I did a two-year post-doc in a climate modeling lab at a major research university studying exactly this proposal. I have peer-reviewed publications on it. I cannot overstate what a bad idea it is. It would kill--at minimum--tens of millions of people, and set off the worst refugee crisis the world has ever seen as global precipitation patterns shifted--and those are the effects we know about. Once we start it, we will have to run it indefinitely or incur absolutely apocalyptic snap-back temperature increases.
Still, I will be absolutely flabbergasted if we don't implement this sometime in the next 15 years. It's cheap, effective at controlling temperature increases, and will let us continue to kick the can down the road for meaningful climate action.
Drought in moist regions, floods in arid regions, massive shifts in farming methods that would be necessitated by famine/crop failure, drying of wells and rivers that provided drinking water.
Primarily precipitation pattern shifts. Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is highly likely to result in less precipitation falling globally overall, but it's really the distribution that's worrying. Our natural model for this--the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the 1990s--caused an almost perfect inversion of global precipitation patterns: places that usually get a lot of rain turned dry, and places that are usually dry got a lot of rain. The effect was detectable for more than two years, and appeared and disappeared right along with the temperature reduction signal.
Here's the precipitation anomaly and Palmer Drought Severity index data for 1991 and 1992, immediately after the eruption. Warmer colors mean less water:
Computational modeling of SAI has indicated that this was not a fluke, and that the degree of change will likely increase with more aerosols in the stratosphere. Both elements of the switch are bad: if you're used to dry conditions, excess precipitation brings flash flooding, erosion, and mudslides. If you're used to rainy conditions, a lack of precipitation brings drought, famine, and fire. SE Asia--and other places that rely on a stable seasonal monsoon--are likely to be especially hard hit, and we have every indication that the shift would be permanent for as long as we kept up SAI. That's why I said it would set off the worst refugee crisis in the world's history.
Do you have sources to read about this? I'm very curious about it having seen it bought up over and over again. Always thought that it was gonna blowback on us bad even if it bought some time
Would it be rude to ask for am article to read about this? Or an effort post if that works better for you. I knew this was considered to be a bad idea but I never saw any hard details
Pah, scientists. Always so pessimistic. Do you remember what they said about Corona and masking? And it wasn't so bad at all, barely a cold. Few million old, poor people died but look at the economy!
I remember back around maybe...15 years ago or so? There was a lot of fearmongering about the Bad Guy Countries potentially doing this because they want to be "lazy" and don't want to invest in green energy.
Well, now that China is the #1 producer of green energy, suddenly all the capitalist bootlickers are insisting we should scorch the sky Matrix style to own the commies.
I had to see a both sidesed video in school where it presented one of the drawbacks of green energy as "will we have to say goodbye to the American way of life?" Even I saw the situation as American businessmen and governments alike simply being too lazy, too hedonistic to do the right thing. We all know it's the right thing to do, but nope too lazy.
Even as a liberal kid that was an enthusiastic yes from me. Brits were on one side getting unviersal healthcare and living in a beautiful country with tons of architecture and I'm stuck on some boring ass shithole with nothing to do but go to walmart and consoom corn syrup?
I suppose if I was this much of a ghoul, I'd also be deathly scared of socialism because there's no way someone who's ready to gas the whole planet is only a Nazi about this one specific thing.
By the way, Ive been saying for years that they are 100% going to do this shit. They are going to keep the pedal to the floor on carbon emissions until it becomes impossibility to ignore any longer and then sell this as a magical technocratic solution. This is going to be a liberal consensus position in like ten years
yeah, we should totally reduce and disrupt the constant source of clean, pure energy streaming into the earth which drives the biosphere's staggering complexity, so we can keep burning the concentrated, dirty pockets of stored and buried sunlight from millions of years ago that is overheating the place and polluting our bodies, air, land, and water.
Yeah but why wouldn't they want to spend a bunch of money to make their solar panels 1% less effective for the benefit of the US imperial order? Just makes sense really.
