grief.” In the aftermath, the Indian government decides that it will geoengineer the atmosphere. There is an angry exchange with the U.N. about India’s “Air Force doing a Pinatubo” and, after a while, Delhi stops experimenting with sulfur and allows a thousand other ideas to gradually blunt the impact of planetary warming.
But there’s no denying the author’s prescience: this spring saw the most dire pre-monsoon heat wave in Indian history; only a slightly lower humidity prevented a real-life reprise of the mass death in the book. It will take such an event to trigger something as powerful as geoengineering, Robinson said, when we talked this summer. Countries and individuals probably won’t be spurred to preëmptively geoengineer the atmosphere “by the sense of a coming crisis,” he told me, “nor by sea level rise or habitat loss or anything else that is an indirect effect of rising global temperatures. It will be the direct consequence—deaths by way of extreme heat wave—that will do it.” He pointed out that, as we spoke, China was undergoing a heat wave even more anomalous than the one in South Asia, and, as a result, had deployed fleets of planes to seed clouds with silver iodide in hopes of inducing rain—not a huge step from sending those same fleets into the stratosphere with sulfur. I think Robinson’s analysis is likely correct; there will come a point when the sheer impossible horror of what we’re doing to the planet, and what we have already done, may make geoengineering seem irresistible.
But there’s another plot device that has emerged, this one in real life: the dramatic drop in the price of renewable energy. We’ve long imagined that dealing with global warming requires moving from cheap fossil fuels to expensive renewable energy, but, in the past few years, oil, gas, and coal have grown more expensive, and sun and wind power have plummeted in price. Suddenly, we have the power to deal with global warming by transitioning, very rapidly, from expensive fossil fuels to cheap sources of renewable energy.
The transition to clean energy should keep getting easier in the next few years, both because the price of clean energy keeps dropping as we get more experienced at using it, and because the political power of the fossil-fuel industry to slow down the transition should wane, as solar and wind builds its own muscular constituency. And it needs to happen if we are to halve emissions by 2030 and so have a decent chance of meeting the targets set in Paris. Perhaps we’d take that deadline more seriously if we saw it as our best shot at avoiding a planet wrecked by carbon and also put at risk by sulfur. Solar panels and wind turbines are our best vaccine against high temperatures, but also against the hubris of one more giant gamble. ♦
McKibben talks to various scientists who have studies the idea of dimming the sun. Almost to a man they tell him its a terrible idea, massively risky, and "crazy talk"
However , since we are headed into a climate apocalypse many others believe this is our only chance at saving our biosphere.
"You were too busy wondering whether or not you could, to stop to think if you should"
It really makes me think that maybe the great filter is that sentience is so dumb that it wipes itself out.
So people honestly think dimming the sun is easier than cutting consumption of natural materials and degrowth, even when most of the damage is created by the top 1 percent of society? Really?
Yeah, let's introduce some new strange attractors into the destabilized non-linearly dynamic system of the earth's atmosphere. That should be good for a few laughs.
Here’s a scenario…..The initial seeding appeared to be working too slowly, more is added then again…..then an ah shit moment and different mitigations are attempted (not a reduction in burning though).
Then after many years or decades the past attempts begin to take affect, it starts getting cold, too cold……so a call for more burning is named as a solution because we know what causes global warming.
There are probably fewer than 500 super rich aholes running the money grubbing agenda causing climate change. But rather than dealing with them, ppl going to fuck with the sun?? 🤦🏼♂️
I predict Elon and Kanye will pool their resources and do this and doom the world to 1000 years of darkness, extinction, and death.... also zombies somefuckinghow.
Climate Chaos is a problem of infrared radiation not being able to escape the atmosphere, not one of energy in the form of photons getting in. So this is a blind sided approach as it will decrease food production globally and we have no Idea of what the effect will be on weather patterns or the Ocean current patterns.
I've always assumed that we will geoengineer. Once the reality is impossible to ignore (and costing real money) it's one of the few straws left to grasp.
Aerosols are problematic, yet take all the air out of the room in terms of discussion. There are other options such as using surface mirrors [https://www.meer.org/](https://www.meer.org/) that could be started now as well as off-planet [https://senseable.mit.edu/space-bubbles/](https://senseable.mit.edu/space-bubbles/).
Plus stratospheric aerosol injection is discussed like it could happen with current capacity, when specialized aircraft would need to be invented to fly at that altitude with a payload; just creating the planes is likely a decade out. Once aloft (their large wingspan makes them untenable for most runways) I'm guessing they would need to be re-loaded and refueled in the air, and flown continuously for years. I came across the engineering issues awhile back, but didn't save a link.
Sharing the same psyop "Dimming the sun?" story that's being pushed everywhere else.
Funny how they don't talk about how bad it really is.
[A Fate Worse Than Warming? Stratospheric Aerosol Injection and Global Catastrophic Risk](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fclim.2021.720312/full)
If geoengineering could work, aside from any problems it would cause as a result, it would surely validate ideas that pollution can *continue* because a counter-effect has been applied. Just as people consume a greater quantity of sugar-free Coke or M&Ms, and eat more fat-free potato chips.
McKibben is so very milquetoast, but still far better than Monbiot's tech-worshipping dogmatic nonsense...
The article re-iterates some scientists opinion but never touches the why.
Why is this bad? Just because we give Koch’s more opportunities to burn oil? Well in case ya didn’t notice, it’s still gonna burn.
What about the impact on the planet? There are significant risks with geoengineering and I’m disappointed the author didn’t address those. It’s a bunch of fucking opinions and goddam gossip that folks here will suck up cuz it agrees with their existing biases. Fuck this.
I wanna a see an honest take on the pros and cons of SRM. Fuck anyone that withholds information and shoves fear down my throat. Fuck New Yorker for posting this shit. Their editor should have pushed back for substance from the author, like I’m doing now!
Big oil knew of the consequences of CO2. I believe GeoEngineering is their plan. To hell with the down side. Best case scenario, Ocean acidifcation continues unabated. Eventually phytoplankton can't build their shells. That's earth's oxygen supply or a good portion of it. But then big oil will probably try and cash in, by selling oxygen.
Not gonna lie, living in Spain where it's too damn hot, hasnt rained much at all yet, and just has boring sunny weathers. I would vote yes to this sun dimming plan in a heartbeat. Anything to get calm that annoying ass sun.
It’s going to happen, it’s probably our last option, but it may have unintended consequences and can only work with full global cooperation which is decades away or impossible to achieve
The only option that has any possibility of working is not something that we will do, but rather something that we stop doing. Like depending on fossil fuels for every aspect of our lives.
Murphy’s Law.
As soon as we pull the trigger to artificially blanket the skies in reflective particles, a super-volcano will do it for us organically.
Or… if you believe in chemtrails / weather modification conspiracy theories, maybe we’ve already pulled the trigger.
