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There’s a whole cadre of risk averse people who have been putting a damper on all discussion of geoengineering for decades now.
But I think that we will roughly follow the path that’s laid out in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future: we hold off on geoengineering right up until some large scale tragedies happen which are clearly as a result of climate change and then use that as a watershed moment to start spraying stuff in the atmosphere to try and defend ourselves.
The risk reward logic for whoever might start doing it doesn’t work out until there is some terrible event to point to. We prefer the status quo and need a big attention grabbing event to justify any type of big actions that deviate from it.
Of course, once we do start doing it, it’s unlikely we’ll scale up carbon capture technology to truly make that much of a difference IMO, so it’ll just be a game of doing this forever or else deal with the termination shock.
A rational approach would be different than this but our psychology makes a waiting-around-and-then-rushed-panicky-reaction strategy more likely.
I'm not sure what that would be exactly. These disasters would seem to be decades or centuries in the future. Over time, deaths due to natural disasters have become much reduced. Our capacity to deal with weather has increased faster than the climate warming. And in many areas, colder temperatures are still a bigger threat to human survival than warm ones.
To put things in perspective, 500,000 people died from the Bhola Cyclone in 1970. It's nearly inconceivable that we'd experience a weather-related disaster of that magnitude today.
In the book it’s a heat event greater than survivable wet bulb temperatures in India. Once the grid goes down, 20 million people die over the span of a few days.
India reacts by unilaterally deciding to begin solar geoengineering and declares any attempts to stop it as an act of war.
I don’t know how likely an outcome like this is. (The death number is definitely pretty crazy).
But who knows. We are just at the beginning of climate change after all.
One paper that does raise my eyebrows quite a bit is this, estimating that by around 2070 1-3 billion people will be subject to hot climate conditions currently only experienced by 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface (currently represented by just a few parts of the Sahara).
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1910114117
At best that really messes with the economy in those places and the pressure to emigrate skyrockets.
I think humans usually surprise me by our ability to deal with extreme heat. But also, tolerance to any environmental stressor is a threshold function, things can look okay while stresses mount until suddenly at certain threshold we see more dramatic impacts. (Example, rising floodwaters are not a big deal right until the moment the water rises to the level of your front door, then costs/damages suddenly rise dramatically).
Seems like a reasonable premise.
Definitely true. The Earth's surface temperature increased by like 5° Celsius over 1000 years at the end of the last ice age. So it is capable for fairly large swings. And, of course, if it wasn't for human emissions, we would eventually fall into another ice age which would cover much of the Northern Hemisphere in glaciers hundreds of meters thick.
The Earth's temperature fell drastically over the last 5 million years, with deepening glaciations. A snowball Earth might have been our future as plants continued to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#/media/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.svg
So it is imperative for humans to take action to control the climate, setting it to the ideal temperature.
We should start today with small, limited actions to prevent increases in global temperatures. As time goes on and the effects are well-studied and understood we can increase our actions to set the global thermostat. The ideal temperature is probably close to our current temperature, or maybe that of 20 or 30 years ago. I doubt we'd want to go much colder that that.
What is this, though? I agree that we should strive for the capability to set the global thermostat to whatever we want, but there are genuinely diverging interests here. Maybe Burkina Faso wants a year round balmy weather for its tourist industry; maybe Muscovites want to wear shorts in January.
It's still better to have that control than not, and probably there's some clever market design where countries can bid to set the thermostat.
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Like what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization
I am not suggesting these are fully mature technologies or that they would provide a silver bullet. But we can't wait and study forever. We need to try and iterate at small scales and gradually ramp it up.
I am going to do the Yudkowskian thing and ask you to map out in your head what would actually happen if someone began developing and deploying biosphere-level sun-blocking technology, remembering what tends to go down in real history books.
I’m not necessarily against geoengineering, but there are in fact reasons not to go down that path until we need to.
This is a fully generalized argument for never doing anything ever.
Am I capable of mapping out all future worlds in my head? Of course not. Nobody is.
Should we start pushing in the direction of geoengineering? Absolutely. The first step is not to solve every problem in your head before you even start. It's to convince other people that the course of action is the correct one. We need to run before we can walk.
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We have been using that tech by burning dirty bunker fuel high in sulfur and also injecting clouds into the upper atmo with contrails. We just need to ramp that kind of thing up a bit. No need for building a sun shade/super laser mirror weapon at the lagrange point.
We've also been experimenting with dumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in ever increasing amounts for hundreds of years. Are we only allowed to increase the temp or something?
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Just to note I took that part out of my original comment because I felt I was starting to ramble.
But yes, I do see that as the biggest danger. Earth history seems to suggest that extreme swings in the planetary climate have not been uncommon occurrences. Thus it’s pretty imperative to reduce the pressure with which we are poking the beast, IMO.
(Geo engineering may be the most responsible thing to do given that, but reducing greenhouse gas injection is also important).
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