some scientists say we should begin…
Article says two scientists say that, and 400 more have signed a letter saying DO NOT FUCKIN DO THAT
Trash journalism
I know. Instead of doing what we know needs to be done, let’s come up with an over-complicated geoengineering solution that we absolutely do not have the capacity to manage or even predict the outcomes of!
what could go wrong?
Well that sounds like a plan that can’t possibly go wrong.
If real life was a Roland Emmerich movie, this article would be paying on the TV in the background while the protagonist eats one slice of toast from the massive breakfast spread his wife has prepared before running off to a shit job.
Well…
The alternative is that it will go much MUCH more wrong very soon.
Also, technically we already have been geoengineering this world to shit for centuries by pumping massive amounts of co2 into the atmosphere. Removing it will take decades to a century, waiting for it to dissolve by itself will take multiple centuries while we’re baking.
Getting that CO2 out by scrubbing and converting and storing it will require about double to triple the amount of energy we got from burning fossil fuels FOR THE PAST CENTURIES. We’d need to dedicate 30-50% of the world’s energy output to CO2 scrubbing for centuries, basically. And in the meantime we are stuck with the results of our CO2 rampage.
Meanwhile, pushing sulfuric compounds into the stratosphere would lower solar energy reaching earth, it would make things cooler,temporarily. These compounds would dissipate much faster than CO2 so their effects would also disappear much faster.
Again, we already sort of did this before and we had the results, temperatures were temporarily lower, due to enormous air pollution. Removing air pollution actually made global temperatures worse due to the CO2 still being there.
So how about instead of again polluting the crap out of our lower atmosphere, we push specific compounds in the higher atmosphere. We can use airplanes to do this, just add it in small doses to the kerosene.
This will temporarily lower temperatures, we bake less, survive better whilst we spend double, tripple to ten times more on the energy we use, because that is what will be required to return the world to normal.
