It's a well known "dirty" secret that aerosols drive (short lived) cooling effects and that this effect is very significant [0]. In fact, the climate models used in the OP nature paper would not be useful if they didn't account for these aerosols in a meaningful way. Scientists measure aerosols using a mix of different tricks (optical density sensors - AERONET, satellites with hyperspectal sensors, local air pollution sensors, etc).
In my work in industrial air quality we occasionally joke that we are doing a good job if we exacerbate global warming.
0. https://skepticalscience.com/images/Radiative_Forcing_Summar...
Further reading for the curious
https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to...
While I appreciate things like this that have a lot of references, and I have been aware of this piece since it was published two years back, it is one of those essays that tends to swing far too pessimistic on its claims. Not saying that there isn't an issue but things like 6-7 billion dead in the next 25 years, that is a bold claim.
It reads similar to the works of Guy McPherson & James Kunstler in that they are continually pushing back the doomsday date as they miss again and again. But I think they do love the attention of publishing these dramatic predictions because it can make people feel like their lives are like that of fiction based drama. Alas normal life it much more humble and slow, at least for the most part.
I do think we will hit a long term equilibrium of about 2 billion people like claimed but over more like 150-300 years as we balance out from overshoot and ecological blow back. But that is a very different real world experienced scenario to what they propose.
The fact is that we just do not know. But what we can actually observe is... Quite grim. And we are not even taking the smallest, tiniest steps we can possibly take to fixing it.
We are basically doing only what is STRICTLY dictated by economy. And we know that it is simply not enough. Whether in 2 decades or 10, billions of human beings are going to die from the direct or indirect effects of climate change. And that is... Incomprehensible.
> Whether in 2 decades or 10, billions of human beings are going to die from the direct or indirect effects of climate change. And that is... Incomprehensible.
Just for some perspective... at the current global death rate, 2.4 billion die in two decades, and 12 billion die in 10. So it's not that incomprehensible.
We have short lifespans, it seems more likely the human population will shrink to match loss of habitable land mass and ecological damage through simply expiring, rather than suddenly through some kind of dooms day event (granted I'm certain climate change will hurry it along).
I'm going to use this bleak comment to suggest anyone reading make sure they go outside and smell the fresh air, life is short man, really short.
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I skimmed the piece. Despite the repeated claims, no evidence is given for agricultural failure on any timeline.
The very first sentence says:
> Climate change will cause agricultural failure and subsequent collapse of hyperfragile modern civilization, likely within 10–15 years.
No evidence is provided for this. The closest thing is some very brief discussion of saltwater increasingly interfering with rice cultivation in some areas of Southeast Asia. Everything else is ungrounded speculation.
And regarding those poor rice farmers, apparently a lot of them are switching to more lucrative shrimp farming when salinity is high: https://www.voanews.com/a/rising-salinity-threatens-rice-cro...
This is not to say that climate change is great. Just that this is not a reliable source.
Agriculture will shift .. which is different to fail.
Eg: Long established wine grapes in both France and mainland Australia have seen production falls already as local climates change in response to global parameters.
Brown Brothers (IIRC, an Australian wine label) has opened new vineyards further south (closer to the south pole) in Tasmania.
Another expected change is Cowboy Siberia, rodeo's, rodeo clowns, and vast cattle ranches on former tundra taking up the slack from US ranches as they bake and suffer from probable water issues.
I was not aware of Brown brothers new site, their site in Milwara is the definition of cozy. Next time I am in Tassie will have to check it out.
Due to the climate shifts, 'New Zealand wine' is becoming a swear word within the wine industry here as they significantly out do our quality.
Anything from somewhere more credible than Medium?
https://www.economist.com/interactive/asia/2025/05/28/if-ind...
TL;DR India should be hotter, but due to sulfur dioxide emissions at ground level the rate of warming is a third less. For reference, the current rate of warming is ~0.25C per decade.
And yet again, in a weird way, India lives up to the adage of being disappointing to both pessimists and optimists.
The article is well cited with external references if you're interested in validating the claims made.
FWiW I've been in geophysical exploration, mapping, and modeling since the 1980s and have no issue with the IPCC's reports on AGW. (I'm also responsible for posting this submission after reading the paper linked).
From your linked medium article:
By 2050 total human population will likely be under 2 billion.
Humans, along with most other animals, will go extinct before the end of this century.
These impacts are locked in and cannot be averted.
How can you validate (ie prove) these claims?
NB: Climate aside, the current "birthrate crisis" that the natalists scream about will see a flattening of population growth by 2050 .. that leaves ~ 8 billion to vanish to reach the 2 billion asserted.
The statement directly following your lifted intro quotes is
> Everything in this article is supporting information for this conclusion.
So,
> How can you validate (ie prove) these claims?
By reading the rest of the article and its references.
As you probably know, not many things in this realm can be proven with 100% certainty.
Which falsifies
These impacts are locked in and cannot be averted.
It's not as outlandish as you're attempting to paint it as, considering the author is assuming that capital interests remain in control when making such a claim.
And under that assumption, it's a bit crazy to think anything but depopulation will happen. Everything points to it being in their playbook; the blatant mishandling of COVID (which is far from over) by the uniparty being one of many glaring examples.
I agree depopulation will happen by simple resource limitations but I do not think it is any part of a playbook. Hanlons razer : Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Many wish there was at least malice because then there is a narrative, the reality is probably much more muddled and messy.
Large swaths of India are notably cooler than 30 years ago due to the aerosol effect.
I never heard of this. A quick good shows its warming less faster, not sure about cooling. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/climate-change/indias-cooling...
Samset was quoted as saying that this is kind of good news, since before everyone was all "oh no our models said we'd get .18 hotter per time-unit and now we're getting .28 - panic!" but what this article shows is that the .28 is a blip due to removal of pollution (which is now gone, it could only happen once) so we'll be back to the projeced .18 per time-unit now
It reminds me of the sulfur dioxide situation.
