You can mess with the atmosphere to achieve temporary cooling the old-fashioned way (try to blow up a stratovolcano) or in a number of new ways. But the key point is that unlike cutting emissions, it's not a collective action problem. One country can say "fuck it" and go it alone
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The author of this piece is an enthusiast. I'm Slavic and tend to think that massive geoengineering stunts are a way to discover even worse unintended consequences in real time. But the author and I can both agree that this option will grow to dominate the conversation on climate
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If you liked Elon Musk sending up a constellation of satellites to ruin terrestrial astronomy, wait until Elon Musk (or his non-union Mexican equivalent) funds a fleet of planes to spray megatons of sulfur into the stratosphere or seed international waters to get a plankton bloom
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This is one reason I'm so exasperated with the "climate emergency" sophistry that suggests we can still get back to normal if we all agree to eat our metaphorical vegetables. We can't, and dishonesty about it creates room for big YOLO terraforming projects without accountability
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Lots of fairly recent proof of concept that injecting sulfur bigly into the high atmosphere cools the planet. But again, you want decisions on this made by the United World Government and not some plutocrat worried about the ocean eating his beach househttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter …
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My own best case is that nature does us a solid and blows up a volcano or two, giving us a few more years to coordinate on global decarbonization. Or maybe does us a real favor and blows up a megavolcano, solving the problem more directly. The survivors can use all oil they want!
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1970s: sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere is killing our planet 2020s: we must put all the sulfur dioxide we can in the atmosphere to save our planet
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Two available pathways to global cooling by 2100: 1) global coordination on moving the industrial economy off of fossil fuels and cement, with huge transfers of money to the developing world from richer nations 2) nuke a volcano What seems like the more American solution?
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Alternative framing of this same point (inspired by the trillion-dollar coin): as the world we live in gets stupider, ridiculous solutions begin to look smarter
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End of conversation
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It the NYT which makes one ask which billionaire sponsored this piece. My money's on orbital mylar sunshades, a la
@amendlockeThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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