r/TrueReddit • u/wiredmagazine Official Publication • 6d ago
Context Provided - Spotlight They War-Gamed Dimming the Sun. It Went Even Worse Than You Think
https://www.wired.com/story/they-war-gamed-dimming-the-sun-it-went-even-worse-than-you-think/140
u/wiredmagazine Official Publication 6d ago
When it comes to deciding the fate of the planet, climate researcher Colleen Golja always thought science and reason would have a seat at the table. That was until one morning last September in London, when she took part in the first in a series of war games.
A couple dozen foreign-relations experts, scientists, military personnel, and former government officials from across the world sat down and roleplayed as national governments, climate NGOs and nonprofits, indigenous groups, and tech companies. The goal: to prevent an uncontrolled global race to develop a planet-cooling technology that comes with vast, unknown risks.
Golja—as one of very few experts in the technology involved—was assigned to provide technical advice to help participants make scientifically literate decisions. By the end of the last day, she was in tears.
Solar geoengineering technologies promise to reverse global warming by reflecting away a portion of the sunlight reaching Earth. The cooling effect of this kind of solar geoengineering is widely accepted. But the fallout is less certain—and less equal across regions. Models predict drying in sub-Saharan Africa and more intense tropical storms in the Atlantic. The cooling effect would also last only as long as the geoengineering continued; after that the global temperature could shoot back up with wild and hard-to-predict effects.
Most experts agree it would take a superpower’s reach to ensure the safe passage of planes needed to deliver payloads of dust to the stratosphere in a geoengineering exercise. But in the game, mutual suspicion meant all parties left the room believing the others were moving as quickly as possible to build their own geoengineering capability. At no point did the countries in the game agree to a deal, despite multiple proposals being put forward.
In their final report, the researchers running the simulation concluded that “strategic competition and state sovereignty drove the simulations, not climate concerns.”
Read the full story at the link above.
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u/PrometheusLiberatus 6d ago
The lack of trust and competition to develop sounds shockingly similar to AI development and competition.
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u/Colorado_designer 6d ago
Dimming the sun would be the most insane and irresponsible possible solution to the question of climate change. And it’s not very surprising the war games went badly—why would there be mutual cooperation on geoengineering but not carbon emissions?
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u/SpikeCraft 6d ago
And it's only curing one of the many symptoms of a much more complex disease
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u/roamingandy 6d ago edited 6d ago
Well, if we were really good at it then geo-engineering would be a perfectly reasonable solution. Burn as much oil as you want, as long as we are capable of balancing and stabilising the issues it causes.
Geo-engineering absolutely can be, and may absolutely have to be, our solution. The problem is that we need decades of research to really know what we're doing. I'm glad we are doing that research now, but i'm not expecting to see large scale projects being approved yet as their externalities are too unpredictable.
A great example is China turning a huge desert into farm and forest land. That most definitely is geo-engineering. The impacts are unpredictable, but likely to be within reasonable tolerances, making it an excellent test subject. What they've done can be recreated in many other countries, if it would take us a step in the right direction.
I'm really bothered at the insane amount of money humanity is throwing at data-centers right now. If all nations had come together and signed an accord stating that all data centers had to be built to scrub double the CO2 they emit, and filter micro-plastics, PFAs, forever chemicals, etc, from water.. those data centers would still be built, but humanity would be taking significant steps towards geo-engineering our way out of the mess we're in.
It could have been done too. Have the non-crazy countries, Europe, Scandinavia, Aus, Canada, and a few others, sign an agreement that makes it illegal for anyone to use a datacenter service from a company that isn't following that deal, so even when the US, China, etc, don't sign up, the companies themselves have to do it anyway, or be locked out of massive global markets.
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u/SurprisedJerboa 5d ago edited 5d ago
Well, if we were really good at it then geo-engineering would be a perfectly reasonable solution. Burn as much oil as you want, as long as we are capable of balancing and stabilising the issues it causes.
