Instead we just have a bunch of moderate liberal democracies who are institutionally incapable of doing anything significant.
Awesome burn! :D
a group of nations can do it without needing very much political energy.
I mean, if your plan is “convince people or governments to do a thing” rather than “do this thing myself”, you’re gonna have a bad time. It’s probably within the scope of an individual NGO or maybe a hella determined individual to pull this sort of thing off, no? I guess you’d have to try, and see if anyone decided it was illegal after you started!
Hey, important question: I liked your first two links at the top of this post, were there any others you found helpful in your own research? I’ve been meaning to do my own research on what geoengineering stuff would be effective.
Added: Ok, I spent a few hours actually reading science and looking into it. So this says the “make clouds over the ocean, so light + warmth gets reflected back into space” strategy has “the capacity to balance global warming up to the carbon dioxide-doubling point”. Which is like two to fourish degrees C. Which I can’t find a figure on how long that’s expected to take, except we went from like 355 to 415 ppm from 1991 to 2019. So this is roughly a century of warming you’d be undoing.
Further, the MCB seems like a very solid approach. I didn’t get a good quantified feeling for how big of a deal various types of non-warming climate are though. Any info there?
Note that you could (maybe) just do a fifth of the full version of Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB): spend a bit less and do it over less of the ocean, and then be like ” ‘oops’ I’m done funding this, but wow it lowered global temperatures by 0.4 C (hopefully a statistically significant difference?), guess someone else better fund it now”, and then see if anyone takes the bait, and then use the rest of your money for something else.
But overall, MCB seems… like the effect size might be enough to justify unilaterally doing it even though it’s not a great game theoretic idea. I’d have to think more about that part of it, but unless I come up with something better, I’ll fund it once I have a spare couple billion.
My preferred approach would be seeding political pressure. Focus on the conservatives, who will, with a little convincing, be eager to believe that there is a way to continue living as they have without anything changing. Then disarm the liberals. Then finally help Extinction Rebellion to see this thing they’ve been neglecting (you might think there must be some twisted reason they haven’t been talking about it, I suspect their discourse is just fairly centrally controlled, I can find no evidence of it having ever been discussed in the larger exposed body of the egregore, it simply hasn’t come up). Then the politicians will hear them all. The soil does seem receptive. One would think that if it were, the fruit would have already grown by now, this technology has been on the table for at least 25 years, but if the medium has not been conductive, maybe we are the part of the medium that’s been failing to respond.
I found most of my info by looking through news articles after hearing Bjorn Lomborg on econtalk. I think it was a critical post on an ideologue’s blog that lead to the royal society.
I’d say: stop wanting MCB to work out so much. Don’t just hope that it’s gonna get approved, mate. Convincing people of stuff if fricking impossible. I think you’re seriously overestimating how likely this is.
Awesome burn! :D
I mean, if your plan is “convince people or governments to do a thing” rather than “do this thing myself”, you’re gonna have a bad time. It’s probably within the scope of an individual NGO or maybe a hella determined individual to pull this sort of thing off, no? I guess you’d have to try, and see if anyone decided it was illegal after you started!
Hey, important question: I liked your first two links at the top of this post, were there any others you found helpful in your own research? I’ve been meaning to do my own research on what geoengineering stuff would be effective.
Added: Ok, I spent a few hours actually reading science and looking into it. So this says the “make clouds over the ocean, so light + warmth gets reflected back into space” strategy has “the capacity to balance global warming up to the carbon dioxide-doubling point”. Which is like two to fourish degrees C. Which I can’t find a figure on how long that’s expected to take, except we went from like 355 to 415 ppm from 1991 to 2019. So this is roughly a century of warming you’d be undoing.
Further, the MCB seems like a very solid approach. I didn’t get a good quantified feeling for how big of a deal various types of non-warming climate are though. Any info there?
Note that you could (maybe) just do a fifth of the full version of Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB): spend a bit less and do it over less of the ocean, and then be like ” ‘oops’ I’m done funding this, but wow it lowered global temperatures by 0.4 C (hopefully a statistically significant difference?), guess someone else better fund it now”, and then see if anyone takes the bait, and then use the rest of your money for something else.
But overall, MCB seems… like the effect size might be enough to justify unilaterally doing it even though it’s not a great game theoretic idea. I’d have to think more about that part of it, but unless I come up with something better, I’ll fund it once I have a spare couple billion.
My preferred approach would be seeding political pressure. Focus on the conservatives, who will, with a little convincing, be eager to believe that there is a way to continue living as they have without anything changing. Then disarm the liberals. Then finally help Extinction Rebellion to see this thing they’ve been neglecting (you might think there must be some twisted reason they haven’t been talking about it, I suspect their discourse is just fairly centrally controlled, I can find no evidence of it having ever been discussed in the larger exposed body of the egregore, it simply hasn’t come up). Then the politicians will hear them all. The soil does seem receptive. One would think that if it were, the fruit would have already grown by now, this technology has been on the table for at least 25 years, but if the medium has not been conductive, maybe we are the part of the medium that’s been failing to respond.
I found most of my info by looking through news articles after hearing Bjorn Lomborg on econtalk. I think it was a critical post on an ideologue’s blog that lead to the royal society.
There’s some really wild stuff down this hole. I’ve barely started. Stephen Salter is a key individual, worth reading his files http://www.homepages.ed.ac.uk/shs/Asilomar%20Climate%20Intervention/
Found out about the salter sink yesterday and it’s fucking bananas.
I’d say: stop wanting MCB to work out so much. Don’t just hope that it’s gonna get approved, mate. Convincing people of stuff if fricking impossible. I think you’re seriously overestimating how likely this is.