The White House cautiously endorsed the idea of studying how to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface as a way to limit global warming in a congressionally mandated report that could help bring efforts once confined to science fiction into the realm of legitimate debate.
A giant space umbrella!
So much easier than regulating like 6 companies.Even if we achieve full decarbonisation, the damage already done won’t go away. This would be a last resort, though because no matter how much research you do, it’ll never be possible to really predict what would happen.
One nice thing about these sorts of countermeasures is that if they turn out to have bad side effects it’s easy to just stop doing them.
Anything that ain’t targeting those companies looks like deflection. Seriously.
I am convinced that there is no way for this to possibly go wrong.
Wanted to reply the exact same.
Sure, blocking the sun will surely be easier and more effective than taxing the rich assholes causing climate change.
In fact, it very well might be. I recall reading about a study done a year or two back that concluded that a fleet of high-altitude aircraft injecting calcium carbonate particulates into the stratosphere could counteract anthropogenic climate change for a cost of about $2 billion per year.
Ok but how do we put ads on it?
You paint this block material on people’s face. I meant people who aren’t billionaires.
Big dropping a giant ice cube in the ocean energy
It’s nothing like that. It’s an entirely different idea from the same episode!
Isn’t this how Snowpiercer started?
Or Termination Shock.
The Matrix as well.
Sigh. Every single time on Reddit, I’d pop open the comments on a thread about geoengineering and do a quick text search for “Snowpiercer”, and there it would be. And now on the Fediverse too.
It’s a terrible idea to be making any sort of real-world policy decisions based off of Hollywood action-adventure sci fi movies, whose purposes is to sell tickets by presenting a scary danger that the hero can battle using kickflips and chokeslams or whatever rather than being remotely realistic in how they treat the scenario.
Wouldn’t want to spend valuable political capital regulating the companies that consistently defraud our country and prop up our enemies, foreign and domestic.
It would be a real shame to lose the pittance they bribe our elected leaders with ever since the unelected council of robed octogenarians said bribery is legal.
Does that mean conservatives will have to admit that climate science is real? They would rather die (and kill us all) than admit any form of science is real, so I can’t imagine they’d agree to any helpful resolution on climate change.
And we are fucked: https://youtu.be/dSu5sXmsur4 (kurtzgestat)
I plan to give more credence to whatever results the climatologists who study this come up with over what a science popularizer on Youtube says.
Kurtzgestat is generally one of the best YouTube channels for actually researched topics. If you wait till they end or skip to the end they provide a full list of actual papers and their citations. You are welcome to back check their work as well.
Since the dawn of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun…
If this is what we are aiming for instead of just fixing the things causing the problems
Then maybe we should just consider letting global warming do its thing.
I think it’s too late to actually fix the problems.
Pretty much. Guess I should have Saud “work on the problems.” Like we could be trying to do better, and instead of working on the things that got us to this point, a lot of them were left alone. And instead the plan is to work on blocking out the sun.
Yes, it’s obviously more complex. And yes, there has been a bigger push for green energy. But we could be forcing even more change instead of this
You say “just fixing the things causing the problems” as if that’s something that’s easy, or even doable. It’s not.
I really don’t get why people are so opposed to simply studying options like this. If you’re really convinced that the world is doomed anyway, why does it bother you whether studies like this are done?
Where oh where is the Highlander when you need him?
THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!