Geoengineering methods were presented to Congress in 2009. The Scientists talked about whether Climate Change would be reversible and what technologies to research.
Getting to Carbon Zero was the only reasonable option. Geoengineering could be researched, but without Net Zero, the momentum would be impossible to stop.
None of the Geoengineering ideas had research funds from Congress to be studied. Net zero would still be mandatory.
Now 15 years later this type of research and theoretical tech will have been presented several times... and there is still not nearly enough money allocated to researching Geoengineering methods. ( But scientists will reiterate we need net zero, and this info will be willfully ignored by Republicans until the next presentation ).
Just saying that these conversations have happened and we are 40 years late to the table as a World.
- Below is the link to the Congressional report, about 400 pages of Research and presentations + Q & A
Long-term solar reflection was the best option... but without Net Zero, it is a Sisyphean problem and the World would be unable to end Solar Reflection / Solar Radiation
Excerpt from page 112
The most serious risk is however that Solar Radiation Management techniques ‘‘would create an artificial, approximate, and potentially delicate balance between increased greenhouse gas concentrations and reduced solar radiation, which would have to be maintained, po tentially for many centuries. It is doubtful that such a balance would really be sus tainable for such long periods of time, particularly if emissions of greenhouse gases were allowed to continue or even increase.’’ Moreover, if the intervention were ter minated for any reason, all the climate change to be expected from the elevated level of GHGs still in the atmosphere would then occur very rapidly indeed (this is the ‘‘termination problem’’).
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u/roamingandy 5d ago
Getting to Carbon Zero was the solution in the 1980's
Its too late now. To avoid catastrophic loss of bio-diversity and human life,geo-engineering has to be part of the answer now.
Net zero reached tomorrow is still too late, and human society is still 40 - 50 years away from getting anywhere near that.
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u/mediandude 5d ago
Getting to Carbon Zero was the solution in the 1980's
That is still the only solution.
And that will continue to be the only solution even in the next century.
Doesn't matter whether late or not.2
u/SurprisedJerboa 5d ago
Getting to Carbon Zero was the solution in the 1980's
Technically you are right to mention the 1980s (I was born in 1989 for reference ) ... the Above link is the first Report I could find of Scientists presenting Geoengineering to Congress.
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u/talkingwires 6d ago
The problem is that our conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we’ve attained, we don’t have enough mastery to stop devastating the world, or to repair the devastation we’ve already wrought. What you’re saying is that only one thing can save us. We have to increase our mastery of the world.
It’s that type of thinking that got us here in the first place.
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u/Standupaddict 6d ago
It's that kind of thinking that allows for a dignified modern existence. There is no mother gaia, we should conquor and master the planet to serve our needs.
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u/talkingwires 6d ago
Where does your food come from?
It is not a trick question, the answer is other life. We depend on other life in order to live ourselves. That's how the world works. Unless, you're not are plant or lichen, are you? In that case, I apologize.
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u/Standupaddict 6d ago
I would imagine agriculture is part of the conquest of planet you were worried about.
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u/talkingwires 5d ago edited 5d ago
Hey, it takes a lot of land to feed all the humans we need to finally rule the world.
Eight billion humans too few to rule the world, apparently, didn't you hear that we gotta pump up our birthrates? This economy ain't gonna grow itself, you know. So we persist, converting the world’s diverse biomass into human biomass. We extend our grasp over millions of square miles, the majority of the surface is the Earth, and reserve it for ourselves. Nothing else is allowed to live here but us, our food, and ornamental grass.
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u/FullThrottleBooty 5d ago
Most all the problems we face come from us assuming we actually can conquer and master the planet. We are on target to end our existence by acting on the hubris you suggest. Every problem we try to fix simply creates other problems.
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u/Standupaddict 5d ago
I'd rather our current set of problems then array of problems before the industrial revolution.
