Is Geo-Engineering Going to Save (or Destroy) Us?
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 2 ноя 2024
- Follow Miriam and Adam:
Miriam: / @zentouro
Adam: / @climateadam
Here's Adam's video about my video: • Climate Scientist reac...
And here's a Radiolab episode that I did with those good folks!
• Smog Cloud Silver Lini...
Yesss! Thanks so much for having us to chat climate! 🎉 Geoengineering is such a complex nuanced topic (from the science to the ethics) and it was great to go into the weeds of it together.
Hi! I see that you have a Mastodon presence. Is that something you're interested in continuing? It looks like you've given up on it since February. I haven't used Twitter in a really long time, and you seem to post about neat stuff.
If not, that's fine, youtube is enough for me. But you have ~700 followers on your mastodon account with basically zero effort, so there's definitely a demand there.
Wonderful discussion of real world science! What inspiration from sci-fi or fiction in climate discussion would you guys like to see be focused on?
are you not concerned about addressing the origins of cloud seeding? you must be aware it was developed for preventing soviet crop growth regardless of when their government was coopted it was part of creating a false image and statistics about what living under communist organization would result in of which north korea is about all that's still needed to point to and say it can't work. your answer on to how to live is not honest if you refuse to acknowledge things like climate change from fossil fuels could have been steadily selectively countered with seeding since the cold war creating real dishonest data and also hey want a third world to have a drought just quit doing as much coverage opposite to the original way it was used to pressure people happily in communal living to adopt our society of social contracts like following an acceptable agenda. also magically ending acid rain was just a matter of changing to a new mix instead of using the tech developed to hurt crops that was hastily repurposed to make a dial and fix data.
@@tosmornHOF4748personally I'm a huge fan of eco-utopias, which outline the beautiful worlds we could build by fighting climate change. The book "woman on the edge of time" was a revelation when I came across it!
@@ClimateAdam Hi there. by any chance have you seen the recent talk given by Anni Pokela on Solar geoengineering about a month back. Having seen a lot of talk in this subject i don’t think anyone has been able to summarise the real predicament we find ourselves in as succinctly as her in that relatively short speech. Would recommend.
I definitely think Adam's point right on the end is spot on. Both not caring and taking a nihilist approach excuse you from having to do anything, and people like everything else gravitate towards low energy states.
from what i see is there are actually very little people who have a we are so doomed that we should do absolutely nothing attitude, its a extremely overblown problem and there is a much larger contingence of we are fucking screwed we have to do something ASAP, not like get it started in a year, like do something right now . I think when people like Adam consistently bring up this false doomer who is just a nhilist and thinks the world will end and say fuck it, thats not a real thing and it dismisses the actual urgency. To much promotion of optimism is not good, it is more likely to have people sit back and do nothing than anything honestly.
I agree, but I find it ironic how difficult he finds it to see the perspective of those discouraging him from talking about geo-engineering non-chalantly given that. I think the best analogue is in the discussion around transportion: we know that trains (in their various forms) are the best solution in a LOT of contexts, but people ignore advocating for that work to be done while getting starry-eyed over electric cars and self-driving vehicles. It is, in my opinion, irresponsible to sling these ideas from the hip (like the other videos, not this one) when we know current society is predisposed to flashy, sci-fi-sounding tech bro "solutions" instead of facing the reality that we know and HAVE known actual solutions for a long time but continue to ignore them while people cling to the hope that they won't have to change their lives at all in the process of fixing the problems we have made and continue to exacerbate.
Miriam and Adam seem to have their heads on straight, though. I'm glad he talked to them and shared it with his audience.
The nihilism and “oh, we’re all screwed anyway” drives me nuts. It’s lazy. Then again, lots of the language around climate issues is terrible. The whole idea of “carbon footprint”, for example, turning a structural issue into a personal issue.
@j.b.5422 Prevent what? The structure problems that have created global warming, or the Doomer cynicism that refuses to do anything more than share memes?
@j.b.5422 The structural problems are getting addressed, I think, not as forcefully as I’d like, but progress is being rapidly made. The free market is your best friend or your worst enemy, and thanks to the order-of-magnitude price drops of solar and batteries, the market favors clean energy and is bad news for fossil fuel and internal combustion cars (and nuclear, for that matter). And I think we’ll see further declines of at least 50% more on solar panels and lithium batteries, plus order-of-magnitude drops in non-lithium grid batteries like iron-air and redox flow. A lot of people look at the current market penetration of solar and EVs and get dismissive (both deniers and doomers), but they’re not looking at the rate of growth. Solar deployment has been doubling every three years for over a decade now. At that rate of growth, we’ll have 10x as much solar by the end of 2030, and it will completely dominate the grid by 2040. This would depend on batteries and synthetic fuels (hydrogen, ammonia, hydrocarbons) getting cheap enough to easily beat coal/gas, but I’d be surprised if that didn’t happen.
Meanwhile, EVs are practically doubling every year now. And as EVs become more common, it’s going to make gasoline look really bad. It’ll start affecting gas station availability, etc. I think that fight will be over by 2035, honestly. Of course, it’ll be another decade or more to get the last of the gasoline vehicles off the road, but it’ll happen. And of course, coal/gas on the grid and gasoline/diesel in cars is not at all the total of greenhouse gases, but it’s the majority. And we can make more progress on harder problems like ship/aircraft fuel, steel and cement, etc. We won’t reach net zero by 2050, but we’ll make tremendous strides.
And that gets to the Doomers. Part of the Doomer problem is all-or-nothing, black and white thinking. We can’t do net zero right now, so we’ll never reach net zero. Blah blah blah. And talking the Doomers into engagement and hope and activism is a retail problem, one Doomer at a time. I’m hoping crossing key thresholds like a real decline in fossil fuel use, a slowdown in the rate of CO2 added to the atmosphere, etc. (My pet preaching point is that we should be measuring CO2, not temperature, as a goal. Easier to understand, easier to target.) Maybe, once the Doomers start seeing progress, they’ll become actually helpful. If not, oh well. This is too important to waste our energy on being annoyed at people.
I really appreciate this. I enjoyed Hanks initial video because it provided an alternative to grief for a little while. Yeah the idea is complicated, but I also see the need and value for something other than despair. I’ve figured for years that geoengineering is where we will end up eventually (as a tragedy). I’ve also been in the climate scene for decades, and my heart has been so broken by it that I CANNOT consume negative media about it. As a invertebrate biologist I am already devastated, and I don’t need more of it.
Ecological catastrophe is already happening, and future generations will already be denied the diversity in life I got to experience. We already lost so much that my parents experienced a very different ecological world than I am.
I can’t read about the reduction in insect life without tears, and Hanks attempts at hopeful messages are the only thing I can still listen to.
every time i look under a log or a plank i get sad seeing a few bugs and a worm. used to be so so much under there just a decade or two ago when i was little.
@@Boardwoardsit’s just so sad in both ways. Not only is it devastating to witness your native fauna (and flora!) slowly fading away, watching invasive species just take over sometimes hurts even more. Witnessing walls of bamboo take over our local forests and seeing only lantern flies where there were once numerous species of endemic butterflies makes me so sad.
