A Test of Cloud-Brightening Machines Poses No Health Risk, Officials Say

www.nytimes.com

15 comments

They probably said that about plastics too, back in the day.
- They swore up and down that Roundup and Glysophate pesticides are harmless to bees and things they werent supposed to target.
  PFAS and PFOS chemicals were touted as harmless, even though the company behind them knew that was a bald faced lie. For Decades
- They also said it about potatoes, fresh water, indoor plants, cotton clothes, thinking about the moon and wooden stools.
One thing efforts like these don't do is decrease the level of CO2 which carries a whole host of issues.
- Well yeah, but the intention is to lessen the effects of the warming already happening and what will happen in the future no matter what we do. Nobody is pretending like we need to do this instead of cutting emissions, (except maybe oil execs I guess), we can do both at once.
  The one downside of this and other geoengineering options is that once we start we can't stop until CO2 levels drop back down so we don't get a more sudden global temperature spike which would be worse for the environment most likely
Cool. Even if we hit net zero co2 emissions tonight, world is going to keep getting hotter for decades.
Not that we will hit zero tonight.
- Temperatures stabilize faster than you might think
  The problem is if we don't actually hit zero, but maintain a constant CO2 concentration, in which case temperatures do rise for decades.
Somehow I am not convinced that spraying salt water into clouds is without risks. Somewhere, all the salt will come down as salty rain after all. I guess farmers will be exited about this when they can harvest pre-salted tomatoes...
- I believe it's mostly being suggested over the ocean. There's a great Hank Green video about this tech.
  
  During the cold war, the Americans (and probably the Russians, too) seeded clouds and checked where the stuff ended up to see how radioactive fallout would work. The result was: basically everywhere.
So this is how sharknado begins...
But no in seriousness spraying seawater into the air over seawater to reflect more heat sounds interesting. The ocean itself has a very low albido compared to clouds of any brightness.
Remember when they used to spray deet in the air and kids would play in it?
Oh shit these the gay contrails Alex Jones warned us about?!
Certainly worth studying, especially if it's actually basically seawater (not clear from the article, informed opinion welcomed). Science bitches, test those hypotheses...

15 comments