I was trying to figure out why volcanoes sometimes have a global cooling effect, I mean the things are pumping out obscene amounts of carbon dioxide right, so whats with the cooling. Well it turns out sulfur dioxide has a negative greenhouse coefficient(it will pass infrared light better than visible light). And if the volcano dumps tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, you get the cooling effect.
At which point I got too clever for my own good and went "Hey wait a minute, we(as a species) worked very hard to get the sulfur compounds out of our fuels, what it that was a mistake" conveniently ignoring why you don't want sulfur in your fuels. "Acid rain was not that bad, right?"
But sometimes it is fun do a little mustache twirl and in my best supervillain voice, proclaim "You know what would reduce global warming, we need to add a bunch of sulfur to jet fuel, to increase the amount of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere"
Do we know what reducing solar irradiation will do for plant growth though? We might actually make the root cause worse if it decreases carbon fixation.
Yep, this. Same for any kind of solar shielding. Some are so fixed on controlling a single metric (Carbon/Temperature)that they may end up inadvertently influencing hundreds of other things.
When simple solutions interact with complex systems, complex problems arise. As it is said, for every problem there is a solution that is simple, easy and wrong.
Lets fund fracking activity around minor active volcanoes. I bet that an increase in volcanic explosions can come with short-term cooling effects.
Brilliant idea, I will fund it.
Great, we conduct artificial stratovolcanic eruptions in NorCal every month: https://makesunsets.com/products/join-the-next-balloon-launc...
I posted this as a joke. Turns out it is a serious? scientific field of inquiry.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
Queue China cleans the air, but at what cost articles.
Nit: You probably mean Cue, as in "That's your time to go on stage" not Queue as in "that's your place in line"
The queue starts with a cue, because it's not your turn until it's your cue.
TIL. Thanks.
You can remember this with the mnemonic that a cue file tells when each track on a CD starts, and a cue ball tells the billiard balls what order to go in the pockets, but a queue is a line of silent letters
> queue is a line of silent letters
glorious, thank you.
And a Q is an omnipotent being/continuum because in the 80’s it actually was cool to have a letter for a name.
Or the quartermaster with a penchant for nifty gadgets from MI6.
Man, something something Data now being reality something something LLMs
I feel like the data structure would be a better mnemonic device on its own. There is no std::cue, there is std::queue.
Shh, don’t let the C++ committee hear you! ;)
Not to mention that a queue is a long braid of hair worn down the back of the neck, long associated with Chinese men.
This thread is a great example of minding your peas and queues. Or maybe cues. It's hard to say which.
Manchu men...
… this points to the importance of studying the effects of deliberate atmospheric aerosol injections… I think calcium carbonate is very promising—but we need to start doing tests asap to learn the effects.
The effects of deliberate small scale atmospheric aerosol injections is something I've studied extensively. The short term results are often quite noticeable even by parties not directly participating in the study.
This is why I think it will not be done. Any possible blow back will be attributed to those who actioned it, even if it might not be their fault. Do some injection in one part of the world and breadbasket crop fails 6 months later, they can point the finger even if it would have happened regardless.
To risky in terms of liability.
And you're going to do this for the rest of the forseeable future? Way more than anything else it sounds like a cop out to avoid dealing with the long term consequences of what we put out there now and to keep pumping oil
> sounds like a cop out to avoid dealing with the long term consequences of what we put out there now and to keep pumping oil
Any practical solution will consist of a wide array of approaches executed in parallel.
Talking about suddenly getting the whole world to stop using oil is a hypothetical thought exercise. It’s not going to happen. We have to be looking at all of the approaches together, including some lessening of fossil fuel use.
Yes, I think it will be taking place for the remainder of our lifetimes.
Solar growth is likely to remain exponential for the next decade or so, which will create a number of new opportunities. Other energy sources will also come online. But fossil fuels are unlikely to be regulated away, globally. We are also likely past some serious tipping points— so I prefer to figure out ASAP whether stratospheric aerosol injections are a viable tactic for preventing the melting of permafrost, for instance.
nice em dash -- how do I generate that in the text box?
but you're burying the lede: "We are also likely past some serious tipping points—" == we're doomed, just slowly, and we desperately need to be doing something to slow down or stop this metaphorical bus before it falls off a cliff
I see the replies to the literal question, but I think the parent was pointing out the possibility of the grandparent post being AI generated. The em dash is one of the common indicators.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1fx12q1/is_an_em_d...
And all of the replies to the literal question are reasons not to take that as a sign of an AI-generated post.
On *nix, <Compose> <-> <-> <-> (or install a Mac-like layout and AltGr+Shift+<->).
On iOS: long press the “-“ keyboard button to access variants of longer lengths like “–“ and “—“ (and also a “•”).
On macOS, you can do alt+shift+hyphen to get one: —.
ALT+0151
It seems pretty wild that we would even think about deliberate climate engineering. We're dealing with an incredibly complex system, the only place we have to live, and one where "harmless" actions before have had devastating unforeseen effects decades later. The lesson we should have learned we need to stop pumping stuff into the atmosphere and oceans until something bad happens, not "let's pump more stuff into the atmosphere."
Some random small group of people get to take these risks for all humanity? No thanks.
It just seems collectively insane to NOT be researching the hell out of the possibility that we could regulate our global heat balance issues for a cost of a few tens of billions of dollars a year.
Especially when the alternative solution to global warming is… degrowth. Which is just not going to work functionally as a political policy in a competitive world.
Fossil fuel use will decrease significantly… eventually.
Btw, did you know that if the USA replaced farmland currently growing biofuels with solar, that land area would produce 4x the current total electricity use of the entire nation?
