this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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The hard lessons of Harvard’s failed geoengineering experiment (www.technologyreview.com)
submitted 6 months ago by silence7 to c/climate
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[–] perestroika 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

“You have to go measure things in the real world, because nature surprises you,” Keith said at that conference in 2017.

He has continually stressed that the amount of material involved would represent a small fraction of the particulate pollution already emitted by planes, and that doing the same experiment for any other scientific purpose wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.

I agree with that. It seems overblown that some folks were opposed to spreading two kilograms of limestone dust and measuring the result.

A single aerobatic flight of an ultralight aircraft with a smoke trail probably requires more pyrotechnical material, not to speak of fuel. Not to speak of a proper passenger or cargo flight. Not to speak of a satellite launch.

People already do the things anyway, only without properly understanding the results.

As for the argument that "then everyone will start experimenting" - well, that depends on the result of the previous expriment, does it not? And some do it anyway. China has a weather modification bureau, Saudi Arabia practises cloud seeding to increase chances of rainfall, etc.

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 3 points 6 months ago

I agree. While I am very skeptical that high altitude geoengineering would work, to me at least this massive fear around studying the upper atmosphere in these ways just makes it more likely that a rouge nation will go ahead with it anyway, precisely because these large margins of errors provide a hope that it could save millions of their citizens lives for negligible cost.

Of course, the other possibility is that it might actually work as expected, we did after all see a big change post fuel oil sulfur regulations, in which case we will have killed more people than died in both world wars purely out of unfounded fewrmongering.

Given the number of real people who are dying today because of climate change, I feel that it is negligent to not at least look into every card we have at our disposal to save lives.