Agree, couldn’t have said that better 👏🏻
Trying to control exactly how the public will respond to new information will always carry the risk of backfiring catastrophically at exactly the time where trust in scientists is needed most. Open conversations about trade-offs are way more valuable.
I also think its basically inevitable that some nation will attempt geo-engineering, regardless of what the scientists are saying. There will be times and places where its simply the only way that the leader of china, or pakistan, or some other country, can avoid thousands or millions of deaths, and that's not choice at all. I think all the handwringing ignores that this is basically an inevitable situation that will occur.
@@TheStrangeBlokehank in his recent video said Australia is already doing a small scale experiment of seeding clouds to prevent heating for the reef. So it’s starting and I think it should with proper research and observations to adjust and learn from
in which video? the intro to geoengineering one?@@Daveyjonesvi
@@critiqueofthegothgf I believe so, towards the second half of the video he briefly mentions it
Maybe they should add more toxins to the aerosol injection in order to numb and dumb down the tax cattle and reduce their will power. Add some chemical byproducts to the water supply too to reduce some IQ points. Increase inflation and taxation so they dont have time and energy to even complain because the are too busy working and being broke... And thus reduce their consumption.
The last thing our benevolent rulers need is a population that gets too uppity!
Your work sharing science with the masses is invaluable. (I loved hearing you on radiolab btw!) My world is brighter for being exposed to you, your brother, and the work you do. ❤❤❤❤
33:33 As someone in the climate policy field, my issue is that I don't trust non-scientists and especially world leaders with having this technology available. A potentially poorly thought out method of "going the easy way", i.e. not having to change habits in your personal life or the economy as a whole, in the hands of politicians is terryfing.
The problem there is fundamentally the process of choosing politicians/decision makers. Unfortunately my direct (and sad) observation of eco-politics from involvement over two decades is that unfortunately you can’t reliably choose politicians by using ANY party label/brand, even if the party’s membership and party’s history claims in its very name to be ecological! I’ve witnessed some cynical actions and objectively irrational / anti-eco policy taken up by successful self/other deceiving eco-populists - more faithful to a narrative than science, ‘clever’ enough to use the planet to get themselves elected, but far too stupid to foresee the unintended consequences of their own Dunning-Kruger policy simplifications. So stupid indeed about the value of not being stupid, that I even watched one say, somewhat defensively I thought, to a voter [as an elected politician] “it doesn’t matter if you’re intelligent, because intelligent people make mistakes too”….(!!).
As for who is best placed to advise on or make decisions about risky interventions, this is hard. Clearly it requires well thought through critical analysis of diverse data to do with context and potential outcomes, but I slightly fear many academic climate scientists (wherever they sit on the doom axis) are like economists.. great at producing interesting models which are worth listening to, but fundamentally almost disqualified by a cognitive bias towards their own models to be the right people to make or advise on life and death decision pathways.
I’d rather follow the best judgment of an adequately briefed group of sufficiently ‘high-stakes’ applied engineers, people capable of critically weighing up the evidence like e.g. doctors or vets or some particular engineering disciplines - basically people who have professionally had to repeatedly deal with imperfect information, complex dynamic biological or physical systems and where death and personal suffering is a plausible outcome - from those people you will hopefully get more critical thinking and analysis..
As the oceans become acidotic, the atmosphere hypercapnoeic, society psychotic and multiple-ecological-organ failure is escalating, we kind of need a Planetary Resuscitation specialty to frame the evidence and asking the questions about tougher interventions - the kind which may become more pressing to consider if the to-date-intransigent patient doesn’t make the ‘lifestyle changes’ compatible with good outcomes.. (and particularly if the timeline predictions of the modellers prove as reliable as that of optimistic economists).
I know Hank does too many things already, but I would love listening to a monthly podcast by these 3 on research/paper updates etc. 🙏
What if just two of them
My first thought was “Hank really stepped in it”, and my second thought was “Hank did this on purpose because he knows people better than most climate scientists do”.
This is highlighting Hank's expertise as a climate scientist, which can be easy to forget about, but even more importantly it's showing his talents as a science communicator, which is a job that involves understanding how people will consume and respond to information, and that's something that Hank is particularly good at.
I think this conversation would not have reached me without Hank.
You are so conscious for this take. Thank you!! I also wouldn’t have sat down and watched an hour of this if it weren’t for hank.
This! I realize that these individuals are very intelligent but Hank is an educator and rides the line of encouraging change without needing shock titles and without doom and gloom and othering. These two miss the point and I find them unpersuasive. Hopefully someone else will watch though and be encouraged to make a change.
Adam has a great channel called Climate Adam that's the opposite of doom and gloom. He uses comedy in his videos
Whoa, 50 minutes of Hank content?!? Christmas came early this year!
Wow, Adam & Miriam on Hankschannel... 🤩Wonderful to see my favorite youtubers having an extended conversation on this issue!
6:18, what Hank is describing is John Martin's "iron fertilization" proposal. He famously said "Give me a half a tanker of iron and I will give you an ice age"; maybe one of the most movie villain quotes. The concerns are: (1) whether it even is efficient enough; (2) disruption to the ocean's nutrient balance. Martin died before any of the experiments could be performed. Martin himself only experimented on clean Antarctic sea water samples to form his hypothesis, not directly in the ocean.
Still, since 1995, there have been I think a dozen such experiments with varied success. e.g.
- EIFEX (European Iron Fertilization Experiment), success, with the blooms sinking to the bottom of the ocean after the experiment;
- LOHAFEX (Indian and German Iron Fertilization Experiment), widely opposed but done anyway, unsuccessful because phytoplankton was eaten by predators and zooplankton did not sink fast enough, confirming you need specific settings for this to work;
- HSRC, probably the guy Hank is talking about, who dumped 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific ocean near the Haida Gwaii islands, which may have violated the UN Convention on Bio-Diversity and London Convention on dumping waste at sea.
Is that the idea behind what the company proposing to compact the sargasso seaweed that’s washing into Florida and the Caribbean beaches and killing all the fish when it decomposes on the beaches and creates water that has no oxygen dissolved in it and compacting it into chunks to sink it at the bottom of the ocean is trying to do or is that a different thing
@@MissMeganBeckett that doesn't sound similar. the thing Hank is describing is dumping iron into the ocean to create algae blooms that absorb CO2 and then quickly sink to the bottom of the ocean. What you describe appears to be an attempt to deal with sargassum blooms, possibly caused by heavy use of fertilizers.
At least people are doing the experiments .. we really need to know this data.
Thanks for this great discussion, Hank, Miriam, and Adam. I regularly watch videos by each of you and have tons of respect and appreciation for your expertise and your styles of communication. To see the three of you in discussion together about such an involved topic was a treat.