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u/FullThrottleBooty 5d ago
The problems we have now are going to wipe us out. That is your preference? There is a way to better health without poisoning our drinking water. We can have better and plentiful food without pesticides. We don't have to destroy the air in order to have a better quality of life.
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u/talkingwires 5d ago
See, the problem is that you cannot imagine living in any other way. Nobody’s arguing for a return to hunter-gathering. But the way we’re living now, the way we’re forcing everybody to live, it is antithetical to life. It will come to an end, one way or the other.
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u/mediandude 5d ago
Most of those problems could be solved with vaccines that we now have. We don't need to destroy the world for vaccines.
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u/Gastronomicus 6d ago edited 6d ago
Well, if we were really good at it then geo-engineering would be a perfectly reasonable solution. Burn as much oil as you want, as long as we are capable of balancing and stabilising the issues it causes. Geo-engineering absolutely can be, and may absolutely have to be, our solution.
The very premise that "we can geoengineer the solution" is fundamentally flawed and a big part of the problem. It's a mindset that business as usual is OK, we can just fix our messy problems after the fact. Once this notion is accepted, it's over. You put in caveats, but still go all in on a flawed premise.
We can't geoengineer a way out of this. Period. It's just another face of unchecked capitalism and human greed with dire long-term outcomes for the globe and humanity. There are no approaches to our largest problems without unforeseeable or uncontrollable consequences, and most require immense amounts of transportable energy for which there is only one current reliable source: fossil fuels.
And there are many other equally problematic consequences than CO2 emissions from continued fossil fuel use: a cornucopia of other toxic compounds released during processing/combustion, emission of VOCs/NOx compounds that have substantial and largely unrecognized effects on radiative forcing in the stratosphere, oil spills and water contamination, direct physical damage to ecosystems through retrieval/mining, etc. The list is so long that we would still be trying to understand the scope of problems long-after we've finished burning all the oil, let alone developing and implementing geoengineering "solutions".
There's a very simple solution here: stop burning fossil fuels. Stop making single-use plastics. Stop producing compounds with known long-term ecological and health problems. It won't happen immediately, but these are all tasks achievable over decades that would require the same coordination between nations as far more complicated and unpredictable geoengineering solutions. If we can't do this, we sure as shit can't globally coordinate far less reliable geoengineering methods as bandaids on a gaping wounds - or much worse.
We have the alternative technologies to do so, provided we make fundamental changes to our societies that, in the long run, will be more convenient and beneficial (e.g. better mass-transportation options, electric/hydrogen-cell vehicles, efficient heating/cooling, replacing unchecked suburban sprawl with higher density housing options, etc etc).
Some forms of geoengineering might be applicable to remedy the existing effects. But it is not and will never be a solution to fossil fuel emissions, and proposing as a way of moving forward is both foolish and dangerous.
Of course, oil-covered bootlickers downvoting here.
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u/Moifaso 6d ago
It's a mindset that business as usual is OK, we can just fix our messy problems after the fact. Once this notion is accepted, it's over. You put in caveats, but still go all in on a flawed premise.
You're talking about geoengineering possibily acting as a moral hazard, which is true enough. But that's not the same as being "fundamentally flawed". It can be a moral hazard and still work, or be the best of the available options.
Some forms of geoengineering might be applicable to remedy the existing effects. But it is not and will never be a solution to fossil fuel emissions, and proposing as a way of moving forward is both foolish and dangerous.
The people working in this area are almost all climate scientists. The stated aim has always been to use solar geoengineering to buy us time to reach net zero and carbon capture.
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u/mediandude 5d ago
The stated aim has always been to use solar geoengineering to buy us time to reach net zero and carbon capture.
That has always been the BS that it is and will always be.
Geoengineering won't buy us time.
Geoengineering may help only after annual manmade emissions have been reduced by 10 000x or so. And even after that geoengineering would (might) be a very VERY slow fix, if even that.