It's probably appropriate for Americans (and Amero-weebs aka "guys who think they're on the team but absolutely are not" (looking at you Eastern Europeans who love America)) to stop this cope over PERSONAL WEALTH and consumption as a measure of a nationstate's wealth overall.
By every measurement I can think of and data exists for, China's population is "wealthier" than America. Oh, except in the areas of, you know, the shitty things. Like concentrating wealth in a top 1% and top top 0.1% of families. Or endlessly consuming shit for no purpose other than to distract from your meaningless life. As far as what I'd call true measures of a nation's wealth, things like (nutritious) caloric intake and availability, literacy rates, availability of healthcare (meaning the cost as well), child and adult educational opportunities and attainment, public works projects like building roads, energy grids and production ability, building rail and high tech trains... on and on. America has been declining for at least ~50 years in all of those areas. As in it just gets worse and worse. While China has been going up and up and skyrocketing in the recent decade or two.
This kinda cuts into the roots of the "GDP discussion" or rather the insistence of capitalist-minded (or biased) economists and random people on using the irrelevant GDP figure to "show" that capitalism and the US/EU specifically are "superior" economically. Goes back to the USSR as well and now days it's still moronically being clung to. A measurement of economic consumption means nothing about the "wealth" of nations. Unless your only measure of wealth is how many PlayStations can you buy...
Of course all the discussions of economics between US/China also leaves out the obvious history of one nation being a settler colonial slave state turned into dominant imperial power post-world war 2. That only makes the current state of the US more pathetic. The biggest head start perhaps in history, built on immeasurable human suffering, only to throw it all away so that Elon can jump on stage and try to do an X with his body, while people are homeless on the streets and the state can only find endless funding to support genocide. I don't think future civilizations (or whatever species might replace humans as the dominant intelligent life form if we blast ourselves from existence) will even believe what they are reading when they learn about the last few hundred years. It's just beyond comprehension
Are you sure you and your lot aren't just trying to sell us something? I think people forgot there's other smart people in the world other than folks in the tech industry.
The tech sector seems to have a high concentration of people who believe that because they understand one complex thing, they must inherently understand other complex things
"I can program well in 5 languages therefore my opinions on economics are valuable"
Especially when talking about air pollution, the literal textbook case of negative externalities. Just throwing bad sounding terms at things you don't like.
They genuinely think some bazinga movie plot involving aerosols and asteroid mining is a more realistic way of fighting climate change than overcoming capitalism
I said it before and I’ll say it again: Aren’t techbros supposed to be smart?
Learning coding and engineering is no joke, so I’ll give them that. But seriously how are people that smart but still so much of them can be so foolish? I’m guessing self-interest is just one hell of a drug.
A lot of engineers are actually sympathetic towards implementing a planned economy to reduce emissions. They just don't make it to the news or are promoted by social media algorithms.
Maybe this is below criticism, but saying "all the smart people I talk to in tech" has no clear difference from "all the people I agree with who I talk to in tech" when you're making an argument like this.
i am smart (for proof, please see my tweet and note my use of the word ‘conversely’). therefore, anyone who disagrees with me is stupid. anyone who agrees with me is smart.
Smarts don’t make you an expert on climate dynamics, and I don’t trust some guy on Twitter to be a good judge of “smart”. The phrasing is pretty telling though “smart people I know”, vs “people smarter than me” means he’s including himself among the “smart people” pushing for this.
Tech people are the worst at believing their specialized knowledge of one tech field makes them experts in all fields, including history, economics, and branches of science mostly unrelated to their own.
Socialism is when people try to prevent climate change, and the more climate change they prevent, the more socialister it is, and when they prevent it completely, that's communism. And it will kill a million bajillion people.
Imagine if we created a better world instead of actively worsening the already shitty state of it. That would be horrible (I assume - it's the only thing that would explain how we behave ... thats it we are just evil assholes).
"Externalities" are a capitalism thing because it externalizes the environment and many other things for the sake of perpetuating an abstract economy based on capital accumulation. An economy based on rational use of resources wouldn't externalize those things in the first place.