I wonder, respectfully, if any of you would also consider having a discussion with a knowledgeable and thoughtful representative from the "Global South" to kind of broaden your points of view on the diverse aspects of our global predicament versus the unipolar way the responses get framed-someone like the Indian environmentalist Ashish Kothari, to name just one. To be honest, it's a little concerning to hear so much decisive talk about global matters without any input from global perspectives. I can see that all of you genuinely intend to be inclusive and speak about equity in your discussions, but I'm often struck by the lack of discussion around the bigger picture and the more than needs to be done beyond the usual technical solutions that you ordinarily champion. Adam says near the end of the conversation that those you call "Doomers" are kind of trying to avoid having to change their lives; however, to someone with a perspective based outside those of the "Global North," pushing all these purely technological solutions-electrify everything!-without a deeper discussion of what this actually means, globally, can also come across as a way of avoiding having to change your lives. What passes for "hope" in so many of these discussions seems to be the "hope" for business-as-usual-but-with-solar-panels, without having to consider the manifold and hairy questions of equity sidestepped by that same "hopeful" plan. It complicates (and enriches and deepens) the picture, to be sure, but I can only presume that curious and well intended people like yourselves would surely love a chance to have your minds blown by new information and broader perspectives on how the world works and what is truly at stake for the billions located at distance from the heart of empire.
This talk by Olivia Lazard gives a first-level introduction to the kinds of questions that need to go along with the technological "answers": The blind spots of the energy transition by Olivia Lazard, fellow at Carnegie Europe, recorded live at Stockholm Impact Week 2023.
ruclips.net/video/e4zVxNbjXCw/видео.html
Meanwhile, thanks for keeping on fighting the good fight!
I LOVE hearing these kinds of renewable energy, climate type conversations - especially as an engineer that works adjacent to a lot of renewable energies. Geoengineering is not something that i was aware of, and it really interesting! On aerosols in the environment - its something I have always wondered about with evaporative cooling towers effect on local climates - especially since these are typically used in geothermal installations. Thanks for sharing Hank!
My favorite work on Geoengineering I read semi-recently is "Geoengineering and the Accusation of Hubris - Meyer / Uhle". For everyone who is interested in the philosophical debate around this topic, I definitely do recommend this contribution.
Thanks!
Great that you had these two brilliant young people to talk about this! Have been following both for a while now and though they do not upload as often, the videos they do upload are always interesting and worth watching, two of the best science communicators online right now.
Aw what a lovely comment - thank you! Trying to upload increasingly often (goal is fortnightly, minimum!)
I really like that specific kind of science communication that isn't super frequent. These people who wait to tell the news in their field that's really worth sharing.
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 if science communication that isn't super frequent is your jam then my channel is perfect for you :P
ah this was fun, delighted my near spittake made the final edit.
Thank you for this homie. Hope you keep getting well-er n stuff
Another climate channel that is absolutely crushing it is @ClimateTown. Totally worth your time to see
Hi Hank! Even though I've only more recently discovered your work, I was given the amazing opportunity to attend your An Afternoon with Hank Green show and I was enthralled with learning about everything you've done and how you manage all these projects. I'm so glad you were able to beat down cancer and overjoyed to have had the chance to see you live. Keep killing it man!
So I am Bolivian, I live in Bolivia and I am not leaving Bolivia.
And I really have to ask, because this question is burning me.
When you say "We are not doomed yet, but if we don't take it seriously, we are doomed". How much of this "We are not doomed yet" is taking "We" as in "First-World folks"?
It kind of feels as if people up there have decided that they can wait a couple 10 more years because it's going to affect us down here first, and they can just avoid our troubles by building walls, making AI that decides which refugee can enter the border or not and be done about it.
So when you say "We are not doomed" do you mean all of us, or just Americans, Europeans and maybe Australians?
You're so right and thank you for saying this
If its any consolation, Australians are definitely doomed (except maybe the 20% who can afford to be wealthy climate "expats")
I imagine they mean that companies and governments won't care until it's so bad that even millionaires start dying. So in "we are not all doomed" the key word is "all". They don't care about me, as you rightly point out they manage to find the time to care even less about you. It's infuriating.
With people like Hank and everyone actually having these conversations, "We" is everyone. Because We know that if any of the smaller countries become doomed then we are just doomed. It's more the politicians and leaders that keep kicking the can down the road on any sort of meaningful action that act the way you are worried about.
precisely. Tuvalu is sinking right now and about to be a thing of the past, yet the old rich white people in power in the Northern Hemisphere won’t lift a finger or do anything about it until the entirety of Miami, Florida is submerged. probably because most of them are egregious polluters themselves and benefit from lack of emissions policies and control. the South isn’t innocent of this either though, Australia needs to wake the fuck up and get serious instead of just rolling over for another corrupt government/economy
Bolivia will probably one of the most stable countries from climate change, in comparison to other developing countries with more variable weather and those on the coast with low elevation.
So could we grow algae and then dry it out and cloud seed with little bits of algae instead of salt?
- while you are growing it it makes oxygen
- if it rains down on the sea it feeds fish
- if it rains down in rural areas it's an excellent fertiliser
Great conversation, love the nuance and thoughtfulness
I also really enjoyed the original video and appreciate your dedication to the scientific method, with review and self-criticism and further exploration.
The people who are working on this problem are what gives me hope for a solution. Thank you and keep it up!
My main issue with geoengineering (as a geologist) is that I am terrified of the political reaction to being able to mediate the effects of climate change.
In a perfect world we would work on small scale projects and see the effects over the span of years and thousands of miles but that is just a hell of a Pandora’s box
It's about the definition you use. If we change agriculture and just allow green energy to continue to take over that will solve a huge amount of the issues
@@sagetmaster4 agreed what we need is economic change that coincides with geoengineering, if it were to happen at all. Any socioeconomic system that still puts profit over people will have screwed up priorities in: food distribution, healthcare, energy, and so on because the status quo is more profitable than major upheaval.
@@GrymgarThat's why I think we need consumer and worker cooperatives.
NEARLY AN HOUR OF HANK STUFF, BEST PIZZAMAS PRESENT EVER.
Also, like, something something serious climate related comment something something (I may come back and edit after watching lol).
Someone in the video had mentioned the idea of who owns the water on earth is a difficult one to pin down.
It reminded me that the CEO of Nestle called the idea of water as a human right as “extreme”. Nestle makes billions in packaging our own water and selling it back to us.
Also the idea of a rich guy stealing water rights to sell it back to a country where he had been secretly causing a drought was the plot of the Bond film “Quantum of Solace”.
If evil capitalists magically didn't exist, and people still lived where they live today, many many many people would not have water because there isnt enough where they live. So people who move it and sell it arent giving you "your" water. I'm not saying you arent describing a problem, but you don't have to frame it with such a narrative to argue a situation is bad.
Quantum of Solace was one of the first Bond films not based on a book. Nestle (and others) were already doing that before the movie was written. I don't think it was a coincidence.
Edit: Quantum of Solace was apparently based on a Bond short story. But very loosely based. The water plot was entirely added by the screenwriters in 2006.
The CEO said human right to water was 'extreme' in 2005. Meaning it was red hot in the discourse and perfect for the Bond writers to add relevance to the plot.