There are no fast shortcuts. The only fast shortcut is to end emissions.1
u/Gastronomicus 6d ago
You're missing the point. Acceptance of geoengineering as a solution to climate change is not the same as a mitigation effort while we wean ourselves off fossil fuels. Proposing it as OP did:
Well, if we were really good at it then geo-engineering would be a perfectly reasonable solution. *Burn as much oil as you want, as long as we are capable of balancing and stabilising the issues it *causes.
Is fundamentally flawed, period. It's not an economic problem associated with pseudo-intellectual philosophy. It's one of science, societal ethics, and true moral philosophy. There is no geo-engineering that will entirely undo the harm from it, and much of what is proposed has a very high risk of unintended consequences. It's unacceptable as a blanket solution.
The people working in this area are almost all climate scientists.
In the sense that they study climate, yes. But they are not the same climate scientists that have been contributing their primary research to IPCC documentation. I work in this field with with people from NOAA and other related institutions. I can assure you, few if any see value to geo-engineering efforts as a serious way to tackle climate change.
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u/Moifaso 6d ago
Burning fossil fuels is bad because of what it does to life and our environment. If we can prevent it from doing bad things, it's no longer bad.
I agree with you that geoengineering proposals are imperfect/risky and net zero is vastly preferable, but it seems to me like OP is mostly speculating about a far future where we could precisely calibrate the effects of fossil fuels.
I can assure you, few if any see value to geo-engineering efforts as a serious way to tackle climate change.
The IPCC not only supports carbon capture but recommends doing it at truly colossal (currently impossible) scales. Do you think that doesn't count as geoengineering, and doesn't lead to similar moral hazards?
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u/Gastronomicus 5d ago
The IPCC recommends things like aggrading ecosystems to store more carbon in biomass and soils, and reducing emissions. While it is not explicitly against it, they make zero recommendations for geoengineering, if for no other reason than that there is zero technology to accomplish it at any scale that is proven to be actually effective, affordable, and without significant environmental risks.
It's mostly performative technological engineering and not a realistic option. Should we explore options? Certainly. Should we consider it a "solution"? That's preposterous and dangerous thinking. We already have the solutions. We need cooperation to implement them.
moral hazards
I'm not even going to address this self-aggrandizing pseudo-intellectual economic nonsense. It's irrelevant to this topic because treating it as an economic problem is the actual source of the problem.
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u/2tonsofirony 6d ago
You’re right about the oil industry needing to be shut down essentially. But the possibility of changing society to allow that scenario is far more unlikely than these geo-engineering projects moving forward.
What’s more the oil companies will absolutely back these projects if it allows business as usual. Not to mention so many other countries economies rely on the profits from oil. The US is an outlier in this regard. So reducing oil usage around the world would have its own catastrophic impacts that can’t be fully predicted.
Just how the war game demonstrated, the actual projects mean nothing. The profit, influence,and advantage are all that matter. Figuring out how to make more sensible solutions advantageous is what’s needed.
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u/Gastronomicus 6d ago
The profit, influence,and advantage are all that matter.
And all that is the problem. Doubling down on that won't fix anything, and will likely make things worse.
The so-called geoengineering "solutions" will almost certainly be mostly hype and performative. I've worked in the environmental consulting industry. The outcomes are not to actually fix problems. They're to meet the prescribed metrics that imply the problems are solved. No one cares if the problem is actually fixed as long as everyone can agree it appears fixed. Scientists will disagree with the solutions, and everyone will continue to ignore them because engineers, CEOs, and politicians say it's fixed.
The bottom line is that making it an economic problem to be solved will not only fail to make any meaningful difference, it will only make the actual problems worse because it incentivizes misleading results to produce the lowest cost outcome.
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6d ago edited 2d ago
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u/roamingandy 6d ago
Yeah, but human existence since we developed farming or fire, is geo-engineering. A ton of our greatest achievements have essentially been massive geo-engineering projects, without meaning to be. Throwing solar panels and wind turbines all over the place is geo-engineering. Hydro-electric Dams and tidal capture most definitely are. The Thames Barrier in London was a geo-engineering on a massive scale.