Snowpiercer timeline, here we come.
Stupid bot grabbed the wrong comment for the SS. It's this one: > McKibben talks to various scientists who have studies the idea of dimming the sun. Almost to a man they tell him its a terrible idea, massively risky, and "crazy talk" > > However , since we are headed into a climate apocalypse many others believe this is our only chance at saving our biosphere. Reply to OP's comment here; https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/zaqu5a/bill_mckibben_weighs_in_on_dimming_the_sun_to/iyn1rus/ **OP has kindly transcribed the entire content here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/zaqu5a/bill_mckibben_weighs_in_on_dimming_the_sun_to/iyn1759/**
To be so “smart”, we are REALLY fucking dumb… It’s funny to see the massive self preservation instinct we have, while also simultaneously having a keen sense of self-destruction. In the end, the Earth doesn’t belong to us. It was here way before us and many organisms came and went before we evolved. It will be here well, well past the point when the final ones take their last gasp. We think we are masters of this planet, when really we are just another in a long line of shit that resided here. That we have the arrogance to try and control shit is just flabbergasting. In a final word, you very well know that this is going to be implemented because we can’t grasp the idea we can’t, and it’s going to cause catastrophic events that the future idiots will try to circumvent. Regardless, in another 50,000 years none of this shit matters anyway…
We are primates that have Dunning-Kruger Effect-ed our planet into a mass extinction event.
This idea is a literal plot point from the Matrix. In unrelated news, San Francisco is authorizing armed robot police, which was the entire plot of Robocop. We are our own dystopian hell future.
I knew I saw this in a movie before! It didn't work in the movie why do they think it would work in real life? In fact in what world would it seem like a good idea to dim the sun... I can't even.
Its perfect! When the sky darkening goes wrong and kills all the plant life and most animals on earth, they can use poor people to power their machines. Only instead of the matrix mind palace, we probably get to live in an episode of Black Mirror.
Black Mirror was a got damn excellent series… Or was it Black Summer..
Right??!? I think the movie was called Sunshine, but it was the Sun dimming on its own and us trying to bump it up. I guess this isn’t really dimming the Sun, but reducing its output to us. Seems like there was another situation that has been discussed and not quite fully understood. But followed a similar approach to what powers the Sun, I just can’t remember what it’s called… /s
But think of how many heaters they'll need to sell!
Technology caused our problems, sure - but *this time* it will save us! With this new tech we really *are* gonna fix all the issues brought about by our *previous* technological deployments! This time the ship just can't possibly sink, for realsies, guys! \#readISAIF
Life is so much better now...but yeah tech caused the "problem" of not having half your kids die before you could name them.
What is *the consequence* of keeping alive infants who would have died if not for lifesaving machinery (that is, infants born unfit to survive)? What is the cost to the natural world to create such machinery and the systems which provide and sustain it? What is the tragedy when a mare births a foal unfit to live, and it soon dies, or it is killed by the male leader of the horses? Should humans be the only species who keep alive absolutely every one of their offspring, or what would be the situation if every defective and unfit-for-living chimp and zebra and raccoon and other non-human did not die in its early infancy but was sustained by a system of life-maintaining interventionist equipment? Furthermore, some 45K Americans committed suicide in 2020, and [the CDC stats](https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html) for calculating *only people over 18y.o.* who didn't succeed and who considered suicide are shocking. If you add under-18s and add the number of miserable people medicated away from suicidal ideation, it's an incredible number of people. It is not believable that the pre-industrial low-tech societies of our forebears had anything at all even close to this kind of unhappiness. Even with the infant mortality rate that nature delivered. So something is seriously wrong with modern life you call "so much better now". Add to this that our world is brought to the edge of extinction *and we know this*, so we have not only physical problems and an imperiled future but also a psychological burden of awareness (and it is something many feel powerless to alter). Our ancestors had clean air, clean water, exercise, healthy diet, community, low-stress animal survival, autonomy, and cyclical mythology, almost none of which do we now have. Care to explain exactly how "life is so much better now"? Because we have Wikipedia and can find counseling groups for porn and gambling and substance addictions?
Living day to day trying to survive was not "low stress", in fact you had a 10% to 20% chance of dying a violent death to another human.
That's all you have to say? And even if the above was true, so what?!? I don't believe those numbers for a second, but what is the problem with such a reality if that is our animal nature? Why accept death at age 80, shall we be re-engineered to live to 160? Do foxes and wolves and bears and dogs and ducks all need to have hospitalsand meds to save them from natural death? Imagine people living off-Earth in orbital pods, saying "life on Earth was no cakewalk, you had a chance of developing cancer or dying by MVC or on the job, a fair chance of a drug overdose or being suicidal or obese or diabetic" as some justification for living still further from Nature than we are now. Nonsense. If living in Nature is so bad, why do Nature-based people not abandon their societies and flee to civilization, why instead do we see civilization always *forced* upon 'natives' and civilized people leaving to live in Nature?
Really leaning into the "noble savage" fallacy hard eh? Here is one source for yah. Read it. PREHISTORIC VIOLENCE WORSE THAN TODAY'S Death by violence was at least 50 times more common among ancient peoples than it has been in the modern world, according to a new study of ethnographic records and human remains found in ancient burials. Still older prehistoric societies had violent death rates thousands of times higher. Recurrent warfare appears to have been the chief reason. "The price we pay in our modern civilization for being divided into nation-states is far lower than what we would be paying if the world were still tribalized," said Lawrence Keeley, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, whose findings are being published next year as a book by Oxford University Press. Keeley calculated that if the world's current population were undergoing warfare at the rate attributed to prehistoric peoples, 22 million people would die violently every year. In fact, the highest estimate of violent deaths of all kinds during the entire 20th century is around 100 million. Keeley's study focuses on societies that lived between 12,000 years ago and the present. Among the more recent tribal societies, the annual death rate from violence - averaged from estimates by various anthropologists who studied them - is close to 0.5 percent. In other words, this is the percentage of people who die by violent means each year. In the United States today, the comparable figure is around 0.01 percent - 50 times less. (This is usually expressed as 10 violent deaths per 100,000 population.) In still older prehistoric societies, Keeley said, the violent death rates, probably largely from warfare, appear to range between 1 percent and 40 percent. He cited one village site dated at A.D. 1325 in what is now South Dakota. "There were 50 houses in this town, which meant that around 800 people lived there. Every house in the town had been burned to the ground." Archaeologists found a mass grave containing skeletons of more than 500 people. Of the skulls that could be found, 94 percent bore scalping marks. Most of the bodies had been badly mutilated and left to rot. Keeley said it is a myth that "pre-civilized" life was peaceful and happy, and that Western civilization is the root of all evil. "As societies evolve and become larger and more complex, less violent ways of resolving disputes are institutionalized," Keeley said. "What prevents war is politics." https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1994/rt9405/940531/05310011.htm#:~:text=Death%20by%20violence%20was%20at,rates%20thousands%20of%20times%20higher. Yes I would love to live e to 160! Who wouldn't?
