cafeamericainmag.com
There has been a lot of CW discussion on climate change. This is an article written by someone that used to strongly believe in anthropogenic global warming and then looked at all the evidence before arriving at a different conclusion. The articles goes through what they did.
I thought a top-level submission would be more interesting as climate change is such a hot button topic and it would be good to have a top-level spot to discuss it for now. I have informed the author of this submission; they said they will drop by and engage with the comments here!
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Notes -
The world is warming and the climate is shifting. Not catastrophically, so far. They just bumped up all the growing season maps for the USA, farmers don't make shit like this up with money on the line. Here in Maine winters are becoming warm and wet, the bays don't freeze up in the winter anymore. Lobsters have all but disappeared from the NE States south of us and NY state and are slowly moving into slightly cooler Canadian waters. We've had more 100 year floods in the last few years than in the last 100. It IS changing, very rapidly on a geological time scale, it doesn't really matter if it is human caused or not; we should stop it.
I'm a big proponent of climate engineering or "geoengineering" . Our whole world is already shaped by humanity and our impact on it, I see no reason why altering the climate on purpose instead of on accident is so much worse. We should start with sulfur now, because it is cheap, we know it works, and how it works and that is is safe. Move on to space based shields later if it is still required. As many of you may have noted if you were in the path of the eclipse, no one would ever notice a 1% drop in sunlight.
Basically, climate change is a solved problem. If it ever gets bad enough we'll do something about it, I hope we do it sooner, I want my winters back.
Add ocean fertilization and enhanced weathering to your list, assuming future research doesn't have any surprises and they really are reasonable ways to sequester carbon in the medium-term and very-long-term respectively. Even if plants don't notice a drop in sunlight (or they notice but are happy enough about the extra CO2 to be fine anyway), we're already about 20% of the way from pre-industrial CO2 levels to "people complain about stale air and drowsiness" CO2 levels outdoors, and indoor air relies on CO2 diffusion to outdoor...
But frankly I'd wait before starting anything. In the US the biggest obstacles to doing anything are: (1) about a third of voters don't think climate change isn't yet causing any harm and (2) phasing out fossil fuels is going to be a massive challenge, both economically (it will be a third phase of history, where the first two were "underpopulated and dirt poor" and "burning fossil fuels") and technologically (we need a massive expansion of fission and/or massive improvements in grid battery costs), so we're probably going to need a stronger political consensus. If we go for the geoengineering too early then that consensus is always going to be split between "we fixed it" and "no, the priests just sacrificed a virgin and pretended that that's what made the drought end".
Ocean fertilization relies on capture in the shells of diatoms as carbonate, which is much more of a stretch than presented.
Yeah, "assuming future research doesn't have any surprises" was a predicate here, not an actually-safe assumption. Sure would have been nice if we hadn't stopped the research a decade ago.
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