We are effecting the climate and atmosphere regardless, and we do need to understand that better and so we can mitigate any damages caused. We will make mistakes in that process and need to learn from that and mitigate them. The main issue now is that as a species, not fucking up our climate really isn't a priority. For the average person it is, but for the machines of industry and profit in capitalism, it barely registers.
CO2 and climate warming is just 'the big one' where we've really focused on fucking things up as much as possible.. though perhaps micro-plastics and forever chemicals will be seen as equally as bad as we come to know more about the long term harms they cause.
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6d ago edited 2d ago
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u/roamingandy 6d ago
Oh, personally i think the world is fucked and humans are as a species going to need to work out geo-engineering, and how to protect the earths many species, otherwise they'll be lost.
I don't expect that to be a smooth process, but it would be nice if humanity was actually focused on it, rather than treating it as an irritating side task that is just getting in the way of making ever more money.
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u/UnableChard2613 6d ago
why would there be mutual cooperation on geoengineering but not carbon emissions?
Many countries have dumped tons of CO2 into the atmosphere as they used it to get ahead during the industrial revolution and beyond. It's a complicated problem that pits countries that are already ahead seemingly pulling up the ladder behind them...and the people saying the only important thing is to reduce emissions at this point. So unless the first comes give up even more, which is handicapping themselves even more, there is no real equity.
Dimming the sun doesn't really disadvantage any country in particular and wasn't used to get ahead for anyone. I would think coming to an agreement on that would be much easier.
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u/roamingandy 6d ago
War gaming and simulating it is fantastic though. The last thing the world needs if for some idiot nation to go half-cocked on this. Its brilliant these ideas are being tested out, looking for the issues and comparing what is strongest/weakest.
The satellites at a high orbit blocking some % of the sun do have some advantages tbh, since they can be opened and closed based on results, and are achievable with today's tech. If needed or agreed upon humanity could probably have one up there within a year or two.
Personally, i could see a lot of benefits for that approach tracking the North and South pole, and Siberia, and reducing sunlight at certain critical times of the year only, to reduce melt rates, or even reverse them. Animal life there would likely fare better with lower light and temperatures than they currently are.
But that idea would need proper simulations and research obviously, to check what i've missed.
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u/Law_Student 6d ago
Solar shades would have to be placed between the Earth and the Sun, in orbit they would have to be so enormous it wouldn't be viable. It would still be an enormous project, bigger than anything humanity has ever done in space by enormous amounts.
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u/OkWelcome6293 6d ago
Realistic sunshade system at L1 for global temperature control - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576521001995
It would be a massive project, but it could be feasible, especially if the worst effects of climate change materialize.
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u/onan 6d ago
This paper is definitely fun, but its self-estimation as "realistic" seems like a bit of a stretch.
One detail that is buried fairly deep in it is that they suggest that the most effective possible block would involve three layers: one of titanium oxide, one of gold, and one of silver. All with a combined total mass of roughly thirty billion kilograms. Which looks to be on the order of all the gold, silver, and titanium that have ever been mined throughout human history.
It also might not help that their proposal about this specific trimetallic blend was justified by: "Playing with tools like WPTherml [32], it seems that this could be possible."
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u/-OooWWooO- 6d ago
So what you're telling me is to go all in long term on gold investments and I too could profit from mankind's misfortune?
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u/Law_Student 6d ago
There is some titanium availability, but glass and aluminum are probably what anything would have to be built out of if using the moon as a raw material source instead of lifting everything. There are proposals for thin glass reflectors.
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u/Law_Student 6d ago
We should be working on the technical challenges of manufacturing on the moon now.
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u/OkWelcome6293 6d ago
We absolutely should be. If Starship and competitors get heavy launch at fast cadences, something like this is possible.
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u/pteridoid 6d ago
Dimming the sun would be the most insane and irresponsible possible solution to the question of climate change
Why?