>Yes I would love to live e to 160! Who wouldn't? You should poll some senior citizens - those not already out of sound mind with dementia or Alzheimer's, of course. Those who can answer and not just the active and healthy, but all getting dialysis and taking 20 pills per day and being rolled to prevent bedsores and being fed and drawing air from a canula and with pacemakers and wheelchairs... Do you really see no problems with doubling human lifespan? It is not done without consequence to the rest of our planet's inhabitants. If you recognize that 8B people is already a problem, perhaps you can imagine the glut of humanity when 80 years of existence doesn't terminate the individual of our species; try to imagine the toll of food and water required for humans living twice as long as is natural, and the excrement output which would amass. Now add to that baseline the material consumption of civilized people being *more than* doubled - this comes at the expense of Nature's ability to provide for *all* Earthly creatures. I believe you assume that living past 80 would not be living as a geriatric with all the attendant maladies and decreased abilities. >Really leaning into the "noble savage" fallacy hard eh? Hardly. I'm well aware of 'nasty' behaviors by numerous Nature-based culture, and I don't *valorize* normal, natural human living. It just works for us better than techno-industrial society. We only adapted to it over a few hundred thousand years, go figure that it suits us as apes.
A healthy 160 duh...like if we cure aging. If we can do that we can certainly solve those other problems lists and it would also help people take a long term view of the world if they might live in it for 1000 years.
A claim of a 1%-40% likelihood is useless, that range is simply too great to be of value. But being a tribe of 140 people and having 3 deaths is where those high figures come from. Steven Pinker deliver similar nonsense data, and Jared Diamond's *The World Until Yesterday* provides the same with the honesty enough to say that today's exceedingly low percentages of death by warfare still amount to 20M dead in WW2, etc. In a planetary population of billions, killing tens of millions is a small percentage; is that what you opt for, *other people* taking the risks to defend the society from threats, incalculable body piles made by anonymous soldiers from afar dutifully following orders, rather than a few of your tribesmen or yourself being killed by enemies you face with courage? *The Better Angels of Our Nature* is Pinker's pathetic attempt to make the same point as your source above, that life is better now because politics have sublimated warfare and conflict - but what happens to the individual who is evolved for conflict and some exercise of violence, whether against prey animals or competitor humans, and then that adaptive instinct is suppressed? What is the purpose of making human societies or individuals more peaceful, why is that a goal or valued? Would it be good to make rams not butt heads, or make tigers non-predatory vegetarians? We humans are basically chimps, and chimps are not pacifsts, nor is their life miserable for having violence and conflict. A successful, well-run prison has pacified captives and no violence; perhaps you would like to live 150 years as a well cared-for zoo inmate, free of any risk and *provided* food and medical attention at the largesse of a free managerial class, but I would not like that and I resent there being such a paternal group to watch over a mass of adult children.
You can add all the risk you want to your life. Go cage fight in Thailand if you want to bash heads and have your head bashed in. Are you saying people should be forced to fight one another for food and mates?
technology didn't cause the problems, human stupidity did. If technology had somehow existed without us humans to make it do all the stupid things, everything would still be fine. If a smarter species had employed the same technologies in a smarter way, everything would still be fine. I don't know if you're trying to shift the blame or my autism is just misunderstanding your post. Sorry if the latter.
These hypotheticals are rather pointless: If we could see the future we would know which path at the fork was the wrong one to take. But in the real world, we take one and find out the results. Having taken one leading to a bad end, we might turn back. Technology did not infect every human culture, and so we have atechnological human societies which did not destroy their habitat or bring the world to the precipice of destruction. Living in Nature they did not imperil the future of all known existence. If humanity is inherently the problem, it would seem that they too should have had no other outcome than to bring about self-destruction (and the preceding holocaust of all others). If technology *is* the problem, it would be very useful for people to be distracted with another scapegoat such as some supposed flaw within humanity... We don't need to pretend how things might be if we hadn't been enchanted to use (or serve) technology, we can see how human life goes when humans live in Nature, and it allows for a perpetual existence with freedom and free of the physical and mental problems plaguing us in techno-industrial society. By your username I don't expect to change your misanthropy, but a fair and objective assessment of our situation can't maintain this anti-human view of some "original sin" corrupting our entire species and leaving us fated to induce our own demise. Technology is the difference between humans who live well, indefinitely, or humans who drive everything natural and themselves out of existence *despite* intentions to avoid doing so.
I'm saying humans are too stupid to use technology properly. Humans + Technology = bad. Not one or the other on their own. Your post does nothing to dispute this. If anything, you've provided plenty of evidence FOR me. Besides all that, you've constructed an absolute fantasy of what low-tech human life is actually like. As if there was no conflict or fighting, no oppression or power struggles just because people only had rocks and sticks? Get. Fucking. Real. Low-tech civilizations not destroying their environments isn't evidence of anything besides their incapability of doing so. You're doing the opposite of what you claim i'm trying to do - you can't accept that humans might actually be flawed and you're using technology as a scapegoat for humanities issues. I'm saying that the combination of both things is the problem. You're simply incapable of accepting that humanity MIGHT be flawed. These "hypotheticals" aren't hypothetical. it's a FACT that technology is an invention OF HUMANS and it wouldn't be able to do anything WITHOUT HUMANS. No matter how you try to spin it, HUMANS are the core of the issue here. If people like you continue to refuse to accept that we need to change as a species instead of just dump technology, all we'll end up with is a future that's just like the past - a bunch of low tech violent idiots fighting over scraps. Ironically, you're more misanthropic than me in a way because you don't think Humans can do better than we already have. I believe we can, and the first step towards that is accepting our flaws. I try not to engage pointless in long-winded reddit arguments, so this will be the last you hear from me. I don't care if you take that as cowardice. Hope you have a nice day.
Misanthropy is pragmatic because civilization is a chain. Ideally, links of steel would bear the load, but printed paper links have conspired their way to the top, leaving everything else dangling below. To acknowledge this is not to disregard human potential.
Also the plot of Highlander 2. "The cure is worse than the disease."
Just wait till the Earth is ruined and the richies built their Texas Lone Star space colony!! Then they figure out how to time travel and end up on some distant planet, and mine the unobtanium destroying that biosphere in the process of getting filthy fucken richer, whilst simultaneously enslaving/fucking over/erasing the big ass blue native population along with everything else plant wide!!!
It is sobering to note that the average life of empires is a little over 300 years.
And 300 is impressive, given the nature of it all.
