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Frances S.'s avatar

Interesting read. A UN-approved report last year said that geoengineering by injecting sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere may be necessary, but would come with major uncertainties. Releasing S02 is not without risks which we don't fully understand, and some regions might 'lose' in terms of greater climate impacts as a result. 'The primary challenges of geoengineering are conducting field experiments to accurately assess potential consequences and developing international agreements to safely deploy and monitor geoengineering technologies.'

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0398-8

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/11/solar-geoengineering-climate-change-new-study

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2022/reversing-climate-change-with-geoengineering/

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/mar/right-dose-geoengineering-could-reduce-climate-change-risks

Also, as mentioned by others, climate change is only one of the many planetary boundaries we are exceeding; others include novel entities, biosphere integrity, land-system and freshwater change, and biochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen). The debts are mounting up as our environment (water, land, air, oceans) degrade and can support less. Surely we need a more fundamental systems change from our current economic growth model at all cost to something more sustainable.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-09-18/the-earth-system-has-passed-six-of-nine-planetary-boundaries/

I'm amazed that conservation is rarely mentioned in much of what I read. It must be more efficient in many cases, at least up to a point. Do we ignore it because it is just 'too hard' in our current economic system?

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Jim Klein's avatar

Thanks a million for writing this. I am retired, but up to late in 2021, I worked over 20 years in patent portfolio management for a Fortune 500 company, after having been trained as a research scientist and practiced as one (for that same company) for 15 years. One of my internal client groups, as a patent portfolio manager, was the huge, sprawling Engineering team - the folks who did the very serious work of designing, building, maintaining, troubleshooting, and improving all the "must work" hardware that goes into factories that are actually making stuff for the company to sell to people and other companies. The folks I had regular contact with were SERIOUS engineers. No "pie in the sky" for these folks. They worked on things that needed to be worked on in order for the company to make money in the short, medium, and long terms, and the things they toiled on had to work. Not just theoretically. When someone threw a switch, stuff had to work.

I was always taken, when "chewing the fat" with these folks, by how many of them dismissed as "solutions" most every thing in your "Part 1" that is commonly put forward as being responsive to the threat of climate change - ESPECIALLY the things put forward most avidly by experts in environmental sciences. The common complaint was that they were good ideas, but "drops in the bucket". The most common explanation for why they were always the things that "experts" (with educations equal to their own) were putting forward, was that the experts are "too close to the problem" and "dependent for employment on companies and agencies tied to those approaches". Almost to a person, these engineers believed that - eventually - the world will do your "Part 3", but likely, not until the pain of climate change is very, very great. Because... politics...

We need more folks like you making The Big Picture clear - or at least clearer. Just because something is good to do, does not make it a solution to a problem. We need to approach this from a standpoint of "If the plan NEEDS to WORK (and it does...), what does the plan NEED to include?" My experience is that many, many well-educated engineers already "get" what you're saying here - and we need to get it better communicated to the rest of the culture.

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