I'm curious whether Sea Walls, wave breaking type stuff, planting mangroves, "rewilding" a reservoir or dam site to improve the fisheries, things like that, is that geoengineering?
Like if we're intentionally changing things to create habitat etc, while it might be smaller scale than aerosol sulfur in the atmosphere, isn't adding sea walls or mangroves to break up the waves and flood risk etc, isn't that potentially ocean current changing, big controversial geoengineering questions?
I don't really have the words to describe what I'm asking I guess, but I would LOVE to see you dive into other aspects of geoengineering that humanity already does.
Or like, any of the stuff the Army Corps of Engineering has done or is doing with the Mississippi etc, that's geoengineering too, and the repercussions of those actions are being discovered still.
Love this topic such a good choice keep it up
I loved the angle you brought to this. Understanding both physical and social science is so important to this whole conversation!
This was a lovely discussion to listen in on. Please do more like this
Long live the stache! May it last forever.
Sorry you've been asked to leave.
@@Logan.Winterdam
Stache gang
@@tosmornHOF4748 the pizzamas stache is made for pizzamas and pizzamas only
Can we just say 43:45 to 48:06 louder for the people in the back please!!!! About 8 months ago I became extremely anxious about climate change. So anxious in fact I lost over 20 pounds from feeling so sick I couldn’t eat and so sad about my future I didn’t want to work/enjoy my dream job or ride my amazing horse. I was pushed so far to the end of that bell curve some days I didn’t want to enjoy my life in general anymore. With my boyfriend helping me with my research/supporting me with my anxiety and Hank’s amazing videos I wouldn’t have felt much better about the situation. It still gives me anxiety but I’m excited for some of the optimism/milestones I’m seeing and I’m excited to get more involved with being more sustainable. I really believe we need to take this into consideration with talking to people (especially young people) so they don’t lose hope. When you lose hope you don’t care and I wouldn’t wish what I went through on my worst enemy. I really think it changed my brain chemistry the amount of anxiety, depression, and dread I went through.
I’m was in the same boat, I was such a crushing feeling I couldn’t even look at my little siblings without crying, but this video gave me realize we cannot give up
For real. Hank has saved me and my mental health
What I understand more in this is that there is a philosophy in climate activism and where you draw this hard line in the sand on climate change that will affect your actions. Doomsday is so easier because it requires you to do nothing and you can get on with your life knowing there is a brutal end. Overcaring can make you turn rogue and do some shit that will damage some environments. But being in the weeds in the thick of things with more information will make us make more informed decisions. I like to think that there is so much that we can do now on a policy level that can bring about greener change
Good job Hank. Keep it up. The conversation is the most important thing. The more people think about it the better we will be prepared for what is coming.
It won't be when *people* begin to believe we are absolutely screwed, it will be when the global oligarchy believes it. Until the billionaires feel their own existence is endangered, not much movement will occur towards fixing the problem.
This talk rescued my mental health. Thank you for sharing!
🎶Stratospheric Aerosol Geoengineering
Stratospheric Aerosol Geoengineering
Stratospheric Aerosol Geoengineering
Stratospheric Aerosol Geoengineering
Sprayed like Buuugs!
Sprayed like Buuugs!
Sprayed like Buuugs!
Sprayed like Buuuuuuugs!🎶
"Sprayed like Bugs" by The Founders
Hey there! Thank you for sharing this, love the long form discussion on this topic as I’m studying this from an ee perspective. I’d love to see this a continued series - especially touching on geoengineering via economics and policy levers (carbon offset markets, etc.) and the local human impacts
In the words of the great George Carlin: Stop messing with nature; it's what has gotten us into trouble in the first place.
On that note, very interesting and super informative. I have read a couple of dystopian novels and the arts at least warn of that sorta thing.
Hanksgiving. Thanks. ❤
It should be added that not everybody should have a white roof. Although it lower air conditioning usage it also increases the amount of heating required in the winter.
Doesn't it mean less energy emitted through radiative cooling, assuming the paint is reflective into the infrared?
It would be good in the south then. But on the South Pole side of the equator white roofs should be used more north.
@@charltonrodda Essentially if you live in an area where one expends more energy on heating than cooling you want to get as much free energy from the sun as possible thus a darker roof where in warmer climates you want to reflect the suns heat via a lighter roof. It might be slightly more complicated than that because of efficiencies, but that the jist.
Where I am the roof is covered in snow anyway. A light coloured roof might allow more snow and functionally increase insulation
Snow is already super reflective, the color of your roof doesn't matter in winter once the snow covers it, if anything it would let snow accumulate faster and provide its insulating effects faster.
I am a completely ignorant 49 year old factory worker, but the classes I didn't drop or fail in my 4 semesters of college that I did good in were variants in economics. While I am surrounded by them, I am not a climate change denier. I keep saying that if the electrical grid is already overloaded and won't support widespread EV charging, if we have to upgrade it anyway we might as well upgrade it enough to handle charging. But my greatest complaint about climate change prevention is that for it to do enough good to be worthwhile, we are going to have to do things like limit people's access to credit used to buy luxuries, and no one will stand for that regardless how absolutely freaking arsed backward the idea that our economy depends on people living out a Will Rogers quote from a century ago is.
You are absolutely right.
How about making policies that taxes industries that produce „luxury goods“ way higher for their CO2 output? And giving people tax incentives to buy luxury goods that were produced more sustainably?
It is already happening with cars. Almost every second new car bought in Austria (where I’m from) last year was an electric vehicle.
And about the grid thing: with geothermic and solar energy house owners in the country side can plug in their vehicle directly into their own system.
As for within city limits public transport needs to be cheap and accessible (as it actually is in Vienna, where I live) so you really don‘t need to have a car.
At the same (only when providing adequate public transport) you can discourage car use in the city by reducing parking space, making parking very expensive and reducing speed limits.
What do you think?
@@jasminvomwalde7497 No on the taxes. Not because I am against the wealthy paying their fair share. But because if we are going to try to do that we just need to take away the protections they already have that keep them from paying their fair share, (Donald Trump's $750 per year federal tax bill here in the U.S. signed into law by a democrat.) instead of putting in new policies that will just be spun to target the middle class and poor trying to better their lives. We need to be giving the middle class a hard kick right in the realities. People who cannot afford to pay cash for them, don't need car windows they can roll down from their phone that they can't afford to pay cash for. If people had to choose between public transit they can afford and the tiny used chinese crap box car they can actually afford, there would a whole lot more money going into public transit without raising taxes mostly on the poor and middle class because the wealthy have protections from taxes. God forbid people would have to use listening devices with cords on them that cost 1/10th the price of their cordless ones, but I have a feeling they would survive as long as political opportunists didn't start a rebellion. I'm positive political opportunists would at least try to start a rebellion. It's easy and feels really good to say "SOMEONE ELSE SHOULD FIX THIS SO WE AREN'T INCONVENIENCED!!!" But the hard reality is that if we want anything done WE are going to have to do the work and WE are going to have to be the most inconvenienced.
