If it was possible I would put quite some money on that geo engineering (like stratospheric aerosol injection) will be seriously discussed on a UN level within ten years. Climate change seems only to speed up and co2 emissions are still rising. At one point there is simply no alternative.
There already is no alternative. The amount of CO2 released is going to stay high for a long time (centuries?). People are dying from the current weather.
For the expected response: We need to also stop making things worse. Humanity can do two things at once.
I also think that this is what will happen (not only discussed) but unless we master fusion it’s practically just fixing a symptom and we’d have to do that for quite a while and the oceans will probably become too acidic.
Fusion would solve a lot, but even if we invent room-temperature superconductors today, it would still take so much time to roll fusion out on a big scale and replace oil infrastructure with electric infrastructure.
I tend to be very pessimistic about climate change, but I hope I’m wrong.
Wouldn’t aerosols reduce solar irradiance globally, hence reducing the rate of photosynthesis globally…which further reduces natural CO2 capture? How would that help?
No. It can be localized (for large scales of localized).
Also, we are finding through putting solar farms on crop fields, sun light is not the limiter on photosynthesis for many plants. Many plants get too hot, loose moisture, and photosynthesis less.
If it was possible I would put quite some money on that geo engineering (like stratospheric aerosol injection) will be seriously discussed on a UN level within ten years. Climate change seems only to speed up and co2 emissions are still rising. At one point there is simply no alternative.
There already is no alternative. The amount of CO2 released is going to stay high for a long time (centuries?). People are dying from the current weather.
For the expected response: We need to also stop making things worse. Humanity can do two things at once.
I also think that this is what will happen (not only discussed) but unless we master fusion it’s practically just fixing a symptom and we’d have to do that for quite a while and the oceans will probably become too acidic.
Fusion would solve a lot, but even if we invent room-temperature superconductors today, it would still take so much time to roll fusion out on a big scale and replace oil infrastructure with electric infrastructure.
I tend to be very pessimistic about climate change, but I hope I’m wrong.
Wouldn’t aerosols reduce solar irradiance globally, hence reducing the rate of photosynthesis globally…which further reduces natural CO2 capture? How would that help?
No. It can be localized (for large scales of localized).
Also, we are finding through putting solar farms on crop fields, sun light is not the limiter on photosynthesis for many plants. Many plants get too hot, loose moisture, and photosynthesis less.
Nah, Sulfur compounds can lower albedo. That’s actually quite possibly what happened here and why we have sudden outlier acceleration.
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/cutting-pollution-from-the-shipping-industry-accidentally-increased-global-warming-study-suggests
Bit horrifying they put that much in the air.
Yea. They were basically burning the tar like leftovers from fuel distillation and there was a lot of heavy tankers moving from East Asia to the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_fuel_oil