Dec 4, 2024 11:00 PM
Responsible sci-tech restraint versus rising alarm/panic in the context of "noble causes or activism"
https://undark.org/2024/12/03/unleashed-...g-climate/
EXCERPTS: The concept of using technology to change the world’s climate, or geoengineering, has been around for a couple of decades, although so far it has been limited to modeling and just a handful of small-scale outdoor experiments...
[...] In the best-case scenarios, successful geoengineering experiments could put a pause on or slow down the warming of Earth’s climate, buying time for decarbonization and perhaps saving lives. But other possibilities loom too: for example, that a large-scale experiment could trigger droughts in India, crop failures, and heavy rainstorms in areas that are wholly unprepared.
Indeed, skeptics sometimes associate geoengineering with supervillain behavior, like a famous episode of The Simpsons in which the robber baron Mr. Burns blocks the sun. They warn that outdoor experiments could set humanity down a slippery slope, allowing powerful billionaires or individual countries to unleash hazardous technologies without input or agreement from the public more broadly, all of whom would be affected.
Such an approach could also distract people from expanding decarbonization efforts. “Geoengineering doesn’t tackle the root causes of climate change; it’s arranged to counter some of the impacts, but it involves intervening in Earth’s systems at an absolutely enormous scale,” said Mary Church, the geoengineering campaign manager for the Fossil Economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law.
But now that human-caused climate change has accelerated, and with devastating effects already underway around the world, what previously appeared to be a risky Hail Mary technofix has gained respectability. Some scientists, including Ricke, as well as some environmentalists, political officials, and business leaders now call for tests of geoengineering technologies that could one day be used in an ambitious, or perhaps desperate, attempt to artificially cool the planet.
Such outdoor experiments, these proponents argue, could demonstrate a particular approach’s utility and finally assuage critics’ concerns. Talk of solar geoengineering has become so widespread that people on the fringe, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Donald Trump’s pick to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, have even espoused the conspiracy theory that the government, or Bill Gates, is already funding such experiments, through airplanes’ “chemtrail” emissions (which have always been of water vapor, not secret chemicals)... (MORE - missing details)
https://undark.org/2024/12/03/unleashed-...g-climate/
EXCERPTS: The concept of using technology to change the world’s climate, or geoengineering, has been around for a couple of decades, although so far it has been limited to modeling and just a handful of small-scale outdoor experiments...
[...] In the best-case scenarios, successful geoengineering experiments could put a pause on or slow down the warming of Earth’s climate, buying time for decarbonization and perhaps saving lives. But other possibilities loom too: for example, that a large-scale experiment could trigger droughts in India, crop failures, and heavy rainstorms in areas that are wholly unprepared.
Indeed, skeptics sometimes associate geoengineering with supervillain behavior, like a famous episode of The Simpsons in which the robber baron Mr. Burns blocks the sun. They warn that outdoor experiments could set humanity down a slippery slope, allowing powerful billionaires or individual countries to unleash hazardous technologies without input or agreement from the public more broadly, all of whom would be affected.
Such an approach could also distract people from expanding decarbonization efforts. “Geoengineering doesn’t tackle the root causes of climate change; it’s arranged to counter some of the impacts, but it involves intervening in Earth’s systems at an absolutely enormous scale,” said Mary Church, the geoengineering campaign manager for the Fossil Economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law.
But now that human-caused climate change has accelerated, and with devastating effects already underway around the world, what previously appeared to be a risky Hail Mary technofix has gained respectability. Some scientists, including Ricke, as well as some environmentalists, political officials, and business leaders now call for tests of geoengineering technologies that could one day be used in an ambitious, or perhaps desperate, attempt to artificially cool the planet.
Such outdoor experiments, these proponents argue, could demonstrate a particular approach’s utility and finally assuage critics’ concerns. Talk of solar geoengineering has become so widespread that people on the fringe, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Donald Trump’s pick to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, have even espoused the conspiracy theory that the government, or Bill Gates, is already funding such experiments, through airplanes’ “chemtrail” emissions (which have always been of water vapor, not secret chemicals)... (MORE - missing details)