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Geoengineers think they can slow climate change. The catch? No more blue skies.
(link.houstonchronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
76 points (95.2% liked)
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Sure... we can totally invent a hundred different solutions soon™ that mean we can just keep burning fossil fuels like we really, really want to.
Okay... they will actually never work and we will irreversibly damage our planet. But that's okay, because the people telling you those fairy tales will have made a lot of money by then. And that's also worth something, isn't it?
I have to wonder how this would impact fossil fuel competitors like solar and wind, given that both are driven by the sun. I'm sure these rich bastards would love to kill two birds with one stone.
Shit. I hadn't even considered making solar less viable as a side effect, too...
Wind is largely driven by the sun too, so it's something to consider.
It's fine though, we already have the solution. Basically. I mean, I've marked it in my calendar, so we're basically halfway there already. Now get off my back about all the CO2 pollution we get rich off.
Feels like this will just delay the warming, just like the sulfur dioxide pollution. And then crops yield will reduced, famine will be widespread. These billionaires would rather find a non-solution than to commit to the known solution.
Billionaires are doing everything they can to usher in the apocalypse and I have no doubt this is another chess move.
Fool us into thinking this will save the climate. In reality it will likely only make shit worse for everyone.
Most climate scientists aren't keen on geoengineering. Things aren't bad enough we need to do this yet.
The course we're on is bad enough that we should talk about it and potentially plan it though. Unless we want to continue to wait until it is too late, just with everything else regarding climate change.
This isn't anything new, sulfur dioxide has been brought up time and time again, it's horseshit and doesn't solve the problem. We can geoengineer the climate by increasing algae/seaweed production significantly. It's like everyone forgets that algae/seaweed already sequesters the most carbon dioxide out of any carbon sink already. Spraying shit into the air isn't going to lower the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
How do I mail a demon core?
Get a demon core first?
Check.
Now what?
Buy a cheap box truck, find someone desperate. Offer him $20k to make minimal stops and blow all the weigh stations.
I like that you mentioned weigh stations for some reason. I used to be good at skirting those when I worked for a sketchy outfit. Two man show: boss and me, and I was too young to ask the right questions.
Very very carefully, drop it in a postbox and run!
Since the question specifically asked about mailing, I specifically recommend one of those hard sided Pelican cases, with the cut-to-form foam inserts.
You'll pay a fortune in postage.
I'm not sure if the postal service routinely scans parcels with a Geiger counter. If they do, you might consider paying an even larger fortune to ship shielding.
The real engineering challenge is the mechanism that triggers the criticality event. Demon core was able to kill the people it killed, because they were using jankety-ass stuff like screwdrivers to hold the hemispheres apart. Getting a mechanism that works reliably when you want it to, and not when you don't is hard. For the first few years of nuclear weapons, it was not allowed to insert the nuclear pits into the bombs until the plane had taken off with positive attack orders. Imagine trying to jimmy a core into a bomb casing in the bomb bay of a B-29 while it's traversing 800 nm of hostile waters to Japan. Sounds crazy, but that's what they did.
Anyhow, mechanisms are hard. It took at least twenty or thirty years to get to something that has a "reasonable" level of safety. And if you see the blue light, you're probably already a goner.
Isn't this exactly how "Snowpiercer" starts?
Yeah. That's a very low-probability outcome though; we're much more likely to end up doing something like redistributing rainfall in a way that leaves us without enough food.
Okay, so say it works and we reduce warming. Our atmosphere is still filled with more CO2 than it should be, thus making it more difficult to breathe. So we’d have a dark, oxygenless planet with everyone wearing suits or at least carrying around oxygen canisters that they probably have to buy from a machine.
Not a world I want to live in.
Ah yes of course. We can't even agree if methane will have an accelerating effect or if methane simply breaks down too fast to have a significant effect. The obvious solution is to add more things and see if it helps. Great plan!
Ah yes of course. We can't even agree if methane will have an accelerating effect or if methane simply breaks down too fast to have a significant effect.
They aren't suggesting to pump methane in the atmosphere.
The obvious solution is to add more things and see if it helps. Great plan!
That's our current course already, 
Bad wording on my part. I mean that we cannot even agree on the effects one more heat-trapping gas would have, and now we plan to add yet another thing that apparently caused a year without summer. Forgive me for having little faith in people that thinks we should pump some other crap up there and see what happens.
We do actually agree on that adding more greenhouse gasses is bad. Just because methane breaks down quicker does not mean it is beneficial for our already heating climate. The people who argue against it are typically part of the agriculture lobby, specifically cattle herders etc.
We have seen a similar bullshit resistance with coal miners and the argument of "clean coal". Or with ICE cars and how badly EV batteries are or how they're powered by dirty power plants, etc. It's all bad faith bullshit.
This article reads like it was written by two people fighting over the same keyboard.
And a million years after the skies have darkened we'll realize there is a whole universe to kill... wait, I've read that storyline somewhere.
Link doesn’t work
Edit: their server IP is on one of the DNS blocklists I subscribe to
Tested here and it seems to work. In what way does it fail for you?
DNS error, I tried without WiFi and it works so somebody must have reported their IP to a RDNSBL.
Link worked fine for me.
Can it be green?
Not easily; probably end up gray/white if we do this.
We just need to find a way to grow a film of algae in the sky around the planet. Food source. Absorbs some of the heat which is the big problem most know about climate change. And it's a fun colour. Win win win
And after that, space whales.
That definitely doesn't sound ominous. "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
I've been talking about this issue for years, though not very loudly since it's considered a "conspiracy theory". Interesting that it's starting to be taken more seriously. Must be about to happen on a level that can't be ignored, if it isn't already. Real nightmare-fuel. (Pun intended.)