sira ve stratosfere - stephenson kritizuje projekt na detekci tohoto, protoze mu pripada spatne uzavirat si tuto cestu
vymezuje se proti clanku v NYT
Just to lay my cards on the table, I think that SRM should be investigated and possibly even implemented. But I don’t think it is likely to be, because people on the right and left both hate it. People on the right lump it in with chemtrails, and hate it for the same reasons (if that is the correct word) they now have now decided that the polio vaccine is bad. People on the left hate it because…well, I’ll get to that in a second. So I don’t think it will happen unless a Trumpian figure comes out in favor of it and pitches it to the populist base in a style that will make those people think it’s awesome.
In other words, I think that this is largely an abstract debate that is more interesting as a case study in fallibilism than it is on its own merits.
The NYT Article
The article describes how some exceptionally smart and technically capable people are using their ingenuity and energy (and presumably taxpayer money) to set up a detection system that will enable them to blow the whistle on anyone who actually tries to implement SRM. This is because “[SRM] could also unleash untold dangers. Many worry that solar geoengineering could have unintended consequences.”
I’m not going to pore over the article in detail because I try to keep these Substack entries reasonably short. But if we take it at face value, it seems that everyone mentioned in this story, as well as the journalist writing it, simply accepts the premise that even the smallest and most preliminary efforts that might be made towards studying SRM are so unthinkably reckless that the most important thing that they can possibly be devoting their careers to is creating sophisticated systems “to measure aerosol concentration and raise a red flag at any anomalies.”
Geoengineering (Wrong 2) - by Neal Stephenson - Graphomanehttps://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/geoengineeringOther methods to implement SRM have been proposed, such as using huge systems of balloons or firing enormous guns into the air. The only thing they have in common is that they are almost comically enormous. They have to be, since what they are trying to do is to replicated in a controlled manner some of the largest volcanic explosions in history.
What then is the purpose of putting all of this ingenuity to work building these exquisitely sophisticated systems for detecting faint traces of aerosols in the stratosphere? The only explanation that makes any sense is that the goal is to sense even the tiniest and most preliminary exploratory efforts in the field of SRM. Experiments, basically. Programs that are, by definition, too small to actually change the climate. If someone were changing the climate, we’d know about it. We wouldn’t need high altitude balloons or WB-57s. We could just aim a webcam at the special airport where hundreds of weird planes were taking off every day.
And it’s worth reiterating—because the level of anxiety about SRM is so high—that the purpose of those weird planes would not be to drop bombs, spray nerve gas, or strafe peasants, but to ameliorate, temporarily and reversibly, the effects of a completely uncontrolled and incredibly reckless geoengineering experiment that the human race has been engaging in for 200 years, and will continue to engage in for at least another 50 years, by dumping vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere and the oceans.
A charge often levelled against environmentalists by the right is that tree-huggers are in some sense anti-technological and by extension anti-human. That they are in love with the idea of an unspoiled natural order and that anything humans do to change it is automatically bad.
But that doesn’t explain this curiously asymmetrical reaction to, on the one hand, the very idea that some people might engage in preliminary studies of techniques intended to save humanity from the consequences of too much anthropogenic CO2 in the air, vs., on the other hand, the ongoing reality of what we are actually doing when we burn fossil fuels. I don’t understand how people who think this way are going to explain such positions when a million people are lying dead of heatstroke somewhere. The only way I can process it is to construe it as a kind of religious belief—an article of faith.