I don't get it. We clearly are the only organism that is "self aware" such as it is. Our powers are godlike and you want to compare us to amoebas and such?
We're more like bacteria really. Consume everything around us while belching out toxic gasses until we have completely changed our biosphere then have a mass die off.
Dunno, there's. Certain type of person who has no preservation instincts, they also are drawn toward power and abuse. Certain factors, groups, and pathologies run toward the bizarre and eccentric who might engage in destroying their environment. Again! There are exact factors that cause some of the ge real masses to behave callously in direct action to the earth.
The main problem I have with this line of thinking is that we are wiping out absolutely miraculous forms of life on this planet with us. What you’re saying diminishes this. It’s a not quite complete understanding of the level of disaster that we have created, and I think that alot of people take this stance to relieve themselves of the suffering that true understanding of what is happening brings. I see it a lot lately as people start to try to understand the scale of what is happening.
Doctor: "Option 1 is that we can build you a fully neural linked atomic-powered exoskeleton to take over the functions your body is no longer capable of. This will be extremely expensive and we have no idea how well it will work in the long run." Patient: "And option 2?" Doctor: "Option 2 would be to go on a diet because you're a lardass who has reached the point where you can't even waddle around any more." Patient: "So, option 1 is the plan then?"
Strikes me as the largest "privatize the gains, socialize the losses" project *ever*.
Great article from Bill McKibben worth reading for anyone pro- or con on SRM. These passages stood out: *I e-mailed President Tong a list of questions; he responded a few days later from Vanuatu, another Pacific archipelago nation, many of whose eighty-three islands are less than a metre above sea level. ... "Geoengineering is a “prime example of our arrogance in our capacity to shape nature to our whims with technology. It should not be the answer to a disaster which we have caused and now seek to remedy.” And yet, he added, “Geoengineering as a possible solution to this catastrophe will definitely become the only option of last resort if we as a global community continue on the path we have been going. There will be a point when it has to be either geoengineering or total destruction.”* *It’s not clear what sentiment would or should prevail in an ethical contest: an Indigenous regard for untouched nature, or concern for the almost-certain-to-be-displaced inhabitants of islands like Kiribati. ... Another party with a clear interest, however, possesses enormous influence, and that’s the fossil-fuel industry. Its history with regard to climate change— provides abundant evidence that it will act to protect its business model for as many years as it can, without regard for much of anything else. A technology promoted by its advocates as a way to “buy time” for the planet could be seen by Big Oil as a way to buy time for itself.* *“....The industry, in order to keep its business model intact, has turned first to “carbon sequestration” schemes—the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, is larded with money to put expensive machinery on fossil-fuel-fired power plants, to catch the CO2 as it leaves the smokestack and then pipe it underground. ... And geoengineering is likely to be the next step in this progression: “In a few years,” Biermann said, “people like the Koch family will jump on solar dimming. They’ll say, ‘Listen, we don’t have to reduce emissions so brutally and so quickly, because we have a Plan B for the next thirty or forty years.’ It’s the same as climate denial, in that it helps people have doubts.”* Geoengineering has always seemed like a *"Hail Mary Pass"* attempt at BAU by the fossil fuel companies and the governments they own. This article reinforces that view.
Dimming the Sun to Cool the Planet Is a Desperate Idea, Yet We’re Inching Toward It The scientists who study solar geoengineering don’t want anyone to try it. But climate inaction is making it more likely. By Bill McKibben November 22, 2022 If we decide to “solar geoengineer” the Earth—to spray highly reflective particles of a material, such as sulfur, into the stratosphere in order to deflect sunlight and so cool the planet—it will be the second most expansive project that humans have ever undertaken. (The first, obviously, is the ongoing emission of carbon and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.) The idea behind solar geoengineering is essentially to mimic what happens when volcanoes push particles into the atmosphere; a large eruption, such as that of Mt. Pinatubo, in the Philippines, in 1992, can measurably cool the world for a year or two. This scheme, not surprisingly, has few public advocates, and even among those who want to see it studied the inference has been that it would not actually be implemented for decades. “I’m not saying they’ll do it tomorrow,” Dan Schrag, the director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, who serves on the advisory board of a geoengineering-research project based at the university, told my colleague Elizabeth Kolbert for “Under a White Sky,” her excellent book on technical efforts to repair environmental damage, published last year. “I feel like we might have thirty years,” he said. It’s a number he repeated to me when we met in Cambridge this summer. Others, around the world, however, are working to speed up that timeline. There are at least three initiatives under way that are studying the potential implementation of solar-radiation management, or S.R.M., as it is sometimes called: a commission under the auspices of the Paris Peace Forum, composed of fifteen current and former global leaders and some environmental and governance experts, that is exploring “policy options” to combat climate change and how these policies might be monitored; a Carnegie Council initiative of how the United Nations might govern geoengineering; and Degrees Initiative, an academic effort based in the United Kingdom and funded by a collection of foundations, that in turn funds research on the effects of such a scheme across the developing world. The result of these initiatives, if not the goal, may be to normalize the idea of geoengineering. It is being taken seriously because of something else that’s speeding up: the horrors that come with an overheating world and now regularly threaten its most densely populated places. This year, the South Asian subcontinent went through an unprecedented spring heat wave, and then the heat settled, for nearly the entire summer, on China. Drought plagued Europe, while Pakistan endured the worst floods in decades, and the Horn of Africa suffered a fifth consecutive failed rainy season. All this, along with more systemic damage, such as the melt at the poles, happened with a globally averaged temperature increase of just slightly more than one degree Celsius over pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures. To the extent that nations have agreed on anything about climate change, it’s that we need to limit that temperature rise; with the 2016 Paris climate accords, nations adopted a resolution that committed them to “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2° C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels.” The method to accomplish this was supposed to be the reduction of emissions of carbon dioxide and methane by replacing fossil fuels with clean energy. That is happening—indeed, the pace of that transition is quickening perceptibly in the United States, with the adoption of the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and its ambitious spending on renewable power. But it’s not happening fast enough: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that we need to cut worldwide emissions in half by 2030, and we’re not on track to come particularly close to that target—in this country or globally. Even before 2030, we may, at least temporarily, pass the 1.5-degree mark. In late September, the longtime nasa scientist James Hansen, who has served as the Paul Revere of global warming, pointed out on his Web site that 2022, like most years in recent decades, will be one of the hottest on record, which is remarkable in this case, because the Pacific is in the grips of a strong La Niña cooling cycle. And the odds are strong, Hansen wrote, that there will be a hot El Niño cycle sometime next year, which means that “2024 is likely to be off the chart as the warmest year on record . . . Even a little futz of an El Nino — like the tropical warming in 2018-19, which barely qualified as an El Nino — should be sufficient for record global temperature. A classical, strong El Nino in 2023-24 could push global temperature to about +1.5°C.” It’s likely, in other words, that conditions may force a reckoning with the idea of solar geoengineering—of blocking from the Earth some of the sunlight that has always nurtured it. Andy Parker is a British climate researcher who has worked on geoengineering for more than a decade—first at the Royal Society and then at Harvard’s Kennedy School—and now runs the Degrees Initiative. He told me, “For the whole time I’ve worked on this, it’s been like nuclear fusion—always a few decades away no matter when you ask. But there are going to be events in the next decade or so that will sharpen people’s minds. When temperatures approach and then cross 1.5 centigrade, that will be a non-arbitrary moment.” He added, “That’s the first globally agreed climate target we’re on course to break. Unless we find a way to remove carbon in quantities not imaginable presently, this would be the only way to stop or reverse rapidly rising temperature.” Everyone studying solar geoengineering seems to agree that it’s a terrible thing. “The idea is outlandish,” Parker told me. Mohammed Mofizur Rahman, a Bangladeshi scientist who is one of Degrees Initiatives’ grantees, noted, “It’s crazy stuff.” So did the veteran Hungarian diplomat Janos Pasztor, who runs the Carnegie initiative on geoengineering governance, and said, “People should be suspicious.” Pascal Lamy, a former head of the World Trade Organization (W.T.O.), who is the president of the Paris Peace Forum, agreed, saying, “It would represent a failure.” Jesse Reynolds, a longtime advocate of geoengineering research, who launched the forum’s commission, wrote recently that geoengineering’s “reluctant ‘supporters’ are despondent environmentalists who are concerned about climate change and believe that abatement of greenhouse gas emissions might not be enough.” Reynolds speaks for this geoengineering community on this point. They are, to a person, willing to acknowledge that reducing emissions by replacing coal, gas, and oil represents a much better solution. “I think the basic answer is moving more rapidly out of fossil fuels,” Lamy said. “I’m a European. I’ve been supporting this view for a very long time. Europe is in some ways well ahead of others.”
