• ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    We’ve spent over 100 years geoengineering the climate, and the people doing the most have known about it explicitly since the 1950s and 60s.

    I mean… everything we do or don’t do is engineering of some sort. Apparently cutting sulfur from all international shipping container fuel reduced the low level “contrails” (not sure of the terminology for ships) and is probably responsible for this year’s spike in ocean surface temperatures. So is that “geoengineering?” Or was the sulfur “geoengineering?”

    Fuck these scientists. They’re almost certainly not going to be suffering from the extreme heat and weather and sea level rise and erosion nearly as much as the global poor.

    We NEED to be engineering the shit out of this, complete with risk assessments and simulation and small scale tests and knowledge building. With backup plans and big red emergency stop buttons and everything.

    The dumbest thing we could possibly do is just blanket ban engineering the climate. We had a chance to do that 120 years ago when it became obvious what fossil fuels were doing and would do. It’s far, far too late now.

    • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      You didn’t read the article.

      They’re calling for more research into geoengineering. They just don’t want governments going off half-cocked with under-researched “solutions” that might make things much worse.

      Governments should also allow academics to investigate the possibilities of geoengineering, chiefly in the form of solar radiation management, which involves attempting to reduce the amount of sunlight striking the Earth’s surface, for instance through whitening clouds to be more reflective, or setting up mirrors in space.

      What they’re arguing against is the kinds of solutions fossil fuel companies are pushing as a way to allow them to continue polluting. Fuck the scientists? These are the people trying to stop climate change.

      “Geoengineering, like direct air capture, is a deeply uncertain techno-solution that fossil fuel executives love to push to take pressure off their core business of selling oil, gas, and coal, which, as more and more people are realizing, is causing rapid and irreversible destruction of our planet’s habitability,” he told the Guardian. “Fossil fuel elites will use geoengineering as an excuse to continue business-as-usual. As a climate scientist, my worst nightmare is continued fossil fuel expansion accompanied by solar geoengineering followed by termination shock. This would be game over for human civilization and much of life on Earth.

    • pc_admin@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      Fuck these scientists. They’re almost certainly not going to be suffering from the extreme heat and weather and sea level rise and erosion nearly as much as the global poor.

      Ummm… since when are scientists wealthy? As far as I’m aware they usually make pretty meager salaries!