We need to buy time — we can’t let the permafrost melt because “stupid humans deserve it”
>Some random small group of people
Like, say, petroleum exporters?
everything we do is climate engineering, just not the deliberate kind
Thing is we're not stopping. So given the fact that we are not stopping and won't stop, climate engineering starts to look like a decent Sr ond choice. I mean it doesn't take much for it to be better than nothing.
I think we need to do this until we develop large scale underground CO₂ sequestration.
Unfortunately even if/when we completely stop producing CO₂, it takes at least several centuries until levels go fully back down to natural levels by themselves.
Pumping SO₂ into the stratosphere should be able to regulate global temperatures to reasonable levels while we develop effective CO₂ sequestration.
Unfortunately SO₂ injection is incredibly controversial, as it triggers the "don't mess with nature" taboo, especially among people who have seen Jurassic Park, and affects the whole planet, including those who don't want it.
We do actually know that SO₂ breaks down in the stratosphere in 1-2 years, because we've studied when volcanoes injects it. It also doesn't cause acid rain because it's above the rain cycle.
But these facts are very hard to get across to people.
Equatorial countries probably should do it regardless of whether we reach net zero tomorrow. About 1.4C warming is a lot.
I think the idea is to do it as a stop gap while we catch up on renewable energy production/integration.
We're doing deliberate tests with sulfur dioxide instead of CaCO3, more info here: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/so2-injection
Entirely different forcing mechanism(s). The two most promising vectors are stratospheric injection and marine stratocumulus injection. Both approaches induce very different radiative and attendant circulation responses, and aren't relevant in the context of this work.
The red states have begun banning geoengineering and even small-scale tests. It seems to be spreading across these states, which suggests that we'll soon see similar laws being proposed at the Federal level.
I seriously hate this political nonsense.
There's currently 31 states who have bills to ban geoengineering. Its not just red states, there are plenty of "blue states" on the list as well. Painting this as a partisan political issue is just stupid. California is set to join the list as well.
March 2025:
As of this week, 31 out of 50 U.S. states—well over half the nation—have introduced legislation to ban or severely limit geoengineering and weather modification operations. Just days ago, on March 24th, that number stood at 24. Seven new states have joined in under a week, reflecting an undeniable groundswell of public awareness and political will.
https://sayerji.substack.com/p/weve-crossed-the-tipping-poin...
You “hate this political stuff” and then you link to a bizarre Substack where the first quote is from noted non-partisan scientist RFK Jr, and he’s claiming that because multiple states have introduced legislation that implies a groundswell of public opinion against evil geoengineering.
Anyone can introduce legislation. Keep this off HN.
A) Quotes from politicians don't discount the facts of the matter.
B) Had you spent five minutes researching what's going on, you would've seen an article from last year about Alameda City, a city in California (yes, THAT California, the supposed VERY BLUE STATE California) that banned geoengineering:
June 2024:
A Northern California city council voted early Wednesday morning to cancel the nation’s first outdoor experiment into the potential to limit global warming by altering cloud behavior.
The five-member Alameda City Council voted unanimously to reject University of Washington researchers’ aerial spraying of liquefied salt from the deck of a retired aircraft carrier in San Francisco Bay, two months after the experiment began.
And shockingly, the report isn't in some strange substack. Its actually a well known LEFT LEANING site - Politico:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/05/california-geoengin...
But hey man, just keep believing that this is simply some red state conspiracy to block climate change.
the uproar over minor, localized cloud-seeding (which had nothing to do with the Texas floods) is probably a death knell for aerosol injection.
we are going to see countries going to war over unilateral solar radiation management efforts
I don't see this as a truly organic reaction. When I see the same laws popping up in multiple states, my suspicion is that it's driven centrally by right-wing think tanks, probably to benefit the fossil fuel lobbies. You don't need aerosol injection if there's no climate change, so we need to make it illegal (just as we need to defund Earth sciences, fire climate scientists, etc.) Similarly, if we need aerosol injection, then climate change is real. It's all one big package.
I think is pretty reasonable for people to be suspicious of spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. What's the effect of breathing this stuff in long term? Can you even construct an effective experiment around here? Do you know what the second and third order effects are?
It wasn't too long ago since another aerosol punctured a giant hole into our ozone, what was the effect of that?
Possibly. Seems like a mix of conspiracy-theory induced paranoia and right-wing influencers pushing a coordinated narrative.
Ironically, aerosol injection will probably benefit fossil fuel companies, with less pressure to meet aggressive emissions targets.
The irony is that this is probably true, but the greater project of suppressing any acknowledgement of climate change exceeds the possible benefits that aerosol injection might afford even to GHG emitters. It’s actually pretty goddamn frightening because it means these people are ready to take the whole damn ship down around them.
ETA: Don’t get me started on how weird it is that there’s a pre-spun conspiracy theory in chemtrails, one that makes zero sense but happens to align perfectly with making geoengineering even more difficult. But now I’m being conspiratorial.
The strategy still seems pretty bad to me. Even if fossil fuel lobbies convince MAGA-types in America that there's no climate change, other countries may do their own geonengineering. Nothing prevents areas like China and EU from starting their own programs, and thanks to more successful education systems their populations mostly don't have such anti-science sentiment.
Check out the open letter to ban geoengineering research by European scientists
Having the political system with the largest military on earth doing your bidding is a very good first step, if your goal is to make sure we do nothing while the whole world burns.
This is the plot of the Stephenson novel Termination Shock. Not endorsing the book but the hypothetical it poses is interesting.
If countries prefer that nothing would be done about climate change, they can go get bombed for all I care.
Countries are often gigantic though? There's plenty of state and local efforts going on in the United States despite the federal government currently backtracking for instance. Does that count as... worth burning tons of fossil fuels to bomb out of existence?
If they want to go to war over geoengineering efforts done by someone else, then yes.
They can sit on their asses, but going against people who actually try to do something to address climate change is a step too far.
Does it fix ocean acidification? Does it fix the decline in human mental performance with raising CO2 levels in the air?