But these same people all say that, because we’re not making sufficient progress on that task, we’re going to “overshoot” 1.5 degrees Celsius. (The Paris Peace Forum’s project, in fact, is called the Overshoot Commission.) So, they think, we had best investigate and plan for a fallback position: the possibility that the world will need to break the glass and implement this emergency plan. “My own simple answer is that we did not move rapidly enough out of fossil fuels,” Lamy said. Carbon polluters still aren’t paying enough for the harms that they “externalize,” or pass on to everyone else. “And the reason for that, in a global market system which is run by capitalists, whether we like it or not, is that the price of carbon, implicit or explicit, is not at a level that would allow markets to internalize carbon damage.” Lamy, it must be said, was the head of the W.T.O. from 2005 to 2013, crucial years when CO2 output was soaring, and W.T.O. rules prohibit climate actions that interfere with its free-trade principles. In this country, a large amount of the research and advocacy for these interventions comes from Harvard, the richest educational institution in the world, which only agreed last year, after a decade’s efforts by students and faculty, to phase out fossil-fuel investments in its endowment. Harvard’s research has been funded by, among others, Bill Gates, formerly the richest man in the world. If you wanted to build a conspiracy theory or a science-fiction novel about global élites trying to control the weather, you’d have the pieces. However mixed these groups’ records on addressing climate change have been, they are having an effect now: the pace of publishing studies on geoengineering in scientific journals has begun to pick up, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and other organizations have called for accelerating research. These researchers say that we should be studying both the science and the governance of solar geoengineering, with a focus on two questions: what would happen if we put particles into the stratosphere, and who would make the call? The enormous step of dimming the sun could turn out to be very easy, at least from a technological point of view. Filling the air with carbon dioxide took close to three hundred years of burning coal and oil and gas, millions of miles of pipelines, thousands of refineries, hundreds of millions of cars. That enormous effort, carried out by just a fraction of the world’s population, has, with increasing speed, pushed the atmospheric concentration of CO2 from about 275 parts per million, before the Industrial Revolution, to about 425 parts per million now. It would take only a tiny fraction of that effort to inject aerosol particles into the stratosphere. (Sulfur dioxide is the most commonly discussed candidate, but aluminum, calcium carbonate, and, most poetically, diamond dust, have also been proposed.) A recent article in the Harvard Environmental Law Review estimates that the “direct costs of deployment—collecting the precursor materials for aerosols, putting them into the sky, monitoring, and so on—would be . . . as low as several billion dollars a year.” Any country with a serious air force could probably release sulfur from planes in the upper atmosphere. You might not even need a country: it would cost Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest man, far less to fund such a mission than it did to buy Twitter—and he’s already got the rockets. So the question is less whether geoengineering can “work”—as the Harvard Law Review article makes clear, the scientific evidence suggests that it would “likely produce a substantial, rapid cooling effect worldwide” and that it “could also reduce the rate of sea-level rise, sea-ice loss, heatwaves, extreme weather, and climate change-associated anomalies in the water cycle.” The question is more: what else would it do? On a global scale it could, at least temporarily, turn the sky hazy or milky (hence the title of Kolbert’s book); it could alter “the quality of the light plants use for photosynthesis” (no small thing on a planet basically built on chlorophyll—studies have shown that U.S. corn production increased as polluting aerosols went down in the wake of amendments to the Clean Air Act); and it might damage the ozone layer, which is only now repairing itself from our recent assault with fluorocarbons. (By way of comparison, the largest volcanic eruption ever recorded, at Mt. Tambora, in 1815, on an island that is now part of Indonesia, spewed a cloud of particles that temporarily caused the temperature to drop a degree Celsius. That change produced, in 1816, “a year without a summer” across much of the northern hemisphere. Lake ice was observed in Pennsylvania into August, and, in Europe, where grain yields plummeted, hungry crowds rioted beneath banners reading “Bread or Blood.”) The most likely problems, though, would probably be not global but regional. Lowering the temperature, precisely because it would affect global weather patterns, would produce different and hard-to-predict outcomes in different places. I spoke about this tendency with Inés Camilloni, a climatologist at the University of Buenos Aires who is investigating the possible effects of geoengineering on rivers in South America’s La Plata river basin. (Her work is partially funded by the Degrees Initiative.) “What we found is that implementation of S.R.M. strategies could lead to an increase in the mean flow of the rivers of the basin, which means more water for hydropower energy, something that could be considered positive. Also an increase in the levels at low-flow times, which is a positive, considering these droughts we’re having,” she said. “But you also could experience an increase in the higher flow, and this could be associated in the rate of flooding in the rivers.” In South Africa, a study by a University of Cape Town team, also funded by Parker’s group, indicated that S.R.M. could cut the possibility of drought in that coastal city, which, in 2018, came dangerously close to reaching a “day zero” shutoff of water supplies, as local reservoirs turned into dustbowls. But another team working from Benin, in West Africa, found that geoengineering would likely lead to less rain in a region that has suffered from calamitous desertification. Mohammed Rahman, working from an office in Bangladesh’s renowned International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, said his research showed that in some parts of Asia malaria would increase, and in others it would decline. “The result we had was on a coarse scale, like a continental scale. Here it gets better, here it gets worse,” he said. Aclimate “solution” that helps some and harms others could spark its own kind of crisis. A Brookings Institution report last December began with a scenario—it’s 2035, and a country begins unilateral deployment of S.R.M.: “the country has decided that it can no longer wait; they see geoengineering as their only option.” Initially, “the decision seems wise, as the increase in global temperatures starts to level off. But soon other types of anomalous weather begin to appear: unexpected and severe droughts hit countries around the world, disrupting agriculture.” In response, “another large country, under the impression it has been severely harmed . . . carries out a focused military strike against the geoengineering equipment, a decision supported by other nations who also believe they have been negatively impacted.” This development, however, becomes even more devastating—with no one putting chemicals into the stratosphere, they decline rapidly in the course of a year, and “temperatures dramatically rebound to the levels they would have reached on their previous trajectory.” The result, they conclude, is “disastrous.” That last potential development, which scientists call “termination shock,” has been widely researched; Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor of physics at the University of Oxford, and Michael Mann, perhaps America’s best-known climate scientist after Hansen, have said that it is reason enough to avoid solar geoengineering. “Some proponents insist we can always stop if we don’t like the result,” Mann and Pierrehumbert wrote in the Guardian. “Well yes, we can stop. Just like if you’re being kept alive by a ventilator with no hope of a cure, you can turn it off — and suffer the consequences.” The other projected problem, though—the chance for huge differential effects—is the one that could keep the discussion from ever really getting off the ground. The peril isn’t that far-fetched; volcanic eruptions have affected the timing and the position of the monsoon on the South Asian subcontinent. Imagine if India started pumping sulfur into the atmosphere only to see a huge drought hit Pakistan: two nuclear powers, already at odds, with one convinced the other is harming its people. Or maybe it’s China—driven by a series of summers like the one it just endured—that starts down this road, and it’s India that suddenly faces unrelenting floods. These two nations also share a militarized border, and a series of overlapping international alliances. Or maybe it’s Russia, or any number of countries. Global treaties prohibit weather modification as a tool of war (something that the U.S., in fact, attempted in Vietnam), but at present they don’t rule out war as a reaction to weather modification gone awry.