And I'd add, more people taking on that inconvenience would naturally lead to fixing these structural issues many people put all the blame on. In fact I think it would be the only way to generate the political will to make these structural changes in the first place. @@jnzkngs
@@jasminvomwalde7497I don't understand why non hybrid new cars are being made. Only rich people buy new cars. Second hand cars are always better for the environment because it takes so much to produce a car, so ban petrol only cars to compensate for the harm new cars do.
@@therabbithat so true. There also should be laws in place to make it harder for companies to sell goods that fall apart after 2 years. Everything should be repair- and recyclable.
I love this discussion, my main concern is the implications of having a way to "reverse" climate change and how that will effect us just trying to stop it. if anyone is interested I found the book "The Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson (the Red Mars guy) a really cool discussion of a science fiction, yet realistic future of a rapidly changing climate on Earth with a lot of geoengineering discussed. I'd be happy to provide more info but I don't want to spoil it for anyone :-).
That is the book where they assassinate the heads of fossil fuels corporations right? How did that go?
The point made around 38:00 about reducing emissions as much as possible before really going at removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere sounds a lot to me like someone on a boat saying "we need to stop as many of these leaks as we can before we think about hiring extra people to bail out the water."
i think that in this analogy it would be more like having all the tools needed to fix leaks on the boat and you sent out a couple of guys to go get some thimbles and you tell people to not worry about the thimbles just get the leaks fixed first then we can try getting the water out
Phenomenal. Thank you for having this conversation and for sharing it with us
Geoengineering: The intentional change of the climate.
Geoopsengineering: Whatever the fuck we've been doing to the climate.
45:35 such a succinct way to disprove the nihilist state of view and it's so true.
Edit: Adam covers it really well immediately following Hank speaking.
46:00 While this is true, it fails to recognize WHY taking the extreme position is so valuable: inertia. You NEED people to have genuine anxiety about the situation, or nothing will happen, and then we really WILL have no other options other than Hail Marys. People have been talking about climate change while doing very close to nothing about it for my ENTIRE life. I don't doubt that humans will continue to exist through climate collapse, but I would greatly prefer as little collapse happen as possible. We've already lost lots of beauty on Earth due to this entirely man-made issue. I would like it to have stopped decades ago, and since that's not possible, I would like it to stop NOW.
So I think the conversation is much simpler when we take a step back and look at the big picture. We are already doing Geo-engineering and have been for hundreds of years. We have just been bumbling about it and ignorant to it. Just like Hank's original video had shown. There are TONS of things we have been doing for a long time that are already geo-engineering. Just making huge concrete and asphalt landscapes is one very obvious thing we have done. Forestry is another. And the idea that geo-engineering is only something you have to actively do to be doing it is like saying "I don't contribute to pollution I just drive my car and have BBQs".
We need to be talking about and researching how we can clean up the mess we've made for ourselves. Hopefully finding ways that don't make things worse.
Great discussion. When it comes to stratospheric aerosol injection what would be the problem if we all agreed to inject a small amount to test the effects ? I do think there will come a time where this will be necessary. Unfortunately the world just isn't on track to avoid very damaging warming in a few decades, we are already starting to get serious effects from warming. At the very least we need to research geoengineering so that we are ready to use it wisely as a stop gap to buy us time to transition our energy system.
Volcanos do this naturally already. They might also do it too much and cause dangerous global cooling. So we need the capability to geoengineer even if we don't do it right away.
Hi Hank's Channel, ever since humans first settled into stable communities they engaged in geo-engineering, all form of horticulture farming and animal husbandry have direct effects on the environment, these changes tend to be enduring, even outlasting the human activity. One good example is the entire Sahara desert which is still expanding at an awesome rate, that whole north Africa region was once a major source of cereal crops that sustained the Roman empire that activity was not of course the sole cause of the desertification but it certainly contributed.
This sort of thing has 'happened in all sorts of places all over the planet and in no place at any time has any significant increase in productivity or bio-diversity been accomplished.
None of the problems or issues we see now are in any way new, many people over the centuries have tried to reduce the harms and impacts of human resource exploitation but so far to no good effect, in a universe that is clearly regulated by consistent cause and effect thwere must be some underlying fundamental principles in play and until we can describe them with some degree of reliable accuracy we will continue as we are. This cycle of growth and destruction is one of the most inevitable characteristics of the natural environment in which we live.
While this does not make it impossible for humans to turn things around and apply technological fixes that make things n[better this is very unlikely to happen in the current totalitarian corporate state system.
I am amused by the claim that wildfires have reduced the temperature because it was not as warm where he stood at that time is a brilliant example of just how our personal perceptions distort our grasp of reality!. The fact that the smoke absorbed the sun's heat there at that time does not mean it was not 'there'!.
Then we get statements that refer to the feelings people have about climate change as if that has any useful contribution, what part of ' all strong feelings inhibit rational thought' has been refuted and who by and where?.
Last but not least we get the sad delusion that only by the application of major modification programmes will be effective when the reality is the combined effects of the daily actions of every living person.
Cheers, Richard.
I guess my suspicion with Geoengineering isn't so much nihilism as it's air space in a media sense. Basically the idea of a scientific fix and a green growth future tends to be very appealing, especially because it tells us that we don't need to change things, and because it matches an ideology of superheroic individual scientists coming up with THE solution. While I know individual experts are more nuanced, the wider system isn't and so funding or research into these edge case things like carbon capture tend to box out better solutions, in the same way recycling boxed out waste reduction because it was a more marketable solution.
I don't have problem with geoengineering research in theory, but the problem is that none of this happens in theory, and when it's implemented in practice it normally looks like shovelling funding and tax rebaits to large oil conglomerates, who then fail to produce a workable solution and use the money to lobby more. Looking at carbon capture specifically it's huge energy requirements mean that in the current scenario it's actually potentially offsetting green power, rather than augmented it.
And of course because geo-engineering is a large, top-down, futuristic seeming solution it attracts politicians, journalists and start ups in the same way the 'pod' design for transports solutions does. And then like the 'hyperloop' concept it gets used to hammer down investment in infrastructure and working solutions in the name of futuristic solutions.
I don't think science can or should be understood as separate from the way it's implemented politically or the ideologies it organises and supports, so while I can admit that a lot of technological solutions would probably be quite useful in assisting a program of degrowth, reducing-consumption, urban redesign and throttling the profit motive out of existence, I'm deeply suspicious of the collected label of geo-engineering for how it allows vapourtech, futuristic reskins of bad ideas, and non-action disguised as progress to take up air in the global conservation and even if many of these work, without the widespread changes they only serve to delay the need to reckon with climate change, because they often rely on mitigating climate effects, by pushing them more.
That said, I'm mostly a social science/ideology of science guy so I'm sure there's stuff I'm missing here. If people know of any projects that have dodged around the weird 'engineering solutions to a social problem' thing that would be interesting to know about.
Great video! but I feel I have to defend my honour. I'm a PhD candidate in carbon capture, specifically direct air capture (DAC) and yes it is very expensive right now but it's incredible how much research is being done and how far we've come in the past few years. I didn't know half the stuff that was happening before I started my PhD.