If not its a distraction, not a solution.
Yes, it does fix acid problems.
The calcium carbonate dust is reflective (the aim of the engineering is to reflect sunlight away from the Earth's atmosphere in the first place). However, it doesn't contribute to acid rain or oceans like the sulfate dioxide does (the aerosol that East Asian scrubbers are removing).
The CO2 (a greenhouse gas) amount isn't increased in this engineering effort. It increases because of burning fossil fuels, though. In the East Asian countries, they are producing/using more energy (via burning fossil fuels), but only removing the reflective aerosol; they're still emitting the CO2.
If cost was no object, we'd probably need to use the calcium carbonate immediately (to prevent the sunlight from entering the atmosphere immediately), we'd scrub existing carbon from the atmosphere (CO2), and we'd convert power plants to non-emissive technologies (and also install scrubbers onto existing ones for as long as they're needed).
The key point here is that we should be researching this stuff as fast as possible.
Looking at the wiki, the effects of long term exposure to CO2 under 0.5% of partial pressure (5000 ppm) are not known. The current concentration is close to just 430 ppm (though that's more than enough for the greenhouse effect). What sort of mental decline do you suspect? And any references?
The short term effects are known though (bad indoor ventilation causes decreased intelligence due to increased CO2 concentration), and a permanent short term effect would arguably be a long term effect.
There have been a handful of studies that last time I looked all involved a single investigator that have shown decreased intelligence due to levels around 1000 ppm.
NASA and the US Navy have been conducting studies since the 1960s showing no loss of cognitive function up to 50000ppm or so.
Submarines and space vehicles regularly operate at CO2 levels much higher than 1000ppm. If the levels of cognitive decline were anywhere close to what some of these studies show it would be easily observable in astronauts and submariners.
Not to mention testing locations with good ventilation would show drastically higher scores over all on standardized tests, and individuals would show drastically higher scores between attempts depending on ventilation.
None of these things happen. The only logical conclusion is that there is some flaw in study methodology.
There is a meta-analysis from 2023:
> Recent studies have shown that short-term exposure to high levels of indoor carbon dioxide (CO2) could negatively affect human cognitive performance, but the results are still controversial. In this study, a systematic review and meta-analysis of fifteen eligible studies was performed to quantify the effects of short-term CO2 exposure on cognitive task performance. The control CO2 levels used for comparison were below 1000 ppm, while the exposure concentrations were divided into three groups: 1000–1500 ppm, 1500–3000 ppm, and 3000–5000 ppm. The results indicated that CO2 exposure below 5000 ppm impacted human cognitive performance, with complex cognitive tasks being more significantly affected than simple tasks. The complex task performance declined significantly when exposed to additional CO2 concentrations of 1000–1500 ppm and 1500–3000 ppm, with pooled standardized mean differences (SMDs) (95% CI) of −2.044 (−2.620, −1.467) and −0.860 (−1.380, −0.340), respectively.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232...
I don't know how large these effects are, but they are statistically significant.
If you dig in you’ll find that for simple cognitive tasks they found no effect.
Then they analyzed only complex cognitive tasks. But fewer studies included complex cognitive tasks, and they used different methods of adjusting CO2 exposure (ventilation vs adding pure CO2)
Then you’ll note that of those studies they found that:
“The effects of pure CO2 on complex cognitive task performance decreased with increased CO2 concentrations”.
Between 1000-1500, and 1500-3000ppm they found a decrease in complex cognitive tasks performance, but at a higher exposure of 3000-5000ppm they found no effect.
This makes no sense until you read
“the complex cognitive task results under pure additional CO2 concentrations of 1000–1500 ppm and 1500–3000 ppm showed publication bias.”
Handful of studies (many with sketchy methodology—reducing ventilation, which brings with it many more variables than just increased CO2), publication bias, and a negative dose dependent response.
Also that Satish et al. study (the author is the one I was referring to in my last post—they also have several other studies on the subject) shows an enormous effect IIRC, which would skew the aggregate effects in the meta study.
The effect sizes in that study were the ones I was referencing when I said that such effects would be obvious.
we are nowhere close to the levels of CO2 concentration that would affect cognitive performance.
skimming through a couple of studies, measurable impact starts around 1000 ppm. with current policy intervention, we will likely reach 550ppm by 2100
> Left unchallenged, the increasing rate of change could see the CO2 concentration increase to about 1000ppm by 2100.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/grantham/publications/briefing-pa...
All right, but indoor concentrations are higher than outdoor. The higher the outdoor concentrations, the easier it is for indoor to exceed 1000 ppm.
If you’re optimistic, it is a means to buy time to implement a solution.
Maybe it will help with heartburn, if nothing else.
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What concerns me the most is India. China has done a good job advancing its population through better jobs and education. India on the other hand has barely scratched the surface, no company wants to migrate manufacturing there and the coming generation has a high chance of lead poisoning their faculties since the government has done nothing to combat the tainted goods in the country.
> India … has barely scratched the surface
Completely untrue. Indian GDP per capita has more than 5xed since 2000.
And? They have a long way to go and have barely scratched the service. They have little manufacturing capabilities and at best is a service export which may work longer term with software engineers but I think is still questionable. Low literacy rates, low secondary enrollment rates, high pollution and most importantly in lots of the country lead poisoning in most kids as they taint their spices with lead.
> India on the other hand has barely scratched the surface, no company wants to migrate manufacturing there
I don't think that's true. India has a large domestic market, high tariffs, and relatively low labor costs. It makes a lot of sense for products for the domestic market to be manufactured (or at least assembled) inside the country, and you see many manufacturers doing that. Some of them have success in manufacturing and go on to build for the export market in India; many have less success and accept the tariffs.
the problem is the power grid in India is terrible, and you still need to bribe people to get things done. i have family in manufacturing, they said the bribing isn't too much hassle but the power grid being so bad isn't worth the investment.