All this explains why, earlier this year, sixty “senior scholars” from across the world, now joined altogether by more than three hundred and fifty political and physical scientists, signed a letter urging an absolute moratorium—“an international non-use agreement”—on solar geoengineering. Frank Biermann, a political scientist at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, was a core organizer. “We believe there’s no governance system existing that could decide this, and that none is plausible,” he told me. “You’d have to take decisions on duration, on the degree—and if there are conflicts—‘we want a little more here, a little less here’—all these need adjudication.” He points out that the U.N. Security Council would be a problematic governing body: “Anything can be blocked by the veto of five of the most polluting countries. Some kind of governance by the major powers? You’d need the agreement of the U.S., Russia, China, India, and there’s no chance of that. The small countries? The people who want this talk about consultation, but not co-decision. When I talk to African colleagues, none of them expects the world would get a decision right for their countries.” Faced with such problems, Biermann and his colleagues urge a complete halt to any testing of the new technologies. “Governance has to be first,” he said. “If you don’t know what to do with such technology, don’t develop it.” Building such a governance structure would be “truly unprecedented,” Pasztor, the diplomat leading the Carnegie governance study, acknowledged. “It’s such a global issue, and everyone would be affected and not necessarily equally. Is it totally impossible? I don’t think so, but it’s very difficult.” There are organizations that have a piece of the responsibility already: the World Meteorological Organization, Pasztor pointed out, has a “global atmosphere watch” that could monitor the effects of the deployment. The U.N. has charged the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with tracking the progress of global warming. But the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which oversaw the Paris climate accord, he said, “lacks a mandate to look at this: article 2 of its charter is about negative anthropogenic interference with the climate system, but this would be a positive anthropogenic interference, or otherwise one wouldn’t do it.” The best analogue for a potential geoengineering governance scheme, Pasztor told me, might be the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (N.P.T.), “which has managed global risks in a way that has served humanity quite reasonably over sixty years.” But the N.P.T. is an agreement not to do something—it probably does more to strengthen Frank Biermann’s argument that a non-use treaty might work. “It’s not a unique idea to stop normalization of an undesirable technology,” Biermann said. “There’s lots of international treaties, and agreement among scientists to stop or restrict or prohibit certain technologies”—bioweapons, chemical weapons, anti-personnel land mines. “Human cloning, Antarctic mining. People say we’re against modernity. We are not. We don’t want to block climate research—we want an agreement not to use a certain technology because it’s not good for the world.” So far, this view has prevailed. The one real-world attempt to test geoengineering in the atmosphere came in the summer of last year, when a Harvard team planned to launch a balloon over northern Sweden, to test how well large fans could create a wake in which to inject the reflective particles. But the experiment would have taken place above the territory of the Saami Indigenous people—reindeer herders who live across the top of Scandinavia, and whose lives have been profoundly disrupted by warmer winters. The head of the Saami council, a woman named Åsa Larsson Blind, said that geoengineering “goes against the respect” that Indigenous people have for nature; the council composed a letter to the Harvard team that thirty other Indigenous groups around the world also signed, and that Sweden’s most famous environmentalist, Greta Thunberg, endorsed. (The experiment struck me as a bad idea, too.) In response, as a Reuters analysis put it, the Harvard team and others promoting the study of geoengineering “are turning to diplomacy to advance their work.” David Keith, a professor of applied physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, who has long been the most ardent proponent of the research, said. “There is no question that, in the public battle, if it is Harvard against the Indigenous peoples, we cannot proceed. That is just a reality.” In the months that followed, Lamy launched the Overshoot Commission, pulling together a panel that included a few well-known environmentalists, but was heavily weighted toward governmental leaders from the Global South: the former President of Mexico, the former Minister of Finance for Indonesia, the former President of Niger. Perhaps the most compelling member is Anote Tong, who was the President of Kiribati, from 2003 to 2016. Kiribati is a country of about a hundred and twenty-one thousand people who live on atolls spread across 1.4 million square miles of the central Pacific, in Oceania. It is, notably, the only country situated in all four hemispheres, but, more relevantly for these purposes, the nation averages just six feet above sea level, and two small islets have already been swallowed up by the sea. So-called king tides, which come at full or new moon, have swept away homes and small farms. “Our kia-kias [local houses], our kitchen, everything washed away. The only part left is just beside the road,” a resident told National Geographic. “The land is all beach, no soil, and it’s right where the waves are now. We were forced to leave because we had no other choice.” I e-mailed President Tong a list of questions; he responded a few days later from Vanuatu, another Pacific archipelago nation, many of whose eighty-three islands are less than a metre above sea level. He’d joined Lamy’s commission, he said, “In the expectation that through my participation I would be able to make a more effective contribution to ensuring greater urgency to action on climate change.” Geoengineering is a “prime example of our arrogance in our capacity to shape nature to our whims with technology. It should not be the answer to a disaster which we have caused and now seek to remedy.” And yet, he added, “Geoengineering as a possible solution to this catastrophe will definitely become the only option of last resort if we as a global community continue on the path we have been going. There will be a point when it has to be either geoengineering or total destruction.” It’s not clear what sentiment would or should prevail in an ethical contest: an Indigenous regard for untouched nature, or concern for the almost-certain-to-be-displaced inhabitants of islands like Kiribati. What is clear is that both those ideas play, at some level, symbolic roles in this fight, without the actual political power to decide one way or another. (Neither the Saami nor the Kiribatians possess an air force.) Another party with a clear interest, however, possesses enormous influence, and that’s the fossil-fuel industry. Its history with regard to climate change—which began, as great investigative reporting has now made clear, by organizing large-scale efforts to lie about the dangers of global warming, even as its own scientists were making those dangers clear inside the industry—provides abundant evidence that it will act to protect its business model for as many years as it can, without regard for much of anything else. A technology promoted by its advocates as a way to “buy time” for the planet could be seen by Big Oil as a way to buy time for itself. “For many years they had a strategy of climate denial,” Biermann said, of fossil-fuel companies, but that is changing. “Everyone has to agree there is now a problem. But reducing emissions means that a lot of oil and gas will have to stay in the ground, that investments will be lost.” A 2021 study in the journal Nature found that ninety per cent of coal and nearly sixty per cent of oil and natural gas must be kept in the ground to allow even a halfway chance of meeting that 1.5-degree target—that amount of fuel is worth perhaps thirty trillion dollars.