I'd argue that DAC is necessary for a couple reasons:
1. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is already too much; to avoid worsening effects we need a way to remove it that imo isn't as dystopian as stratospheric aerosol injection but also not as optimistic as tree planting
2. As much as we want an emission free world that's just not possible (anytime soon). There are hard to abate sectors like steel and cement (to which we can add point source capture plants), and electrification of distributed sources like cars and planes won't happen soon enough unfortunately, so DAC is a way to address that.
There are thousands of materials being tested with actually a quite good affinity and selectivity for CO2 even at low partial pressures. Part of ongoing research is finding materials that are good at capturing but also good at releasing the CO2 so we can reuse the material with less energy requirement.
I LOVE THIS SO MUCH! HANK I NEED YOU TO DO MORE STUFF ABOUT THINGS THAT CAN BE MAJOR CAREERS IN LIKE 10 YEARS. Anything you say I worship like a student of Aristotle or Socrates
I'm troubled by your limited definition of geoengineering for the purposes of this discussion when, in reality, geoengineering is used effectively to devise barriers that keep dangerous materials, for instance, from leaching into the soil and reaching groundwater or other water sources. Extensive scientific studies were done by both the Department of Energy and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission regarding geoengineering in the proposed deep geologic repository for nuclear waste that was studied and analyzed for some 30 years. I would also suggest, the way certain "professional intervenors" use the protections provided for citizen involvement by the National Environmental Policy Act and other laws causes many good and useful projects to rid the US of pollution-producing fossil fuel plants by replacing them with other non-polluting sources is as much of a problem as the fossil fuel industry itself. And by no means am I criticizing public involvement in any new large-scale project that may impact or is currently impacting the environment, but time and again, I have seen false or outdated information used to upset a community or make them fear a new technology when the concern that is being raised has been disproven or mitigated. Thanks to all three of you for continuing your efforts to educate the community.
I think the most important thing to remember about direct carbon capture is that it requires energy. If we burn fossil fuels to run a direct carbon capture machine, we're going to be just doing harm. If the system were 100% efficient, it wouldn't cause any direct harm, but it would be a waste of money, and the system will not be 100% efficient.
There might be a time when carbon capture at scale will be very useful. For instance, when we have enough sustainable energy coming in to reliably meet our needs on low production days (when it is cloudy and not particularly windy), on good days we will have a huge overcapacity, solar panels will be switched off and wind turbines will have the brakes on. If we have reasonably could carbon capture facilities, we can use that excess capacity to remove carbon in a useful way.
The other way it can be useful is to remove carbon from specialized industries. We might not be able to build airplanes that can cross oceans using batteries only, and we might not find a way to make concrete at scale with no emissions. If those are emitting carbon, we can capture it at the cement plant for concrete, but we will to pull it out from the environment to deal with aircraft emissions.
In either case, the energy to do the capture will need to be sustainable, which means we will need sustainable energy in excess of our regular needs before carbon capture even helps. Step 1 of carbon capture is to build a minimum carbon economy with more energy production than we need. Step 1a is to develop the carbon capture technology so that when we get to step 2, it is ready to go at a reasonable level of efficiency. So prototypes, development, and pilot projects are a thing worth doing right now, but we are pretty far from actually being able to implement carbon capture in any meaningful way.
There seems to be a lot of similarities between how (many) folks think of geoengineering and how they think about GMOs.
We have these abilities, and they can be immensely beneficial or harmful... it depends on how they are applied. Just taking a "it is bad" position pretty much ensures that the applications will be selfish and likely harmful.
Fantastic discussion! Thanks so much for having it
I’m researching direct ocean capture in a closed system in my yard!! It creates a calcium carbonate rock. I’ve even increased the growth rate of calcifying corals with this tech being used in my tank!
It's definitely important to consider the inevitability that there'd be conflicts between countries, especially when environmental conflicts are already happening even without geoengineering. If Ethiopia building a dam is enough to spark a crisis involving Egypt, I can only imagine how out-of-hand things would get if a wealthy country's climate mitigation efforts led to crop failure halfway around the world.
The ability to say "I could be wrong" and talk to experts on why you might be wrong in certain aspects is EXTREMELY respectable and a necessity in science
Anthony Fantano really branched out from the music reviews
Hank, just FYI, you help me be less afraid by showing me that there are real people in the world who do want to change things for the better. My brain says horrible things to me about the boat we're all in and you kind of make it shut up for a little while. So, thanks for that. All the love to you guys
Solar is great. Collecting carbon is hard. Plants use solar to collect carbon. Let's grow plants, refine them into biodiesel to run our cars, planes, ships, and power plants, then capture the emissions from the power plants. This replaces the need for fossil fuels and largely runs on the equipment we already are using, plus would pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.
I qgree quite a number of people seeing to take a delight in this we are all doomed idea. It's like an EMO phase of climate knowledge.
I’ve seen Climate Adam’s response to Hanks original video and am SO loving that they made this episode now!
If aerosols shield us from global warming, isn't that a huge additional argument to go back into researching biofuels? (Specifically algae, because it's like 10 times as efficient as other fuel crops - only reason we prioritised rapeseed and corn is existing infrastructure.)
Algae isn't at the point where it can compete with other renewables for electricity production, but 1) Some aerosols get released in the carbon-neutral burning of fuels in combustion engines in cars/aeroplanes, too, right?, and 2) if we're going to keep some fuel-based energy production plants around for the sake of aerosol production, we might as well make them renewable and carbon-neutral...right?
Seems to me like a much more efficient way of solving this issue.
Carbon neutral and renewable fuel production is way expensive. Nuclear is better at it but eu refuse to touch nuclear despite desperately needing a reliable stable energy source
@@exosproudmamabear558 I think we just need to bite the bullet and accept that better solutions cost more money. Should have done it decades ago; refused to make the investment. Still having the same problems. it's time to learn our lesson.
@@TheHadMatters You can bite the bullet most companies wont. Your opinion does not matter as long as you are not those companies or filthy rich. As long as there is free market you cant stop companies from using cheap solutions since if they dont do it in your country they will do it in a third world country for cheaper. The best thing you can do is try to make the cost cheaper.
@@exosproudmamabear558 Absurd world view. There are many ways to force better solutions than those with the most appealing cost.
Not to mention "companies" are only responsible for a section of the global electricity & fuel consumption. Consumers and governments are responsible for a substantial portion of energy needs, and they are motivated by far more factors than cost efficiency for a profit.
@@TheHadMatters Look to geoengineer with hydrogen, you need a lot of it. And energy is a limited resource. If you take renewables to make less hydrogen(Because the cost is electricity cost, also water. It is indirectly money) then you need to have another electricity source to cover that up and that is probably will be coal because as I said hydrogen produced with just electricity cost too much electricity than it generates. That's just bad science.
Why would anyone do that instead of doing it with excess heat of the nuclear power plants? They wouldn't and they shouldnt do it because it has zero advantages. We should think about lowering our Co2 emissions first then consider geoengineering because geoengineering has side effects too. When a patient sick instead of thinking excessively medicating them you should first get rid of main reason they are sick.
