In addition to actual reporting, the NYT creates newslike ads for the fossil fuels industry. This results in disproportionate attention on high-risk approaches that involve anything other than phasing out fossil fuel use.
In this case, it hasn’t been happening intentionally at a meaningful scale; you’d be able to look up and see the thin haze from it, and use a spectrometer to figure out that it’s not water vapor.
What has happened is that ordinary sulphur mixed with fossil fuels has produced particulates lower in the atmosphere. These turn into sulfuric acid when in contact with water, resulting in acid rain. Policies to sharply lower sulfate particle emissions have resulted in that becoming far less of a problem, but also accelerated warming in recent years.
This petro puppet proposes perverse pseudoscientific prattle
Delusional, just insane.
Technology will not save us, but guillotines will.
?
Global warming is nothing but a math equation at the end of the day. Change the input value, change the result.
The real problem is what you do with all the snakes after they eat the mice.
It’s a bit more than a math equation; things like how much ice there is are meaningfully path dependent. Just dropping CO2 concentrations won’t get us back the world we had.
Blocking the sun is not a practical solution. Putting something up in the atmosphere is untested and super dangerous. It could cause all life on Earth to die out like the Matrix.
Physically blocking the sun is also practically impossible. It requires that we put an object in space in a Lagrange point (gravitationally stable points around Earth) which is very far away and the sun shield would have to be approximately the size of Brazil. Launching that much material into space and getting it into position, and then unfurling it would be a HUUUUUUGE undertaking the likes of which we have never seen. Plus, launching all those rockets, mining the materials, etc, would emit so many tonnes of green house gasses that by the time we actually did it we might be in an even worse position.
Hey, I’ve seen this one
If you let a sabretooth tiger loose into a playground full of unsuspecting children in order to catch the rats that are eating all the shrubs, does it fail catastrophically? Or was it just catastrophic to begin with?
In the struggle against human-caused climate change, this is a completely new avenue for humans to change the climate.
There are a bunch of issues:
- It requires maintaining technical infrastructure for longer than civilizations last
- It changes the pole-to-equator temperature gradient, altering weather patterns worldwide
- It changes rainfall distribution in ways that we’re not clear on yet, potentially risking agriculture
- If we keep on burning fossil fuels but limiting temperature increase with a scheme like this, we still end up with ocean acidification, killing off pretty much everything with hard body parts in the oceans
Never in the history of humanity did any experiment cause unintended harm, ever. Except that one time. Oh and all the other times, fair. But… Well yes, there were those toads. And the camels. But that’s it! And … Well, all the rabbits as well. Ah screw that, I’m going home.