I strongly recommend keeping this idea in your back pocket. There are a few ways to accomplish geoengineering to reduce solar gain with technology we have now. It will cost taxpayers a staggering amount of money, will likely punch down on poorer countries anyway through modified weather patterns, crop yields may suffer, air quality may get worse in ways you can’t imagine, but it will work for a limited time. Right now it’s a game of chicken where we want governments and big business to do anything else first. If we flinch and dim the skies, the petroleum industry will just burn more and faster, throwing away the time we just bought, delaying doomsday by a few decades instead.
The problem is, if we wanted to bring the temperature back down by adding particulate into the atmosphere, we can never stop. Sulphur fuel in ships was a small amount, but to truly save lives I fear we would have to geoenginer the planet. And once we have opened that door there is no going back. The effects of a warming planet would come right back as soon as we stopped pumping particulate in.
I strongly recommend keeping this idea in your back pocket. There are a few ways to accomplish geoengineering to reduce solar gain with technology we have now. It will cost taxpayers a staggering amount of money, will likely punch down on poorer countries anyway through modified weather patterns, crop yields may suffer, air quality may get worse in ways you can’t imagine, but it will work for a limited time. Right now it’s a game of chicken where we want governments and big business to do anything else first. If we flinch and dim the skies, the petroleum industry will just burn more and faster, throwing away the time we just bought, delaying doomsday by a few decades instead.
People are already dying in “poorer” countries. We could do some clouds now to bring the temperature down to levels that aren’t killing people.
The problem is, if we wanted to bring the temperature back down by adding particulate into the atmosphere, we can never stop. Sulphur fuel in ships was a small amount, but to truly save lives I fear we would have to geoenginer the planet. And once we have opened that door there is no going back. The effects of a warming planet would come right back as soon as we stopped pumping particulate in.