We really really shouldn't open this can of worms. Or soon we'll have stuff like "Sorry Ruanda your rain quota is over for the month, but maybe check with Canada if they can spare you some"
Miriam and Adam seem really nice & smart but I think the plan to not look/invest into geo-engineering is just not serious. Maybe 20 years ago that was a possibility but even if we aggressively do prevention right now (which we aren't), things are going to get very very very ugly very quickly. A lot of people are going to die and quality of life will go down a lot, geoengineering will be important for damage control. And politicians are going to attempt to do that cause people are going to be begging them to do something to prevent the mass deaths and misery. Here in Texas we basically got cooked alive in the summer, I can't imagine what its gonna be like in 10 years. I can guarantee you every Texas politician is going to do everything to engineer the climate to make it at least bearable. It's best if they do so with great research and guidance from the scientific community as to how to do that
Right. AC can only keep up with -20 degrees vs outside temps. If you start getting summers that are mostly in the 100-110s, that's still really uncomfortable for most people most of the time during normal work hours. So people are going to have to move or drastically change work hours/behavior or move. There are huge economic forces to keep people from moving and working at similar times so I agree with you that local politicians may go rogue.
@@emma70707 Yeah just for an anecdote here in Texas my partner got heat sick just from going outside to get groceries and was extremely ill for a while. And it also severely affected her mental health. Even for me who's pretty heat tolerant it was pretty brutal.
Edit: Also ACs will have a real difficult time during such extended extreme heat
@@luisosta So lets poison the planet and ruin the ecology so you can temporarily feel more comfortable while getting groceries. When was the last time you saw a clear blue sky in Texas? They ARE ALREADY spraying the crap in the sky which is increasing UV radiation and making your partner feel sick. That is why they won't admit to doing it. IT DOESN'T WORK.
Thanks for sharing this, its annoying how few understand anything about geo engineering.
Too many people take a luddite approach and talk about elites, then add their own combination of conspiracies
I hate to bring this up but at least in the US we have an entire party who at worst denies climate change entirely or admits climate change is happening but claims it's natural and not man made. Those same people push HARD for the increased use of fossil fuels and it's those people who I can see glomming onto any and all excuses to continue using fossil fuels. And it's true nothing would ever change those peoples minds but I can see the average person continuing to vote those people into power if they believe we don't HAVE to get off fossil fuels anymore and then US policy focuses entirely on geo engineering and not getting rid of fossil fuels.
I’d say It’s already waaaay too late to not need to counterbalance the heating we’ve already caused. We don’t have a choice anymore. Even if we go net climate neutral tomorrow it wouldn’t stop what we’ve already done
This series has really helped put geoengineering into context for me. The idea of solving the problem from an engineering perspective was attractive, especially in the face of doomerism. However, hearing the discussion emphasized that we're dealing with a chaotic dynamical system, and effects by definition are not predictable. And if we have hope to solve the problem gradually, we can better steer toward a good future.
An argument I've been making for direct CO2 Capture is that it could easily be a side effect of a more 'important' industry. Humans need climate control and a billion small heat exchangers are better than wood or gas furnaces or even power plants and electric boilers, we have a system in place for utility pressurised gas, so we can condense the atmosphere and give away AC and even improve the air quality of cities and similar. Compressed air and the fractions there of may be useful for industry or power storage the heat associated with the process could go to utility hot water, useful for heating homes or cooking or bathing or industry. And as a biproduct you can capture more than just CO2 from the air, airborne pollutants, viral particles, dust and more effectively fall out as a solid byproduct, some you can use to do public health science with, some may be sellable and the CO2 could be used for growing food or fuels in greenhouses or as a component for Carbon Fiber materials (which are relatively permanent storage for that Carbon)
Hank suggested we consider stratospheric aerosol injection in an "if everything is going to break and we're all going to die scenario, where there are mass extinctions" while we're certainly not in an "all going to die scenario" we are in a mad extinction event where many thousands of people are getting harmed by floods, bushfires, crop failures etc. As such we have a moral imperative to seriously consider technologies like stratospheric aerosol injection. And this may require is to do it on a small but measurable scale so we can understand it, better understand the risks, and better understand the role of aerosols in climate change. This must complement rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, but we may not be in a world where emissions are reduced enough to get to
We are already doing it.
I have a question completely unrelated to this topic but i hope this might be a good spot for you to see it Hank,
bare with me please...
At the very end of time when everything has been gobbled up by black holes, we'll say there is specifically 2 Mega Giga massive black holes
They are separated by an immeasurable distance of space, from my understanding they are still gravitationally attracting each other no matter how minute
if given long enough will they
- Speed up to the speed of light towards each other
- Ever reach each other
- If they do will they
- have enough force to tear each other apart
- Would this cause another Big Bang type event and (Insert Oscillating Universe theory here)
Or
- Just combine and "Bobs Yah Uncle" and its just 1 BH
Or
- Will space be expanding so much that they'll fall beyond each others Hubble horizon (dunno if that's the right one)
- And they'll just Hawking radiation decay before they meet
Ive heard a little bit recently about the Universe might be a net neutral energy system or something and matter is just gravitational potential energy
- Could this potential energy be whats attracting the 2 BH's together??
Hope this makes sense
I'm glad you pulled through with the cancer Hank, You are a Gift to Society
Thanks for taking me for this walk through the weeds. I find a lot of weeds are actually my helpers in my garden.
What is a weed? From what perspective do you judge the definition?
@@tosmornHOF4748Weeds are the plants that grow when humans don't want them to
I played this game in 2011 called fate of the world and it was impossible to be under 3 degrees at 2200 without stratospheric aerosol injections. I don't know what their formula was but it's always stuck with me since.
45:35 this sounds like Hank trying to read people's minds "if I was that pessimistic I would be pro geo-engineering, so if they're not pro geo-engineering they must not be that pessimistic"
but if you talk to climate scientists a lot of them are in full existential despair mode. it would be better to listen to them rather than try to reverse engineer their state of mind.
"Should we do it?, no."
Enter the plot of snow piercer.
The discussion of rogue actors doing geoengineering made me think of the novel “Ministry for the Future”, by Kim Stanley Robinson. With as little spoiler as possible, one of the first things that happens in the book is that the nation of India decides to do sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, despite opposition from just about every nation in the world. Basically, they put the planes in the air and dare everyone else to shoot them down.
I can't separate geoengineering with the Horizon game series, such an amazing but scary plot of earth in a post-post-post apocalyptic setting majorly factored by geoengineering mishaps.
One of the lessons I learned from the Covid vaccine roll-out is that the scientific community is incredible at working collaboratively and developing brilliant solutions to difficult problems. What they are somewhat less good at is making decisions on public messaging. I think anytime you tell someone "We shouldn't talk about this at all or research it at all" it fuels conspiratorial thinking. I think honestly explaining to people that "Hey, dumping a ton of chemicals into the air/ocean is extremely risky and could easily create a worse situation." is WAY more intuitive than most of the things we have to talk about in the climate change context.