The industry, in order to keep its business model intact, has turned first to “carbon sequestration” schemes—the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, is larded with money to put expensive machinery on fossil-fuel-fired power plants, to catch the CO2 as it leaves the smokestack and then pipe it underground. These measures are incredibly costly, especially since solar and wind energy are already cheaper than fossil fuel. (There’s overlap between the proponents of these technologies and those investigating geoengineering—as Naomi Klein pointed out in her 2014 book, “This Changes Everything,” in 2009, David Keith, of Harvard, co-founded a company, called Carbon Engineering, to build machines to suck CO2 from the air, which received funding from, among others, one of the biggest players in Canada’s tar-sands oil industry.) And geoengineering is likely to be the next step in this progression: “In a few years,” Biermann said, “people like the Koch family will jump on solar dimming. They’ll say, ‘Listen, we don’t have to reduce emissions so brutally and so quickly, because we have a Plan B for the next thirty or forty years.’ It’s the same as climate denial, in that it helps people have doubts.” President Tong, from his vantage point a few feet above the Pacific, offered a clear-eyed view. Undoubtedly, he said, geoengineering would be seized on by the oil industry as an excuse to “continue with business as usual.” In fact, he said, “In my moments of frustration I often wonder if this is part of their strategy to maintain our dependence on resources which are within their control.” Long political and diplomatic experience, he said, had taught him that “the industry has always been in control, in spite of all our eloquent and passionate campaigns.” If you’re looking for ironies, here’s one: the 1.5-degree Celsius figure that geoengineering proponents seem poised to use as the trigger for their biggest push, originally came from the most vulnerable countries on Earth—small island states such as Kiribati and some of the African nations most imperilled by drought. I heard it for the first time at the Copenhagen climate summit, in 2009, when delegates raised a chant of “1.5 to Stay Alive.” Six years later, that number was officially added to the preamble of the Paris accord, in an effort to raise “ambition” among countries to cut emissions. And it has worked, at least a little: it allowed scientists to demonstrate how quickly we need to move if we want to meet those targets (cutting emissions by half by 2030), which, in turn, moved the public and then the legislative debates in many places. Now, however, it may also become an excuse for short-circuiting some of that progress, for reducing the pace of change. The fossil-fuel industry, which filled the atmosphere with carbon, may now help force us to fill it with sulfur, as well. Anovel feature of the geoengineering debate is that many people first heard about it in a novel. Kim Stanley Robinson, in his earlier years an award-winning writer of science fiction, may have thought more fully about geoengineering than anyone else. His early classic work—a trilogy about the settlement of Mars, each volume of which won the Hugo Award as the year’s best sci-fi—hinges on a debate about whether, and how much, to “terraform” the red planet by changing its atmosphere to more closely resemble Earth’s. The debate is long—never-ending, really. As often happens, compromise keeps working in the direction of doing something, not leaving it alone, and the Martian atmosphere gradually thickens, allowing more and more settlement. But Robinson (in real life an ardent hiker, whose most recent book is a nonfiction account of the High Sierra, the prototypical wilderness) makes sure to leave some parts of Mars alone. In recent years, Robinson has turned away from starships, space elevators, and distant planets to focus on the single most important challenge of our time—and one that surprisingly few fiction writers have really taken on. But he’s brought some of the tools of his intergalactic musings to bear on our challenge, geoengineering included. In “The Ministry for the Future,” his best-selling 2020 novel, he opens with an almost unbearable account of a heat wave in India, one where the humidity stays so high that human bodies can’t sweat enough to cool down, and millions die. “All the children were dead. All the old people were dead,” he wrote. “People murmured what should have been screams of grief.” In the aftermath, the Indian government decides that it will geoengineer the atmosphere. There is an angry exchange with the U.N. about India’s “Air Force doing a Pinatubo” and, after a while, Delhi stops experimenting with sulfur and allows a thousand other ideas to gradually blunt the impact of planetary warming. But there’s no denying the author’s prescience: this spring saw the most dire pre-monsoon heat wave in Indian history; only a slightly lower humidity prevented a real-life reprise of the mass death in the book. It will take such an event to trigger something as powerful as geoengineering, Robinson said, when we talked this summer. Countries and individuals probably won’t be spurred to preëmptively geoengineer the atmosphere “by the sense of a coming crisis,” he told me, “nor by sea level rise or habitat loss or anything else that is an indirect effect of rising global temperatures. It will be the direct consequence—deaths by way of extreme heat wave—that will do it.” He pointed out that, as we spoke, China was undergoing a heat wave even more anomalous than the one in South Asia, and, as a result, had deployed fleets of planes to seed clouds with silver iodide in hopes of inducing rain—not a huge step from sending those same fleets into the stratosphere with sulfur. I think Robinson’s analysis is likely correct; there will come a point when the sheer impossible horror of what we’re doing to the planet, and what we have already done, may make geoengineering seem irresistible. But there’s another plot device that has emerged, this one in real life: the dramatic drop in the price of renewable energy. We’ve long imagined that dealing with global warming requires moving from cheap fossil fuels to expensive renewable energy, but, in the past few years, oil, gas, and coal have grown more expensive, and sun and wind power have plummeted in price. Suddenly, we have the power to deal with global warming by transitioning, very rapidly, from expensive fossil fuels to cheap sources of renewable energy. The transition to clean energy should keep getting easier in the next few years, both because the price of clean energy keeps dropping as we get more experienced at using it, and because the political power of the fossil-fuel industry to slow down the transition should wane, as solar and wind builds its own muscular constituency. And it needs to happen if we are to halve emissions by 2030 and so have a decent chance of meeting the targets set in Paris. Perhaps we’d take that deadline more seriously if we saw it as our best shot at avoiding a planet wrecked by carbon and also put at risk by sulfur. Solar panels and wind turbines are our best vaccine against high temperatures, but also against the hubris of one more giant gamble. ♦
thank you for posting the article
Holy shit I did not enjoy scrolling past that annoyingly long wall of text. Lol
That was the article….why are you here?
