We have "aggravated the situation" (as you put it) beyond recovery. Doing nothing will now surely lead to an unacceptable outcome. We are going to have to fix it, or resign ourselves to a huge shrinking of the habitable region of the planet, with the hunger/famine/war that will accompany that.
Obviously we can always make things worse. But when doing nothing is unacceptable, we have to start taking risks.
You have absolutely no idea if the "solutions" we try won't lead to even worse outcomes.
Up until the point climate change is becoming an existential threat, which it isn't yet, we shouldn't go doing anything too drastic. There is plenty of evidence that we can still avert the worst of it without resorting to geoengineering.
Why exactly do you place faith in evidence that says "we can still avert the worst of it" and are not willing to do the same for evidence that says "we can do even better with geo-engineering"? Presumably the scale of the problem is the same either way, so well-reasoned evidence should be able to persuade you of either.
> In the early 1990s, anthropogenic sulfur dominated in the Northern Hemisphere, where only 16% of annual sulfur emissions were natural, yet amounted for less than half of the emissions in the Southern Hemisphere.
> Such an increase in sulfate aerosol emissions had a variety of effects. At the time, the most visible one was acid rain, caused by precipitation from clouds carrying high concentrations of sulfate aerosols in the troposphere. At its peak, acid rain has eliminated brook trout and some other fish species and insect life from lakes and streams in geographically sensitive areas, such as Adirondack Mountains in the United States. Acid rain worsens soil function as some of its microbiota is lost and heavy metals like aluminium are mobilized (spread more easily) while essential nutrients and minerals such as magnesium can leach away because of the same. Ultimately, plants unable to tolerate lowered pH are killed, with montane forests being some of the worst-affected ecosystems due to their regular exposure to sulfate-carrying fog at high altitudes.[1]
One of the risks of a strategy like this is that we become reliant on it and use it as an excuse to solve the actual problem slower. Then if there's ever any disruption to SO2 production we get 20 years of warming all at once that we otherwise might have worked to avoid.
Betting on never having a disruption to that supply seems high risk to me.
It is untrue that they have no idea if the "solutions" we try won't lead to worse outcomes
It is true that they have some idea that the "solutions" we try won't lead to worse outcomes
It is true that they have some idea that the "solutions" we try will lead to better outcomes.
I think the nuance needed here is: what do we mean by "better outcomes?" It's reasonable to believe that it will help lower temperatures. But is that an "outcome" in and of itself?
If we consider the "outcome" to also include the second and third order effects, I'd like to understand how anyone could be certain that it will be better.
> There is plenty of evidence that we can still avert the worst of it without resorting to geoengineering.
We already have once in a lifetime climate event every month and the carbon locked-in of the past decade still hasn't kicked-in. I'd argue the complete opposite, there's a lack of evidence of other options.
This kind of defeatist attitude doesn't help with the situation at all. We can all do our part in reducing our daily carbon emissions, raise awareness, and educate policymakers and business stakeholders on the importance of mitigating climate change!
I want to know what the costs[1] of ignoring are likely to be so I can be sure it's worth the pain to ban non-electric cars in 10 years, ram through nuclear power plants while gutting safety regs so we can get them built in less than a decade and try and threaten India and China into reducing CO2 emissions. What do you tell me?
[1] In $, convert other units like lives into dollars as need be and be sure to value lives from different cultures at 0.1x as thats the expressed preferences of the population based on chatitable giving figures.
You can call it defeatist, but at this point it's factually true. We've made a negative amount of progress on this matter. And that's taken 40 years. We have very little time left. We have already locked in almost 2 degrees of warming.
These are all regrettable facts. But that are facts.
40 years of raising awareness and individual action has failed.
One man's defeatist attitude is another mans realistic attitude. Does it help? No, it doesn't. But for the defeatist and the realist alike that may no longer matter. I'm 'long' on humanity, but I'm not convinced we will be able to avert the looming (and for some already very present) issues. My feelings are in part because of how we dealt with COVID-19, if a pandemic can't get us to pull the cart together then nothing can.
Doing nothing is itself a risk. Better to think of it as risk in every direction, all we can do is use what we know from science to choose our exit from the roundabout.
If all human carbon emissions magically ceased today anthropomorphic global warming and its concomitant environmental changes will stillcontinue to unfold for the next few centuries or millennia, at a minimum, before settling into a new (albeit shifted) "natural" evolution. It will take millions of years for the human carbon emissions to be cycled back into the lithosphere.
In this sense, continued emissions only accelerate and compound the current process unfolding. Global warming as it exists today cannot be stopped passively.
