Philosoraptor

I promised a few folks (@[email protected] @[email protected]) over on this thread an effort post about stratospheric aerosol injection today. My doctorate is in philosophy, but I did my PhD work on the foundations of climate modeling and complex systems theory, and I ended up in a climate lab for two years as a postdoc, where I worked explicitly on this proposal. Long story short, we should not be doing it. Here's what it is, how it works, and why I think it's a bad idea.

There's a ton to say here, so I'm going to just start with a kind of general overview of the proposal and why it worries me. Folks can ask questions if they want to, and I can go into more technical detail or give references on any part of it that folks are interested in. I'll try to get to any serious comments eventually, but I do have a job and shit. OK, here we go.

Very large volcanic eruptions release a truly mind-boggling amount of volcanic shit into the atmosphere, including compounds known as sulfate aerosols. Sulfate aerosols are small droplets of sulfur-based chemicals that aren’t quite liquid and aren’t quite gaseous. When they get into the upper atmosphere, they can block significant amounts of incoming solar energy, preventing it from getting down to the Earth’s surface where it would otherwise get stuck thanks to the greenhouse effect. This has a major cooling effect: the last big volcanic eruption, 1991’s Mt. Pinatubo, reduced incoming sunlight by 10% and decreased global temperatures by about 0.5 degrees C for two years.

If we wanted to, we could intentionally release similar aerosols into the atmosphere (probably either with high-altitude balloons or literally shooting them into the stratosphere with specialized guns; they need to get way too high up for planes to disperse them). High atmospheric winds would rapidly spread aerosols released near the equator to cover the globe, and with enough aerosols, we could potentially cool the planet off enough to cancel out a quadrupling of GHG concentrations. If successful, such a plan could prevent sea level rises, save the glaciers, and prevent many other extreme weather events that we anticipate would accompany drastic temperature increases. The total cost is projected to be something like $50 billion per year, which is just absolutely insanely cheap by the standards of effective global environmental policy--it's something on the order of 1% the cost of totally retooling the global economy away from fossil fuels.

OK, so what's the catch? Well for one thing, global temperature increases aren’t the only consequences of climate change (that’s why we call it “climate change” instead of “global warming”). CO2 in the atmosphere turns to carbolic acid in the oceans, endangering marine life and disrupting ecosystems on land and at sea; aerosol injection (like all SRM plans) would have no effect on ocean acidification. Plus, all that sulfur in the upper atmosphere would start eating away at the ozone layer again, potentially undoing all the progress we’ve made toward closing the ozone hole (remember that?) since banning CFCs two decades ago. Perhaps most worryingly of all, decreased sunlight plus a stronger greenhouse effect would wreak havoc on the water cycle across the globe by decreasing evaporation and changing rainfall patterns. In the years after Pinatubo blew, worldwide rainfall dropped to more than three standard deviations below normal. That’s a gigantic decrease: to use an (imperfect) analogy, a difference of three standard deviations in adult male height in the United States is the difference between someone who is five feet and eight inches tall and someone who is six and a half feet tall. The years after Pinatubo’s eruption saw droughts over much of the world, many of them severe. Moreover, the drought wasn't equitably distributed: traditionally dry places (like the middle east) tended to get a lot of precipitation immediately after Pinatubo, while traditionally wet places (like SE Asia and the Amazon basin) got much, much less. Both of these are very bad. And that eruption, remember, only cooled the planet by 0.5 degrees: the effect on rainfall is expected to increase with greater aerosol concentrations, and this plan would call for enough to cool the planet by 4 degrees C or more. The effect on agriculture the world over could very well be catastrophic--arguably just as bad (or worse) than the damage done by warming alone.

We may reach a point where the benefits outweigh the costs--particularly if we continue not reducing our GHG emissions--but who’s to say where that point lies? There’s no way to target this plan by region: either we do it to the whole globe, or we don’t do it at all.
Are we comfortable asking farmers on another continent to sacrifice their livelihoods for the sake of other nations’ unwillingness to reduce CO2 emissions? Should we be comfortable with that? Who even is "we" here?

How much agreement among nations is enough to take this plunge? If the citizens of every nation but one decide that the sacrifice is worth it, would we be justified in starting the program even over that single nation’s protests? What if it’s two nations objecting? What if it’s just under half? These are not idle questions--not mere hypotheticals of the type that concern few but moral philosophers inside the seminar room--but real decisions we could be facing before the century’s out, and I’m very worried that we are in no way ready to handle them. Considering the difficulty we have making tough decisions inside individual nations, I can’t even imagine how we’d even begin to deliberate about this as a species.

But the really scary thing about aerosol injection--the thing that really keeps people who work on this up at night--is just how easy it really is, and how difficult to stop it would be once the compound was released. If a Peter Thiel or an Elon Musk (or an Exxon-Mobil) decided to initiate a program like this, it would be almost impossible to stop them if they managed to get started; we’d just have to wait for the aerosols to fall out of the atmosphere, a process that could take years even after the emissions ceased. The same goes for a single nation that decides such a program is in its national interest and elects to go it alone, full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes--or, in this case, damn the rainfall. Would we go to war to stop this from happening? Would we go to war to make this happen, should we decide it’s in our national interest? Either way, the implications are deeply troubling.