Having seen the rat-king level street wiring, I am not surprised.
> no company wants to migrate manufacturing there
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/cons-products/...
I don’t think that disproves much? They have been trying to move since 2017 and it’s been filled with nothing but troubles for them. I am sure it will happen as the cost of labor is cheap and they will be making US phones here without risk of Chinese tariffs.
India is a difficult challenge for most manufacturing operations, the government has done little to educate the population and pollution both in the air and food I fear will have a lasting impact. Some of the last reporting I saw had some insanely high number like 90% of tested children have lead poisoning. China has had their problems but they excelled at the growth stage.
It's optimism, mixed with getting some local (Indian) goodwill, mixed with pretending you diversified your production (while parts can still come from China), mixed with slow progress and mostly bad results
Local and global pollution reduction are often in conflict. Classic example is the rush to diesel passenger cars.
The findings highlight the complex tradeoffs involved in air quality and climate policies.
Overall, the findings suggest that the unintended climate consequences of reducing aerosol pollution in East Asia are a mixed bag - they help reveal the true scale of the climate challenge, but also accelerate the pace of climate change in the near-term. Careful management and mitigation of these effects will be important going forward.
I don't really think so. Areosol pollution is short-lived and kills a ton of people. So you get enormous downsides in the short run (WHO estimates 2 million people die of air pollution in China alone), and in the medium term, you don't gain anything in terms of warming. The underlying CO2 accumulation happens anyway, and as soon as the short-lived areosols and suphur dioxide rains down to Earth, the accumulated warming kicks in.
But the killing a ton of people is very long term /(dark) s
I don’t understand why this comment is downvoted. The options to reduce total energy consumption were always humans voluntarily accepting lower quality of life (not just among the top 1 million or 100 million, but top 2 billion at least, so this was obviously not going to happen), or reduce total number of humans.
It would make a difference even if we humans could just accept the same quality of life we already have, instead of building more and more, larger and larger data centers, for whatever the future of AI is. Computers have become so much more efficient than they used to be, and despite any joke we can make about Electron apps and such, those are still reductions in energy consumption, and some people are building such extravagant compute facilities that far outweigh the progress people have made on reducing energy costs.
It is great to see progress on those mini nuclear reactors for data centers though?
https://www.popsci.com/environment/google-mini-nuclear-react...
Really hoping the work here ends up producing solutions that can be taken advantage of by cities and towns since the smaller size factor requires a lot less onerous demands for deployment.
I assume energy use by electronic devices is a distant runner up of energy use compared to moving lots of mass (individuals + their large personal cars) lots of distance (to and from their large lots in far flung suburbs). And leisure travel of course, especially via airplane.
Oh, I bet you're right. I was only giving the first example that came to mind. I think transportation is a better example, a field where many cities (at least in the USA) could have better quality of life for less energy. When everyone drives their own car every day because public transportation is inadequate and inconvenient, we waste time every day stuck in slow traffic. With more convenient public transportation, the roads are more clear for cars, the air is cleaner, and people don't have to spend as much money on gasoline and car maintenance.
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Your comment sounds 100% AI-generated except that you went back and changed the long dash to a short one. Apologies if that’s not the case.
Did you use GPT to write this comment? Or to proofread?
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Somewhere, someone named Deep is getting ready to carry his backback, but doesn't know it yet.
Ouch that is grim but true.
If the effect of aerosols are short lived, then how many years until a big spike in temperature?
the point of the article is that the effect was short lived, and we're living through the spike in temperature
hasn't this been going on over the atlantic as well? container ships aren't putting as much sulphur in the atmosphere as they used to.
put the sulphur back in the ship juice!
Reducing geo-engineering reveals already far gone global warming, which is percieved as a speed up.
Wait... We need to bring back pollution to cool down the earth?
related, less ship activity during COVID meant fewer pollutants and so more warming: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/30/...
Some pollutants do have a cooling effect and there are circumstances where purposefully increasing those pollutants could be worth it, but only if we can be sure it is temporary.
The nightmare scenario would be something like we start releasing sulfates into the upper atmosphere to induce cooling to counter the warming from greenhouse gases but do not reduce the growth in greenhouse gases.
Greenhouse gases would continue growing and so the amount of sulfates we have to release to counter that also would keep growing.
There are two big problems with that.
#1. The greenhouse gas emissions are a side effect of numerous useful and important activities. People make a lot of money from those activities. They happen unless we make a concerted effort to reduce them.
The sulfite emissions on the other hand would be specifically to counter the effects of greenhouse gases. Whoever is paying for them would be losing money doing this. All it takes is an economic downturn to make budgets tight and funding might go away.
#2. Greenhouse gases can affect climate for a long time. It takes hundreds to thousands of years in the case of CO2 for today's emissions to be no longer affecting the climate.
Sulfates in the upper atmosphere clear out in months to maybe a couple years.
Let's say then we go down the sulfates path, don't reduce greenhouse gas growth and this goes on for decades. Then something stops or disrupts the sulfate releases for a couple years and the sulfites leave the upper atmosphere.
The greenhouse gases are there still there and we rapidly get most of the warming that had been held off for decades by the sulfates.
This would likely be disastrous. Getting all that warming spread over several decades at least gives people time to adapt. Getting it all over a few years would be way to fast for people to deal with.
I think probably the only way purposefully emitting pollutants like this might be acceptable would be after we've got greenhouse gas emissions under control and are on a path we are sure is going to get is to net zero in some specific timeframe, but it will still take a few years to reach peak greenhouse emissions and we've identified a tipping point that we will hit before that. Then maybe countering that with emitting pollutants just until greenhouse gases peak and then come down to where we are below that tipping point might be reasonable.
There was a period during covid where cross atlantic shipping slowed, and the reduced sulfur in the air caused some increased warming. Basically things are a lot worse than we assume but there's certain accidental keystones holding things back, like pollution combating the global warming by blocking the sun.