STRONG agree. People in my life were able to be convinced to get vaccinated when more nuance was explained to them, and when they understood the risks and benefits, as opposed to “it’s perfectly safe and you’re stupid if you question it”. “Geoengineering is a bad idea and you shouldn’t talk about it” is the same bad messaging. Emphasizing the risk/reward ratio and not treating the audience like they’re stupid is the way.
9:46 "Already has been, if we want to get all pluperfect about it"😂
Okay wow
I watched this while cleaning & every 10 minutes or so I'd have to "hold up, what? Wait. Then rewatch the last 30 seconds to make sure I heard that correctly
I LEARNED a lot.
I was in North Dakota this spring during the forest fires in Alberta and it was wild how the forecast called for HOT temperatures (27ºC, idk what that is in freedom units, but hot for North Dakota in the spring) and the smoke blocked the sun so much that I was shivering while outside.
37:56 - What Miriam is saying here, needs to be said more. It's an issue of justice - think of the oil companies as analogous to arsonists. If someone burns your house down (deliberately or negligently, doesn't matter - it's all arson the eyes of the law). Most legal systems will say that the arsonist should at least pay a financial penalty to offset the cost of damages done, but what no one does is make a fundraiser to pay the arsonist to rebuild the house. If they saw the error of their ways and offered to help rebuild the house for free, that might be a different story. But we sure as hell don't pay the arsonists new construction company and let them profit a second time off the damage they helped create.
The same people who caused the climate change doing the geoengineering to fix it isn't necessarily a bad thing, when we make a mess we are responsible for cleaning it up. Because if we do it, it will impact the whole world, but if we as a global community decide it is worth the risks, the costs (and the costs of mitigating the negative side effects of the geoengineering) should be paid by the people/countries who built giant wealthy economies on fossil fuels and caused the damage.
I don't think it will come to that, the better solution is to stop emitting carbon, share the sustainable technology so the people who weren't able to build prosperity during the last century can leapfrog up to parity with the people who were. Countries that currently have minimal power infrastructure and industry can skip the investments in fossil fuels and go straight to the better, more efficient, more cost effective technologies that are becoming a reality today.
I have a problem with this concept of "cost" when it comes to climate change. At its very basic level it sounds like it is about profit and loss and how a company would consider it as being worth the profit in the end, like how many cars or yachts i can buy at the end of it which I am sure should not be. It is not something that should be coded and isolated within the traditional economic system but I fear most people still do.
For example, there is this huge discussion about HS2 in the UK which is meeting huge levels of opposition by different groupss including the environmentalists and the NIMBIES (again strange bedfellows that I doubt could have been forseen, say during the industrial revolution).
Both groups don't like to see the green spaces destroyed by the necessary infrastructure for something that otherwise seems to have over all support and thought to be beneficial.
So, I was having a discussion with one of these so called entropernours who happened to have a very nice big house in the very area where it will be affected by HS2. As a way of testing the waters, I said: why not building the wholes thing or at least the offending parts underground as tunnels. I mean it is definitely technologically possible. But the reaction was a sort of violent: but that costs too much. I thought to myself surely that is needs to a contexual evaluation not same as how he evaluate the next business deal he is going to make but it appeared as if he was instictly appling the same code.
Say if his was totally obcessed with his green estate and he had the funds to finance the building the part that it would affect his part of the world as a tunnel then theoretically he could offer the government that to pay for it to save my environtment for his own selfish reasons.
This is what I mean. How is this so called "cost" calculated? Once we have an apeopeiate single currency then may be we can understand cost which at the moment I don't think we do.
Hank, I think it would be very interesting for you to have and share a conversation with international relations scholars, between this topic and your UN video. I'm definitely more from that world than the hard sciences, and the difference in perspectives I sometimes sense in these conversations is something I'd love to see explored.
Real science when your video is peer reviewed, love it!
Hank, I feel something really important was said that isn't talked about from YT educators afaik - the climate model assumptions! Let me elaborate.
So I didn't like Miriam's take *until* she casual mentions that climate models assume we will still be 60% carbon energy based world wide. Then I was like WTHeck?!
I have never heard this from educational RUclipsrs! This really needs to be disseminated and the cost to get carbon emission reductions (based on the climate model assumptions) vs cost of direct carbon capture should be discussed (and perhaps include other geoengineering efforts, in a cost / risk table)! Because I was all for direct carbon capture from the ocean (non-biological methods, except for shoreline ecosystem habitate restoration) but now I am not sure what to think!
I still can't believe the climate models are assuming we will still be using so much carbon energy .
its really weird and bad! i'm working on a video but i am a. slow at making videos and b. it is a big topic and making it actually watchable is hard.
@@zentouro well good luck with it! I know I'll watch it when it comes out
I'm on the nihilist spectrum of climate concern but it is NOT because of, nor is it causing ne to, not wanting to do anything about. much to the contrary, it makes me frequently wonder if we shouldn't be doing violent and illegal things abt it. i try to stay hopeful but when i hear incredibly smart and educated people like you guys talk about it without a sense of urgency it just sounds like you're being extremelly optimistic. i'm so tired of hearing about how we must cut down emissions, without even a nod to the fact that we are not doing that and it doesn't look like we *ever will.* so i don't see a way out of this that doesn't invilve a) somehow forcing the cutting of emmissions or b) admitting that that is not going to happen to the necessary scale soon enough and thinking of something else to focus on. i want more than anything to be proven wrong and to be convinced things aren't as hopeless as they seem to me but i can't seem to get that from any expert.
Hank seems to stand his ground on the importance of being able to talk about/research geoengineering/aerosols, ultimately dismissing concerns about that hurting our progress. I think he's underestimating how much proper right wing political parties are desperate to delay action on decarbonisation. In Australia, the right wing (not 'conservative') opposition has discovered nuclear energy and is demanding we investigate that rather keep pushing towards renewables... anything to save their donors and defend their legacy of climate inaction. I'm as curious as anyone to see if novel/innovative approaches could help with this crisis, but the world is FINALLY inching in the right direction and all it takes is a few bad elections in big polluting countries and suddenly we'll see that coal in 2050 is still very much on the table in a lot of places.
Of course thr two MOST URGENT Geo-Engineering issues are 1) the need to replace fossil fuels with something such as the Geo-thermal power just three kilometres below Italy that could power all Europe for the next hundred thousand years, and 2) how to stop or at least delay the already bulging supervolcano under Italy from exterminating all human life.
29:24 i don't think I've ever heard hank swear lol
My philosophy is if we do nothing things will get worse. So why not try to do something good or attempt to do something good to curb the bad. I’m not saying put a mirror in space but we should be testing on a small scale to see what impacts this does have. Speculation can only go so far and it’s better to be optimistic because pessimism will kill us all.
This was fantastic. Thank you!
Hey hank! Have you heard about the asteroid “Bennu”? And how we just got samples of it in spetember? It might have the answer to Levinthals paradox.
"It feels better in the weeds," I feel like this is true of most issues