this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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In Silicon Valley, a Rogue Plan to Alter the Climate | Some restless entrepreneurs are releasing pollutants in the sky to try to cool the planet. (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

Sulfur dioxide added to the atmosphere through human action does contribute to reducing global temperatures. There's a Nature article about it. From their abstract:

In 2020, fuel regulations abruptly reduced the emission of sulfur dioxide from international shipping by about 80% and created an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock with global impact.

Ships had been emitting a lot of SO2 and the effect of abruptly stopping that is apparently quite large:

a doubling (or more) of the warming rate in the 2020 s compared with the rate since 1980

In other words, the laws against SO2 emission by ships are making global warming twice as bad. It's ironic that environmentalists are contributing as much to global warming as everyone else put together.

The guys running this company sound like loose cannons, but it may take a loose cannon to overcome the bias that institutions have towards doing nothing rather than taking an action that involves risks. It's true that adding SO2 to the atmosphere may have serious unintended consequences, although the huge amount that ships had been adding until recently wasn't catastrophic. However, doing nothing as the planet keeps warming will definitely have serious unintended consequences! It's the trolley problem: these guys are pulling the lever and their critics are saying "They're going to kill one person!" but if the critics had their way, five people would die.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Tropospheric so2 is a problem for reasons beyond warming.

Stratospheric so2 might not be a problem, but geoengineering is always risky.

Plus, since so2 is significantly more reactive than co2, it will be removed from the atmosphere more quickly, meaning that it can only act as a temporary mask without constant maintenance. All-in-all, it’s probably best to see how much damage we are doing early on before we find ourselves in the so2 equivalent of credit card debt and slowly poisoning ourselves to death trying to stay cool.

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