This study concerns a specific type of emission (sulfate emissions). Reducing other types of emissions should still reduce global warming.
Depends what you define as "pollution". Everything seems to have its place...
Lead certainly doesn't. Which is why we (mostly) stopped putting it in gasoline.
No, we need to stop using oil and gas and such.
Short of the wealthy paying the poor to not use oil and gas, that's obviously not gonna happen. What's plan b?
That seems like a cynical though broadly accurate description of carbon pricing, which are in place around the world and shown to be one of the more effective interventions.
They are technically also paying the rich (and crucially the companies that supply things for both the rich and poor) to not use oil and gas too.
I mean directly. I have little faith in carbon pricing as anything but a grift.
if you don't price carbon, then emitting carbon is free (you just priced it at $0)
India seems to be converting to solar without external pressure.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/indias-solar-boo...
That's because India has to. Domestic demands are huge and India's coal isn't very high in quality. Not to mention coal power is largely state-controlled and doesn't allow for much private frolicking.
It's quite the opposite situation than the US, where coal is extremely high-quality and private player participation is unrestricted.
Almost all new energy construction is non-coal. Coal has collapsed even here in the US, and the current administration is unlikely to seriously change the trajectory. Gas is increasing, but mostly here in the US, but production is dropping again.
> is setting the stage for a potential drop in annual coal-fired power output
I'm not holding my breath. I'm happy they saw a slight reduction in oil and gas use, though.
Invest in whole house oxygen generators.
I suppose the alternative is making the alternatives cheaper. For example wind and solar for electricity are quite cheap.
Yes, it can happen.
Any alternatives are way further into fantasy land than plan A.
What are the trade offs for that?
The entire point is that the global climate is a complex system and changing things may have unintended consequences.
> changing things may have unintended consequences.
Proved by reality, that's why they propose to reduce or even undo human emissions.
It's a transition, not a reduction. Human energy usage is going up.
It's just shifting, what types and where, energy is generated.
And those shifts, have tradeoffs.
Want cleaner air in developed urban areas via EVs? ok cool, but the tradeoff is more mines elsewhere to supply those minerals, more batteries and metals for charging infrastructure.
There is no free lunch in the energy world, solar and wind have tradeoffs.
Yep, currently attempting to move from a carbon economy to a metals based on.
Or we should start reading books about atmosphere physics. Taking a look at the infrared spectrum and checking out what's really going on there is worth it...
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/VW-and-H...
"In 2021 the CO2 Coalition submitted a public comment opposing climate change disclosure rules by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The Coalition asserted "There is no 'climate crisis' and there is no evidence that there will be one," and further "Carbon dioxide, the gas purported to be the cause of catastrophic warming, is not toxic and does no harm." Both assertions are at odds with the scientific consensus on climate change."
Pollution was masking some global warming, which is worse than had been thought. This pollution cannot mask it forever, since CO2 accumulates while it does not.
Yeah, if you spread a bunch of sulfates in the air it gets cooler. But oceans don't get less acidic and the air doesn't get more breathable.
I mean if you explode all of our nuclear bombs, we’ll probably take the earth to a winter. And it’ll still be livable, just a bit more cancer all around.
Nuclear winter is extremely unlikely to be survivable for most humans. With enough sediment in the atmosphere the earth will cool AND most crops will fail, causing world-wide famines.
Or we need to reduce the number of living things that are polluting.
For some that is less cows, for others, it seems like the desired solution is less humans.
if you say "less humans", surely you mean "less ultra-rich humans", right? because poorer humans usually account for the minority of all the pollution.
True, but only if you include middle class people in rich developed countries in the uktra rich.
I mean if you include everyone in the first world as ultra-rich than yes.
The ultra rich can afford EVs, and well insulated homes with solar panels.
Dirt poor people heat and cook with coal or firewood. They burn down forests to plant food. They are sustained by long supply chains by well intentioned NGOs rather than local produce.
It's not simple to say rich people are polluters, and poor people are living naturally.
Although per capita, the middle class consumer may be the worst of them all.
Environmental impact of creating the EVs and giant homes with solar panels. Plus all that jet travel. You have to account for all of that, and then almost certainly they are polluting way more than middle class or poor person.
If that isn’t cynicism, here’s some optimisation thoughts:
- start with the humans that pollute more - which is way more correlated to their consumption that their solar roof surface. Sorry USA, you go first. Others high standard living countries follows.
- Regarding the cows, they have a shorter lifespan and don’t shop much neither do they heat their house or shower water. We could just stop breeding new ones and keep the existant till their death.
The cows also don't really pump up oil. They participate in a carbon cycle.
Their farts are not a long term issue like so damn many people make it out to be. (and I don't think they don't produce (that much) more than the wildlife and plant rot they replace over the total outsized amount of space they actually take up) If there's a reason to have less it's because we chop down forests for more grazing space to grow the herd. Environment impact aside these are carbon sinks even if vastly less efficient than kelp forests or bogs or the like. Also because we use a bit of fossil fuels for fertilizers in part for their feed. That said the manure they produce is probably invaluable in avoiding famines if we're going to stop utilizing Haber–Bosch or start utilizing more expensive methods without gas.
China.
Seems like a deliberate effort not to mention it in the title and abstract, despite the text clearly defining "East Asia" as "mainly China".
Also major contributor to plastic pollution in the ocean (from rivers) and #1 in CO2 emissions. All the while western economies hurt themselves and consumers in vain efforts instead of being serious about the issue and confronting its major contributor.
It's a scientific paper, they need to be precise with language. Saying "East Asia" in the title and then specifying in the paper that most of the impact comes from China is precise. Saying "China" in the title would be misleading, saying "mostly China" would be incomplete and imprecise.
If they put China in the title it'll be flagged
China is currently the one setting a good example on the global stage:
https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1lvoi0x/theres_a...