That was the previous poster's point. We can infer that their unstated objective is the end of global warming in the near future (i.e. in the next few centuries), the achievement of which necessarily requires active intervention.
I might infer that your unstated objective is not the end of global warming, but the end of ongoing human interference per se. That's an entirely different objective, albeit no less legitimate.
If I'm correct (and I'm confident in my assessment wrt to the previous poster), then you two are talking past each other.
No problem with this, apart from convincing like 5-6 billion people to cut their standards of living to half. Also less people is needed, few children. Sounds like impossible now without concentrated media effort and all ruling parties probably would lose for decades.
We don't have the time to sit back and let epistemic knowledge wash over us. We know more or less what needs to happen (less sunlight in, more heat out). All attempts to resolve the situation require taking some risk, and it'll be impossible to quantify all those risks until we try them.
At the risk of stating the obvious: we need to measure every weird idea we try, and do our best to isolate the variables. Easier said than done. But we broke it, it's our problem now.
Talking about humility: an excess of humility leads to fatalism. Some is good, but not too much if you want anything to happen. We're talking about fixing the ecosystem of a planet, of course it's ambitious.
>You sound like someone about to perform a triple bypass with a butter knife.
This style of comment is lazy and simply trying to shut down conversation without actually making an argument. If you have an objection to the comment you're responding to, then say why you think they're wrong, what your alternative point of view is, and why your point of view is the correct one.
That metaphor implies an understanding and overview that we simply do not have. Think of it as changing bytes in an executable file which will be run in 50 years, based on what "seems reasonable" to you staring at a wall of hex without even a de-compiler existing, much less you being able to use one. The only reason to even dream of it is not having to suffer the consequences, period. And that's not just because you might not be here in 50 years, it's because you're just one person in one very, very narrow walk of life, as opposed to being billions of people.
The carbon emissions of the richest 1% of humanity are more than double than that of the poorest half of humanity. Oil and coal companies profit, while putting out disinformation, as they have been for decades. But why step on the toes of the powerful when you can just use inject sulfur into the atmosphere?
So don't do a bloody tripple bypass with a butter knife. Just stop the bleeding. Jeez, this conversation is the best illustration of everything that's wrong with geoengineering ideas.
Indeed we have practiced quite a bit. Read on the catastrophe that was geoengineering attempts resulting in what is now happening with the Sea of Azov.
There are a number of problems that all interlock. Democracies with their relatively short election cycles will naturally find it hard to deal with problems that last much longer than those election cycles and that have the bulk of the problems downstream of us. Voters are motivated by their personal issues first, local issues second and global issues dead last. Countries are going to have to collaborate in a very strict manner in order to deal with global issues.
Throw all of those in a blender and it's easy to see why democracy and global problems are not going lead to an actual solution. Individuals are going to make some minor difference but not enough to offset the larger trends as long as it isn't a solid majority doing this.
I agree we shouldn’t count on our liberal democraties to handle that. Individuals will do the job and the majority is coming, just wait for the boomers to evade in their fantastic plastic graves.
> So don't do a bloody tripple bypass with a butter knife. Just stop the bleeding.
We're way past that point, the choice is quickly became to try geoengineering or die and I'm not going to take the dying option, no thanks, no matter how immoral you think the other one is.
We’re actually curating it to get closer to the situation. Or are you seeing humanity as a kind of god that can play with earth without impacting it existence on it ?
> You sound like someone about to perform a triple bypass with a butter knife.
If climate change was a disease it wouldn't have an ICD number, no method of diagnostic in standard literature, let alone a treatment approved by the competent authority.
The recommended solutions would be to eat more healthy, more physical activity, and something to treat the symptoms.
There won't be a double-blind study for specific treatments of earth, so any kind of idea is equally valid.
Putting aside "a space-based solar sunshade represents a technological leap forward and would be really cool" -- which I think speaks to me on an emotional level -- I do think this might be the single most powerful technological weapon we have to combat climate change.
My reasoning:
* people talk about going carbon neutral: great! But this isn't one problem, this is a thousand distinct problems. Our civilization is built on fossil fuels, and every manufacturing process, agricultural process, transportation process, etc, has to be re-invented to not be built on fossil fuels. Progress will never be as fast as we'd like on this front. We can and should push to get there (there is no good path but forward), but every new bit of news we hear out of Antarctica or Greenland should tell you that we need a longer runway.
* people talk about carbon sequestration: scaling up carbon sequestration is hard -- IMO, even with uncertainty, it feels a lot harder than blocking 1% of sunlight. There is a (semi)plausible technological path to the latter, at least. We will obviously have to keep exploring carbon sequestration in the hopes that a silver bullet emerges. But we can't count on nonexistent tech bailing us out. That's magical thinking, and one step above "thoughts and prayers". There has to be a plan in the mean time, and that plan needs to scale. We're probably going to need it.
