Blacknbengal
Well-Known Member
The Enormous Risk of Atmospheric Hacking
Solar geoengineering is the ultimate, break-the-glass response to the climate crisis—and one we should back away from for now.
This man-made equivalent of a permanent cloud of volcanic ash might disrupt the monsoons over Asia; it will definitely allow the oceans to continue acidifying; and, as the climate scientist and geophysicist Raymond Pierrehumbert points out, it gets us ever farther out on a limb, because, if we’re masking increasing carbon with sulfur, we’ll never be able to stop without triggering a period of accelerated warming. “The disastrous consequences of termination shock would grow as we cower year after year under the flimsy stratospheric sunshade,” he wrote, “hoping that technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere on a massive scale becomes practical before disaster strikes.” It’s also worth imagining how whoever does engineer the sky will be blamed for every weather disaster henceforth—it’s bad enough trying to deal with the cascade of nonsense about green energy causing the Texas power outages.