Meanwhile, US leadership is on team "Drill baby, drill"
Who is China producing FOR tho? Doesn’t seem like a fair assessment
Per capita consumption is a much better metric for deciding who is more responsible for the pollution, which will point the finger right back to... the West [0].
India: 1.2 tonnes CO2/person/year.
China: 7.2 tonnes CO2/person/year.
Russia: 10.1 tonnes CO2/person/year.
Canada, Australia: 12.9 tonnes CO2/person/year.
USA: 16.5 tonnes CO2/person/year.
Pollution is not CO2
Your figures are for who produces CO2 and nothing to do with pollution
CO2 is the topic under discussion. (Also, this is not “nothing to do with pollution”.)
I disagree entirely. The total emissions are absolutely important, and our planet doesn't care about whether one ton of emissions served 1 or 1,000 people.
A complete picture of blame absolutely should include per-capita, ultimate use (who buys the end product of China's emissions), and historical contributions. However, to ignore China's absolute , ongoing contribution as the world's largest emitter (by far: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...) is clearly an error.
2023 totals:
China: 11.90 billion tons, trending up
USA: 4.91 billion tons, trending down
The planet doesn't care about arbitrary lines humans draw on their maps. It just cares about the worldwide total emissions.
Unless you can make a good argument that some humans have a natural or divine right to a bigger share of whatever total worldwide emissions budget we decide we can accept any kind of per country instead of per capita base allocation [1] make no sense.
This can be seen by considering what happens if countries split. A large country that is over their allocation in a per country system can simply split into two or more smaller countries, with the split designed so that each of the new countries has about an equal fraction of the former country's emissions.
This results in no change in the total worldwide emissions, but now that set of people that were before over their total allocation and high on the list of people that need to make big changes now are all in countries under their allocation and in the "should do something about it eventually but no need for big changes now" group of countries.
If they are clever about how they split the original large country into smaller countries they can immediately make free trade treaties and travel treaties between them that effectively make a common market with free travel like much of Europe now has so the split into multiple countries doesn't even change life much for the citizens of the new countries.
Whatever countries have now moved to the top of the "need big changes now" list because of this now have incentive to split, and so on.
[1] By base allocation I mean whatever share they would be allocated in a world with no trade. Actual allocations need to take into account people emitting more because they are making/growing things for other people which reduces the emissions directly attributable to those other people.
If you can make the case to China be my guest. I don't think it's interested in splitting up the country to reduce it's lead role in such emissions.
The point of the country splitting hypothetical was to show that a country's total emission is not a useful measure of whether they are doing better or worse than any other given country on addressing emissions.
A useful measure should not be affected by where we happen to draw political boundaries on our maps.
If you ignore that countries really do exist and really do produce those emissions in order to succeed in their economic objectives, sure, then it's not useful.
Outside that thought experiment it actually is useful, and that's why we have data showing that China leads, by far, in producing emissions. By the way, they lead in methane and nitrous oxide as well -- it isn't just carbon dioxide.
It is not useful because it ignores population.
One property a useful measure of something undesirable (like CO2 emissions) should have is that if you identify the country that is doing the worst by that measure, and they were to change so that their economy works like that of the second worst country and their people live a lifestyle nearly identical to the people of the second country, that should improve the thing being measured.
Total by country fails at that. If China were to change so that they are basically a clone of the US economy and lifestyle their emissions would go way up.
Conversely, if the US were to change to be a China clone that would result in a big decrease in total emissions.
No, the description of what actually is produced, and by who, is accurate and useful.
If you want to suppose those these two countries' populations changed lifestyles, I can also entertain that argument. You'd want to consider the economic reasons why one produces the emissions it does right now, and then suppose how that changes. In such a case, who is purchasing China's manufacturing output, and who is now purchasing that of the US?
Ignoring the world's largest and fastest-growing source of emissions simply because its per-capita rate is lower is a distraction from solving the actual problem.
It's an enticing "what if," but does not reflect the reality of the real data we have today. That data says China is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.
If it is faster growing as a consequence of greater population growth, then that seems like maybe a point.
Now, yes, if we consider just China, then that being a major contributor to world CO2 emissions does imply that if we are to have total emissions under some total global rate, then, well, the total emissions from China need to be below that rate, certainly.
However, it seems a hard ask to try to get China to put stricter per-capita limitations on themselves than we are willing to endure ourselves?
Now, if the higher population places reduced their emissions and the lower population places stayed the same, that might be sufficient, but it also seems a bit, free-riding for those lower population areas?
Also, yeah the consumption of the goods produced seems pretty relevant.
> However, it seems a hard ask to try to get China to put stricter per-capita limitations on themselves than we are willing to endure ourselves?
It is especially a hard ask when you consider that because of the longevity of CO2 in the atmosphere there is more US/Europe CO2 in the atmosphere currently than there is Chinese CO2.
The US and Europe spent well over 100 years massively emitting in order to build up the levels of prosperity they now enjoy. If everyone else that wants prosperity tries to follow that same path it will be disastrous.
The only way to give every country a chance to reach a decent level of prosperity without using a a disastrous amount of fossil fuels is for (1) countries that achieve prosperity to rapidly and drastically cut their emission by switching to renewable energy, and (2) the prosperous countries provide subsidies for renewables to the countries that are trying to become prosperous so many of the latter can skip much of the "fossil fuel our way to prosperity" phase and go more directly to the prosperous renewal energy powered country endgame.
> Also, yeah the consumption of the goods produced seems pretty relevant.
In a fair system it is relevant, but as an adjustment after population. A fair system would start with the amount of total annual emissions that we decide (somehow) we need to keep under as a world, divide that by the number of people, and then assign each country that quotient times there population as their annual emission allowance.
If a country emits more than that they would have to get some other country to give them some of that country's emission allowance. That could be incorporated into international trade by making it so outsourcing production of something to another country requires you to provide that other country with enough of your emission allowance to cover the making of that thing.