Because the residence time--the amount of time a compound hangs around in the atmosphere before it decays or precipitates out--of aerosols is so much shorter than that of greenhouse gases (sulfur dioxide has a residence time on the order of months, as opposed to decades or centuries for most greenhouse gases), once we start this program there's really no turning around. We're almost certain that it would reduce the temperature, but then we've got a tiger by the tail: either we keep pumping more compounds into the atmosphere forever, or we stop. If we stop, the aerosols--which, remember, are not gasses but rather small droplets of liquid--fall out of the atmosphere entirely within a year or two. Suddenly, all that warming that they've been masking is back, only instead of seeing 4+ degrees warming spread over a century, we see it spread over 24-36 months. It's impossible to overstate how catastrophic that would be, both for human civilization and ecosystems. It would leave the world with no adaptation time. That means we need to keep this technology running with nearly 100% uptime for an indefinite period into the future, or end up worse off than we would have been if we'd just done nothing. Because it's so cheap and easy to start, it would be really simple for a billionaire (or single nation) to just start doing this in secret without the world noticing until the temperature reduction signal became detectable by the scientific community at large. At that point, we're locked in and the single-actor geoengineer has effectively taken the world hostage. This fucking sucks for obvious reasons.

There's more to say here (for instance, there's some evidence that change to precipitation patterns is at least partially a function of release location, and so who gets impacted in what way depends in part on how and where the injection is performed), but I feel like this is enough of a start. I can dive into more technical detail if people want.

"Why isn't she running away with it?" David Brooks asks. Turns out, it's because of woke! It's also because Democrats insist on hating oil, and generally catering only to the most extreme of the extreme left--if only she would pivot to the center! Some of the most distilled, unfiltered bullshit I've ever seen, even considering the source.

Despite only being trained to detect the "big six" (cannabis, cocaine, fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine, and MDMA) drug dogs are somehow magically able to provide probable cause to search packages that their chud handlers think might have abortion medication. The cops explain this by saying that abortion drugs are commonly packaged around narcotics.

Preprint of a new paper examining the material conditions that give rise to internationally recognized scientists just came out. The authors argue that if we were actually recognizing and nurturing scientific talent, we'd expect the family income distribution of Nobel laureates to be roughly normal (i.e. most Nobel winners would come from families with incomes around the 50th percentile). Their results very much do not bear this out: the average Nobel winner grew up in a household in the about the 90th percentile of income no matter where they grew up, with disproportionately large numbers coming from the 95th percentile and up. This strongly suggests that academic achievement, especially at the highest levels, is not a meritocracy, but rather limited by the material conditions of birth.

I know, but the size of the effect is really staggering.

Paper here

This is an almost incomprehensibly bleak update.

We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis. For many years, scientists, including a group of more than 15,000, have sounded the alarm about the impending dangers of climate change driven by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and ecosystem change (Ripple et al. 2020). For half a century, global warming has been correctly predicted even before it was observed—and not only by independent academic scientists but also by fossil fuel companies (Supran et al. 2023). Despite these warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, the 3 hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024 (Guterres 2024), and current policies have us on track for approximately 2.7 degrees Celsius (°C) peak warming by 2100 (UNEP 2023). Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage. We are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence. We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo (supplemental figure S1; CenCO2PIP Consortium et al. 2023).

Last year, we witnessed record-breaking sea surface temperatures (Cheng et al. 2024), the hottest Northern Hemisphere extratropical summer in 2000 years (Esper et al. 2024), and the breaking of many other climate records (Ripple et al. 2023a). Moreover, we will see much more extreme weather in the coming years (Masson-Delmotte et al. 2021). Human-caused carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases are the primary drivers of climate change. As of 2022, global fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes account for approximately 90% of these emissions, whereas land-use change, primarily deforestation, accounts for approximately 10% (supplemental figure S2).

Our aim in the present article is to communicate directly to researchers, policymakers, and the public. As scientists and academics, we feel it is our moral duty and that of our institutions to alert humanity to the growing threats that we face as clearly as possible and to show leadership in addressing them. In this report, we analyze the latest trends in a wide array of planetary vital signs. We also review notable recent climate-related disasters, spotlight important climate-related topics, and discuss needed policy interventions. This report is part of our series of concise annual updates on the state of the climate.

Link

This is a long shot, but I'm trying to replace the water pump on my wife's 1988 Toyota pickup. The guy who put the last pump on used a TON of RTV liquid gasket to seal it on, and it might as well be fucking welded in place for all it will move. It's an aluminum engine, so I'm trying not to attack it with a chisel or anything too violent. Any comrades here with car mechanic experience got any tips? I'd prefer not to drop the $400+ the mechanic is going to charge to do it.

I was sure it was going to be professional genocide ghoul Shapiro. Color me surprised.

In 2023, the CO2 growth rate was 3.37 +/- 0.11 ppm at Mauna Loa, 86% above the previous year, and hitting a record high since observations began in 1958, while global fossil fuel CO2 emissions only increased by 0.6 +/- 0.5%. This implies an unprecedented weakening of land and ocean sinks, and raises the question of where and why this reduction happened.

Despite the incredible, unprecedented work of The Most Progressive President of Our Lifetime in the US, global carbon emissions continue to accelerate. However, in general carbon that's introduced into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels doesn't always just stay there; in fact, most of the time most of that carbon gets absorbed by one or another carbon sink as part of normal geosystemic processes. These sinks include getting sucked up by plants as part of photosynthesis, dissolving into the ocean to marginally raise its pH (mostly this one), or reacting with rocks on the surface to from new minerals. The upshot is that a lot of the warming potential of the fossil fuels we've been burning has been averted by the natural carbon cycle absorbing much of our collective waste.

This natural absorption showed an alarming drop off in 2023, even as carbon emissions continued to rise. This is very, very bad and is setting us up for warning and other climate change impacts that may happen far in advance of what our models predicted--decades instead of centuries.

Liberals not being total losers challenge (difficulty: impossible)

Loser energy at levels never thought possible before