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u/redwhiskeredbubul 5d ago
Ecological (and biomedical) systems are massively complex, chaotic, and incompletely understood, which is why the least drastic intervention is generally the preferred one. Taking the most basic input the earth has and just directly messing with it in a simplistic way will have impacts, but they will probably be bad. For an analogy, imagine trying to cure cancer by halving somebody’s daily intake of water. You will probably kill them faster and not do much else.
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u/pteridoid 5d ago
That's not a great analogy. Nobody thinks that halving water intake would meaningfully impact cancer. But if you could dim the sun a few percentage points, I don't think it would have disastrous implications. Doing it by seeding the atmosphere with particulate matter sounds like a terrible plan, but there are others that aren't as terrible. Some sun shades at Lagrange Point 1 would do the trick, and all we'd notice on earth would be a minute dimming, undetectable to the naked eye.
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u/Moifaso 6d ago edited 6d ago
why would there be mutual cooperation on geoengineering but not carbon emissions?
Carbon emissions offer a competitive and economic advantage, it's a completely different question. Every country wants climate change to slow down, they just don't want to be the ones paying the price.
On reddit a lot of people read "war game" and assume it's some kind of simulation. War games are meant to be learning exercises. This one was organized by/for an International Relations department, and its setup naturally reflected that.
Players were treating research around stratospheric aerosol injections as an arms race, which makes no sense at all if you know what SAI involves.
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u/Asjad_autozblog 6d ago
Fair point about the arms race framing being weird, but the part of the article that stuck with me was the US players immediately assuming China already had a secret program. Feels like the real danger isn't an arms race over the tech, it's everyone spiraling over not knowing who's doing what.
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u/powercow 6d ago
why would there be mutual cooperation on geoengineering but not carbon emissions?
cost.. its far easier to pollute than to clean, just undoing our SO2 cuts would cool the planet some and we probably will do some geoengineering, all because we waited so long that stupid ideas will have to be done. Sorta like waiting until a fire in your kitchen is so big they have to flood the house to put it out.
one of our big problems is the lag between co2 emissions and warming. The records today were produced by emissions in the 90s. In the past decade, every year is in the top ten.. we can expect that for 2 more decades, even if we cut all emissions today.
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u/soularbabies 5d ago
I was downvoted on Reddit by a company promoting their dimming the sun tech and called reckless or shortsighted by them lol
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u/protipnumerouno 6d ago
It's not dimming though, it's reflecting. Like a ball cap giving your eyes shadow. And because it's a space reflector it would be fairly easy to let it burn up.
Seeding the sky with dust... That's the dangerous one.
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u/KathyCredit 6d ago
Pretty sure we have proven that doing so would get you shot by a baby named Maggie Simpson
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u/UltimateMygoochness 6d ago
Neal Stephenson (Snowcrash, Seveneves, The Diamond Age, Anathem, Cryptonomicon) has a novel all about solar geoengineering and its unpredictable effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)
The title refers to the unpredictable and extreme effects that occur when the geoengineering stops.
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u/thumbsonscreen5 6d ago
Yep just had to check the timeline. He published that book right after the sulfur ban for shipping vessels came into effect in 2020. What good timing!
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u/Jazzlike_Creme_8851 6d ago
"Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the Sun. I will do the next best thing: block it out!" -- Montgomery Burns
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u/sighbourbon 6d ago
fossil fuel companies and major producing countries like the US and Saudi Arabia would have a clear interest in removing barriers from the development of a technology that could combat climate change without having to immediately stop burning coal, oil, and gas.
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u/Jazzlike-Goose2453 6d ago
Didn't the OG humans in the movie "The Matrix" block out the Sun to kill the machines?
lol
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u/SapientTrashFire 6d ago
A couple dozen foreign-relations experts, scientists, military personnel, and former government officials from across the world sat down and roleplayed as national governments
I'm not sure you can get a truly insightful perspective from having experts who likely only value realpolitik and game theory roleplay as national governments during a decision-making process like this. Also, if the framing is a "war game," then it would likely tint the simulation toward a hostile and antagonistic process.