I did not possibly make my arguments clear.
China has higher emission, because China has higher number of factories. The factories produce stuff. Where do all that stuff go? And for whom are all that stuff produced?
Not entirely China, or Africa, or India. A vast amount of that stuff flows to... the West.
So, if the West chooses to reduce its consumption significantly, the CO2 emissions of China will go down.
The consumers have to take the blame. It's as clear as that. And the West should fund climate-resilient infra for people and green tech for China and India and Vietnam. Because it is to West that stuff goes. But that's another issue. It is because there is demand in the West, China produce stuff.
If every American buys only one pair of shoes and a couple of new tshirts every year, and not more, and buys a smartphone after using one for 4 years, not less, the CO2 emission of China will go down.
I understood your argument, and I did already address the point you want to continue with here.
> ultimate use (who buys the end product of China's emissions), and historical contributions. However, to ignore China's absolute , ongoing contribution as the world's largest emitter (by far: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...) is clearly an error.
"Ultimate use" discusses consumption by the West. This fact does not exonerate China, as China directly causes the emissions in order to satisfy its economic ambitions, and profits from its _factual_ role as the leading emitter of greenhouse gases. If China did not offer these exports, perhaps someone else would. But right now, it's China.
I also threw in "historical contributions" to throw you a bone. Nonetheless, right now, its China and China's emissions are, even still, increasing.
If you want to pass the buck to the West that's fine, but the reality is that China is producing more emissions than anybody else is, and it does it for the benefit of China at the expense of the planet.
The article is about reducing pollution, so in this context, they're doing a good thing.
This is a case of China trying to reduce pollution. Reduce aerosol emissions. The impact of this is lower cooling (aerosol interaction results in atmospheric cooling)
What exactly has the US done to hurt their economy? They have subsidized green energy, but China does that to a much greater extent.
> "Figure 1a shows changes in aerosol optical depth (AOD) retrieved by MODIS Terra and Aqua"
The US wants to immediately defund these satellites and halt their observations.
https://www.science.org/content/article/dozens-active-and-pl...
I don't know why some people celebrate strength with fear of knowledge. Maybe they're just equally as afraid of knowledge and don't want to look weak and puff out their chests to pretend to be strong. As an American, it really frustrates me to see such bravado celebrated as bravery.
> afraid of knowledge and don't want to look weak
I've come to the conclusion this is basically it, aside from corruption.
Intellectual weakness and cowardice, avoiding what you can't actually do or don't understand.
In the case of anything space related though, I'd look to corruption, trying to cut public resources to reduce competition with private equivalents, shifting money from something publicly owned to something privately profited from.
For those in power, those that point out the problem, become the problem.
you're assuming this is because of perception of weakness, and not an explicit, decade-long aggressive effort by foreign money + US billionaires to dismantle the US government.
just happens that oil barons & Putin happen to have views that are aligned, and that Trump + his cronies are willing to play ball with the fellow travelers.
i think a decades-long aggressive effort to dismantle the US government might also be from such a place of fear of knowledge or at least, fear of others having control over their right to make profit. I guess I'm just tired of us celebrating the ones who appear strong but really are just acting out of deep fear and wish they (and us) had the courage to see it as fear and express it as such.
[flagged]
I'd be fine with that as a counterargument if that were the counterargument such people made. I think that's a healthy debate and dialogue, where we could learn from each other. I often think the case is they say climate change is fake and that experts are lying and everyone who has a PhD is lying to you, and those ad hominem attacks often say to me someone who feels insecure about their knowledge or has some vested interest in, say, the oil industry, for example. That was more of my outburst.
With regards to whether a private company could maintain satellites (probably with government regulation and maybe subsidy), I'm open to that. I just worry sometimes that many of these decisions are made in the "Uh oh, this public knowledge might destroy my private profits, so let us get rid of the public knowledge."
Don't pay money to give your political opponents facts to help oust you.
politics 101.
They're already going to be ousted. This is about temporarily propping up the price of fossil fuel assets that will never practically be monetized. Even an extra 5-10 years could allow vast sums of fake-wealth to be dumped onto other bagholders.
The asset bust coming to Permian basin via fracking is going to be a doozy.
Need the money to pay for moving the retired, defunct Shuttle Discovery to Houston in order to lie to the people that space is being funded.
There are three kinds of satellites that do this sort of earth observation right now. I'd look up the acronyms but frankly it's been weeks since the news dropped and I don't care to educate anyone anymore, you can google it if you want. There's one kind they've been launching every now and then since the 00s and there's only a couple of it's type up there due to short-ish life (like a decade and a half) last few being problematic resulting in a very low (like count on one hand) number of its type in service of which most are at or beyond end of life. Those are being defunded. The programs that maintain the other two types will remain.
It's like the air force saying they're killing the F15C but keeping the F15D and F15E only with space and different acronyms.
Really speaks volumes about the community that news that's basically the space equivalent of the army or navy retiring a class of craft in favor of others that do that jobs is being portrayed like it's the end of the world. If the EOLing were an actual degradation in the organization's capability it would not have gone out of the mainstream so fast.
No; the budget cuts the Earth Science division (encompassing MODIS et al.) in half[0]. You need only query at the budget request itself[1] to see it does so with wilful malice, under the rationale that climate science is "woke" and a "radical ideology"[1].
[0] https://www.space.com/science/climate-change/as-nasas-budget... (.... It called for a 24% overall cut to NASA's budget, including a 47% reduction in Earth science funding...")
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal...
> "The recommended funding levels result from a rigorous, line-by-line review of FY 2025 spending, which was found to be laden with spending contrary to the needs of ordinary working Americans and tilted toward funding niche non-governmental organizations and institutions of higher education committed to radical gender and climate ideologies antithetical to the American way of life."
You didn’t address what they said though.