* geoengineering with aerosols isn't just geo-engineering, it's essentially terraforming. That's a wing and a prayer, and at the scale we'd need to do it to have an impact we'd surely create some nasty unintentional consequences.
* Note: the above is an important risk calculation, because if you're ok with dumping a crapton of aerosols in the atmosphere -- as some people seem to be -- aren't we basically fine on climate already? Just do that indefinitely! Seems fine, right?
* if aerosol spam is not fine, your backup plan can only be something in space: you are here, at this pdf, at the solar sunshade. The sunshade has side effects, but they're much more palatable in my estimation -- the 1% of sunlight blocked will have the effect of making every day seem imperceptibly hazier (this was something I noticed during the 2017 solar eclipse at 50% of the sun being blocked -- seemed like a hazy day at that level of diminished sunlight. That was 50%. With the sunshade we're talking a 1% reduction to reduce the global temp by 2C.)
Aha! I was wondering where the github stars were coming from. :)
I did get a kick out of this from the OP:
> Binary: Born from YouTube compression being absolutely brutal. RGB mode is very sensitive to compression as a change in even one point of one of the colors of one of the pixels dooms the file to corruption.
It's more than youtube compression -- video compression in general wreaks absolute havoc on our meticulously arranged (and sometimes colored) pixels. It's actually pretty fun/instructive to step through the transition between (what you want to be) two distinct frames when you're trying to (ab)use video for this sort of use case -- there are segments of the frames that get correlated and "flip" together first, resulting in in-between frames that are gibberish even with a modest amount of ECC in play.
For example, you might currently be using a public/private keypair for 4096-bit RSA. That keypair (by definition) only works for the RSA key exchange algorithm. Likewise, an x22519 keypair is for the x25519 key exchange.
A sntrup761x25519 keypair will be its own thing. As an aside, a sntrup761x25519 public key will be two public keys glued together (one for each algorithm). [1] Likewise for the private key.
(one could reuse an existing x25519 keypair for the x25519 component of sntrup761x25519, but it seems like a bad idea)
Same keys, servers and clients will keep using their ed25519 keys for authenticating each other, the keys for the key exchange are negotiated on login.
I would put celery in that class of software that's good enough to be useful, but enough trouble that you'll never be truly happy with it.
We got a lot of mileage out of it (in a past life) before finally moving our job scheduling to a custom solution built on RQ. Celery caused more than a few headaches -- which is why we ditched it -- but its flexibility probably helped us scale up the service to begin with...
At the risk of being reductive: Make more of our software copyleft? Even weak copyleft?
As a thought experiment, imagine how the modern web might've played out if KHTML was released under the MIT license instead of the LGPL?
Bearing in mind: Google has other ways of controlling the market (search, android, youtube, gmail, "switch to chrome" everywhere... don't call it anti-competitive...), but they've had to work much harder to exert control than they would've -- IMO -- if blink/webkit/khtml had a more "corporate friendly" license.
Maybe I'm off base with my reasoning, but I see it as being about friction. We can't stop the inhuman profit-seeking machine from doing what it does, but we do have some (underutilized) tools to slow it down.
As far as yesterday was concerned, Edwardsville (and neighboring areas) knew they were in the line of fire by 8PM local time. The tornado hit the facility at ~8:40.
Things can get out of control quicker (15-20 minutes warning is usually as close as it gets), but I think it's definitely reasonable to suspect negligence in this instance. There are two possibilities, imo:
1. They had enough time to get people to shelter, and chose not to
2. The facility wasn't up to par
Those numbers are with the standard, fairly high ECC setting (~20% of the image) that I settled on for video-based transfer. If we want to be more aggressive and use half the error correction:
The decoder has a lot of image processing work to do (intriguingly well-suited for the GPU), and also lots of popcnts. I've optimized it a fair bit, but there's probably some tricks I still need to learn. It turns out that mobile processors don't like heat very much, and blow out their cache much quicker than you'd hope. :)
In the long run, I think your intuition is correct. The hard physics of the camera constraints (exposure time, etc) will put a hard upper bound on FPS+fidelity, and thus bandwidth.
We have "aggravated the situation" (as you put it) beyond recovery. Doing nothing will now surely lead to an unacceptable outcome. We are going to have to fix it, or resign ourselves to a huge shrinking of the habitable region of the planet, with the hunger/famine/war that will accompany that.
Obviously we can always make things worse. But when doing nothing is unacceptable, we have to start taking risks.