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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34370 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Assume that it works, why would it?

If there were no consequences of climate change until a known point in time and geo-engineering would be an immediate success, there would be no advantage to implementing geo-engineering prior to the known point in time at which consequences would occur. Do you expect geo-engineering to be an immediate success?

Yes? I've seen numbers run that for somewhere in the high ten figures you could have planes spraying enough particulates to counteract any reasonable amount of added CO2 -- it's not hard, and wouldn't take long.

Now that you mention it, doesn't it usually make more sense to see whether something is actually a problem or not before taking extreme measures to correct the possibility that it might become a problem ~50 years from now?

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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