Does anybody see a way something like this can actually be avoided? Fighting climate change is expensive. And while the costs of a climate catastrophe are even higher, they only need to be paid long after today's politicians have left office. Policy makers who want to get re-elected tomorrow have very little incentive to do what's right. What's more, it's a global problem where individual countries can benefit by defecting and letting others do the hard work. They can blame each other to justify inaction. It's a wonder that any measures get taken at all.<p>Direct air capture is not looking promising. I bet there will be so little action that shit will hit the fan and we will need some kind of geoengineering. An eternally dark sky like in the Matrix? Hopefully not. But perhaps targeted control of the weather to prevent the worst droughts and storms. And a massive, forceful change to the planet to offset the additional warming.<p>Please someone convince me I'm wrong?
It’s sad that the greed and selfishness of our societies lead to these kind of dystopian attempts to stop climate change. People are ready to try the craziest things, as long as it’s not one of: curbing their consumption, stop flying or stop eating animal products.<p>But sure, let’s blast fucking aerosols into the atmosphere. Fucking sad.
Yet another stupid attempt to push this flawed proposal. There are so many things wrong with the idea it's almost ludicrous. For one thing, who gets the right to determine how this goes planetwide?<p>For example, who will guarantee that releasing sulphuric acid into the sky won't trash the monsoon and kill billions of people? The number of unintended consequences we could suffer as a result of this moronic idea boggles the mind.
I fail to see how AI can really assist with this.<p>Whatever model the AI is fed is going to contain an enormous number of assumptions many of which we have a very limited ability to scientifically test and validate prior to using them as inputs.<p>If the inputs are faulty if doesn’t matter how smart the AI is it’s going to produce inaccurate results.
I understand the push for stratospheric aerosols, but the alleged need for deeplearning is poorly justified.<p>All the points listed in favor of deeplearning in this article only point towards the need for heavy calculations, but I would say it's not deeplearning that's required, but instead very precise physical simulations.<p>For example to help the deployment of drones to spread the aerosols, I don't think that you can model winds better with deeplearning than with current models used by meteorological agencies. Or, at least, it does not seem to me the bottleneck here. Or, OK <i>maybe</i> there will be breakthroughs that would replace physical simulation-based meteorology by deeplearning models, but I don't think it is helpful right now, or you would need to do a lot more explaining to convince me.
Almost 45 years after we were told not to burn all that coal, we are still burning all that coal.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI</a><p>But 45 years from now we’ll be smart enough to reverse all the damage we did for almost a century.
As the climate warms, we can expect more flooding in low-lying coastal areas.<p>What if someone created a mobile climate response team that dealt with floodwaters by injecting them into the air as aerosols? Kill 2 birds with one stone.<p>It's even possible that you could do it as a for-profit, by charging municipalities for the service. (For profit means more scaleable, easier to get capital)<p>I don't know what sort of approach might be feasible here. Could do something really imaginative like an inflatable tower with tubes running along it and pumps at the bottom. Or drones as described in the OP.
This is and will always be a terrible way to solve the problem. Should be in the same category as nuclear weapons. Abjectly terrible idea.<p>All the people pushing this idea truly dont understand the implications, think they are smarter than they are, and think this is the easy and obvious solution.
That would be the mother of all jokes: After we clowned the Chemtrail-Simps we actually need Chemtrails to safe the world from chemicals. Humanity is a clown-show