Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/22/geoengineers-propose-freezing-high-altitude-water-vapor-to-slow-climate-change.html
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OR, we could, you know… switch over to a more environmentally sound energy systems? 
Although, at this point, some of this more extreme measures might be necessary…
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I do think more out-of-the-box solutions may be necessary, only because of the amount of carbon that’s already locked-in whose warming effects haven’t even been felt yet (even if we stop emitting tomorrow we’ll still keep getting warmer) and because it’s simply impossible to actually stop emitting tomorrow.
But the geoengineering shit is so damn dangerous. We can close to guarantee there will be unintended consequences. What does less water gas in the air do? What does less solar radiation do? Then there’s the problem that it allows us to mask increased CO2 emissions, and if the geoengineering ever stops or fails, the resulting sudden increase in temperature will be even more catastrophic. And then there’s the questions of whether one or a few countries are allowed to experiment with the entire planet.
But still we’re going to need to do more than using green energy, which is why I’ve been supporting carbon sequestration programs. It’s a really tricky question, though. Each dollar spent on a new solar panel unquestionably removes more CO2 than each dollar spent on a carbon sucking machine. And yet we’re going to need that technology as well, so it seems like it’s good to support it to try and get the costs down.
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Or spend that money on planting lots and lots of forests. Spend it on subsiding non livestock based farming (and cut subsidies to livestock farming). Stop subsidising air travel from appetite to arsehole.
Spend all of the money, right now, on actual solutions rather than the pipe dreams of accelerationists.
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Perhaps ice crystal ‘seeds’ (nuclei) are deemed less scary than calcium carbonate and a soupcon of sulfuric acid; or perhaps there were grumpy scientists involved, but this report compares interestingly to a very recent Harvard geoengineering experiment called off:
Harvard has halted its long-planned atmospheric geoengineering experiment
March 18, 2024
The decision follows years of controversy and the departure of one of the program’s key researchers.
In a university statement released on March 18, Frank Keutsch, the principal investigator on the project, said he is “no longer pursuing the experiment.”
The basic concept behind solar geoengineering is that the world might be able to counteract global warming by spraying tiny particles in the atmosphere that could scatter sunlight.
The plan for the Harvard experiments was to launch a high-altitude balloon, equipped with propellers and sensors, that could release a few kilograms of calcium carbonate, sulfuric acid or other materials high above the planet. It would then turn around and fly through the plume to measure how widely the particles disperse, how much sunlight they reflect and other variables. The aircraft will now be repurposed for stratospheric research unrelated to solar geoengineering, according to the statement. …
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One of the things I’ve always wondered when it comes to geoengineering is: “how much of the earth’s surface would we have to cover with mirrors (or some other reflective material) to make a difference?”
But I’m sure that people smarter than me have considered the idea and found it to be unfeasible.
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A few countries are already experimenting by churning out methane and CO2. I also don’t think you need to hedge on the unintended consequences.
There was a report on some super super white paint. It had an extremely high albedo. The article said if we could cover an area equivalent to 1% of the Sahara with this paint, then we could largely negate the greenhouse effect.
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We will do the damnest thing to avoid the elephant in the room, our environment destructive habits. Global warming and greenhouse gas are long studied and well understood problem as this point but no, we only need some innovation to not change our habit.
Can it cause drought in one place and storm/flood in another? You can run simulations all you can but you won’t know the outcome for sure until you actually do it because some unknown variable wasn’t taken into account when you ran your, well, simulation. This won’t end with them losing their jobs. It can affect millions of people.
Sound like some certain pioneer talking about moving to Mars.
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Schwartz also reassured reporters that this plan won’t have an unintended Snowpiercer effect.
I’m out. Curiously specific denial!
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“Look guys, I promise you it’s not going to end up like Snowpiercer. I guaran-fucking-tee it. How am I so confident? Look, the movie doesn’t even make sense! A goddamn train traveling forever? Who even laid the tracks that encircle the globe? And I’m not even building a train! Do I look like some kind of train enthusiast? So who could even think I’m going to make us end up like Snowpiercer???”
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Just don’t try anything funny in Tennessee.
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oh, so geoengineer is a profession now? what?
I dont know…and giving the fossil industry a reason to continue the carbon party? because that will most certainly happen, when these “extreme measures” showing to have a real effect on global temperatures.
I could be wrong, but I doubt the goal is to “remove” the water through freezing, but to form reflective ice crystals in the stratosphere? because actual removing 3% of the water from that layer should have nearly zero effect. the tonga eruption 2022 injected nearly 150 MT of water into the stratosphere, thats about 10-12% of all water up there; a study from last year came to the conclusion this additional water lead to an increase of about ~0.03-0.04C in global temperature. thats basically noise.
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whether or not it would work, it’s certainly a bright idea. 
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I’d be morbidly curious to know how much further past the culture warriors you could get a wind farm proposal by introducing the project lead as a geoengineer with an advanced concept for a macroscale, bulk-fluid-interactive, selective kinetic extraction array, it’s site discerned by sophisticated(we’ll say “AI”) computational models.
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