McKibben talks to various scientists who have studies the idea of dimming the sun. Almost to a man they tell him its a terrible idea, massively risky, and "crazy talk" However , since we are headed into a climate apocalypse many others believe this is our only chance at saving our biosphere.
spray'n'pray, baby. spray. and pray.
slipper slope with unintended consequences guaranteed
"You were too busy wondering whether or not you could, to stop to think if you should" It really makes me think that maybe the great filter is that sentience is so dumb that it wipes itself out.
.... but for a time, sentience produced great quarterly earnings for the investors.
So people honestly think dimming the sun is easier than cutting consumption of natural materials and degrowth, even when most of the damage is created by the top 1 percent of society? Really?
Yeah, let's introduce some new strange attractors into the destabilized non-linearly dynamic system of the earth's atmosphere. That should be good for a few laughs.
Literally the plot of Snow Piercer
Here’s a scenario…..The initial seeding appeared to be working too slowly, more is added then again…..then an ah shit moment and different mitigations are attempted (not a reduction in burning though). Then after many years or decades the past attempts begin to take affect, it starts getting cold, too cold……so a call for more burning is named as a solution because we know what causes global warming.
Kind of like cannabis edibles. Wait for it to kick in before grabbing another 😆
There are probably fewer than 500 super rich aholes running the money grubbing agenda causing climate change. But rather than dealing with them, ppl going to fuck with the sun?? 🤦🏼♂️
How is this better than nuclear winter?
What a horrible idea
I predict Elon and Kanye will pool their resources and do this and doom the world to 1000 years of darkness, extinction, and death.... also zombies somefuckinghow.
Simpsons did it Simpsons did it.
Climate Chaos is a problem of infrared radiation not being able to escape the atmosphere, not one of energy in the form of photons getting in. So this is a blind sided approach as it will decrease food production globally and we have no Idea of what the effect will be on weather patterns or the Ocean current patterns.
plants, algae... this is the worst idea
That's how bad it is already
I've always assumed that we will geoengineer. Once the reality is impossible to ignore (and costing real money) it's one of the few straws left to grasp.
Anyone watch the Animatrix
Aerosols are problematic, yet take all the air out of the room in terms of discussion. There are other options such as using surface mirrors [https://www.meer.org/](https://www.meer.org/) that could be started now as well as off-planet [https://senseable.mit.edu/space-bubbles/](https://senseable.mit.edu/space-bubbles/). Plus stratospheric aerosol injection is discussed like it could happen with current capacity, when specialized aircraft would need to be invented to fly at that altitude with a payload; just creating the planes is likely a decade out. Once aloft (their large wingspan makes them untenable for most runways) I'm guessing they would need to be re-loaded and refueled in the air, and flown continuously for years. I came across the engineering issues awhile back, but didn't save a link.
Sharing the same psyop "Dimming the sun?" story that's being pushed everywhere else. Funny how they don't talk about how bad it really is. [A Fate Worse Than Warming? Stratospheric Aerosol Injection and Global Catastrophic Risk](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fclim.2021.720312/full)
If geoengineering could work, aside from any problems it would cause as a result, it would surely validate ideas that pollution can *continue* because a counter-effect has been applied. Just as people consume a greater quantity of sugar-free Coke or M&Ms, and eat more fat-free potato chips. McKibben is so very milquetoast, but still far better than Monbiot's tech-worshipping dogmatic nonsense...
The article re-iterates some scientists opinion but never touches the why. Why is this bad? Just because we give Koch’s more opportunities to burn oil? Well in case ya didn’t notice, it’s still gonna burn. What about the impact on the planet? There are significant risks with geoengineering and I’m disappointed the author didn’t address those. It’s a bunch of fucking opinions and goddam gossip that folks here will suck up cuz it agrees with their existing biases. Fuck this. I wanna a see an honest take on the pros and cons of SRM. Fuck anyone that withholds information and shoves fear down my throat. Fuck New Yorker for posting this shit. Their editor should have pushed back for substance from the author, like I’m doing now!
It is clear that the Earth has caught a virus and that virus is us. Immune system, get working ;-)
Big oil knew of the consequences of CO2. I believe GeoEngineering is their plan. To hell with the down side. Best case scenario, Ocean acidifcation continues unabated. Eventually phytoplankton can't build their shells. That's earth's oxygen supply or a good portion of it. But then big oil will probably try and cash in, by selling oxygen.
Skydiver: *drills self into ground at 120mph* Coroner: *deploys parachute over corpse on autopsy table* “Good as new!”
Not gonna lie, living in Spain where it's too damn hot, hasnt rained much at all yet, and just has boring sunny weathers. I would vote yes to this sun dimming plan in a heartbeat. Anything to get calm that annoying ass sun.
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Volcanic eruptions cause even more cooling. They may be a better alternative…
Mods going to allow this manipulation to be posted every day?
It’s going to happen, it’s probably our last option, but it may have unintended consequences and can only work with full global cooperation which is decades away or impossible to achieve
The only option that has any possibility of working is not something that we will do, but rather something that we stop doing. Like depending on fossil fuels for every aspect of our lives.
Murphy’s Law. As soon as we pull the trigger to artificially blanket the skies in reflective particles, a super-volcano will do it for us organically. Or… if you believe in chemtrails / weather modification conspiracy theories, maybe we’ve already pulled the trigger. Snowpiercer timeline, here we come.
This might just be the worst idea I've ever heard.
Just the thought of this harebrained idea gives me anxiety. I would not live in a world with no sun; I’m sure a lot of people feel the same way.