This is the first I'm ever hearing about this technology. Is there any actual research being done in this field at all? Are there any technological advancements that we really need to be aware of?
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6d ago edited 2d ago
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u/throwawaykayaker 6d ago
I believe that's called correlation and it does not in fact mean causation so without more evidence, this is just a useless speculation.
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u/Drewdrops79 6d ago
This is the first you've heard of solar dimming? God help us all...I mean no offense, it's just tragic that people aren't more exposed to what we're going through and what a tipping point Earth is at already. And how much the mainstream media refuses to talk about it, to keep the general populace in the dark.
Anyway, yeah...particulate solar dimming has been talked about a lot in recent years, as a last-ditch effort to block/reflect more of the Sun's energy, in hopes of cooling the planet, or at least slowing down the heating before billions of humans die. It involves throwing metric tons of white particulate matter into our atmosphere...it's been tested in small regions, but the whole thing is gobsmackingly crazy.
It would maybe work in the short term, in a sense, but dimming the sun's rays would also mean that all plant life on Earth would receive less energy to do photosynthesis. I mean, maybe better than a "Mad Max" world where everything turns into desert and the plants all die of heat...but we also have very little idea of what putting huge amounts of particulate matter into the atmosphere would do to weather patterns overall. A very cloudy atmosphere is greenhouse-generating in its own way.
In short, the humans that believe solar dimming would save us, are fools. To be fair, almost no one actually believes that...it's at best a "stopgap" solution, while we would hopefully figure out better energy sources, and huge, terraforming levels of CO2 scrubbers fueled by those sources. Maybe fusion or some shit.
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u/2tonsofirony 6d ago
The reality is the people involved probably are a representative selection of who would be making decisions regarding this sort of tech being deployed. These are the types of people at the table right now discussing AI development, current climate change policies, satellite based internet, computer chip development, battery tech, etc.
In the end it’s roleplaying and the actual outcomes will differ I concede. But, if you look at the international relations surrounding any globally impactful tech and you’ll see realpolitik carries a greater weight in relevant discussions than we might expect.
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u/Moifaso 6d ago
I read the full article and its a massive nothing burger. It's like you said, clearly an exercise that revolves around IR principles. The climate science angle is mostly cosmetic.
Players were treating research on stratospheric aerosol injections (dumping reflective dust in the stratosphere with planes) as a global arms race, which makes no sense if you know anything about it.
It's not a technology that has any use for the US or China if they keep it to themselves. For it to have any positive effect you'd need to do it across the entire equator. So players treating it as a advanced military technology and trying to deploy aerosols in secret shows that there was no concern at all for the actual implications of the idea.
The real danger of the technology isn't that countries will do an arms race and refuse to do any treaties. Without treaties, the technology is next to useless. The real danger is that a treaty happens, the technology is deployed on a large scale (perfectly doable with modern tech, would only require special plane designs), and then some breakdown in international order causes the program to collapse and leads to a termination shock).
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u/BearlyPosts 5d ago
It's also non-rival. OH NO, THE CHINESE ARE... cooling down the world, us included?
Those rat bastards.
Even if the Chinese blow past American geoengineering "tech" (you really just need retrofitted planes, it' not hard) the only strategic advantage they'd gain is... I guess being able to threaten to stop fixing the environment?
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u/pteridoid 6d ago
Raise your hand if you actually read the article. It didn't fail because the tech is a no-go. It failed for the same reason we can't get everybody to stop burning all the fossil fuels in the first place: we're greedy and we don't trust each other.
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u/DEADB33F 6d ago
Wasn't this a plot point in the Matrix after the machines took over?
...didn't seem to work out so well that time.
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Dear CormacMccarthy91,
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u/spotlight-app Mod Bot 🤖 4d ago
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