In an influential cli-fi novel, a desperate government ignores international consensus and pumps aerosols into the atmosphere to cool the world. Could it happen for real?
The Climate Overshoot Commission Releases Its Report, Pts 2 & 3 beniciaindependent.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from beniciaindependent.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Open access notables Net zero is only a distraction— we just have to end fossil fuel emissions. The latter is true but the former isn t, or not in the real world as it s likely to be in the immediate future. And just just doesn t enter into it; we don t have a simple problem on our hands. Net zero is afflicted by various carpetbaggers and the fossil fuel industry itself— plus plain old human nature in the form of wishful thinking. But fully eliminating hydrocarbon fuels and non-fuel CO2 emissions from key industrial processes spanning from agriculture through production of concrete and on to manufacture of steel is going to be a long process. Likely we ll never be able to eliminate GHG side-products from our culture. Quite arguably we re not going to stop eating and using concrete and steel, and equally it s arguable that if we want to keep global warming contained to survivable limits then it s better not to embrace a fantasy and instead maintain our grip on rea
Open access notables
At our roots Skeptical Science is about cognition of the results of climate science research in the minds of the entire human population. Ideally we d be perfectly communicating understanding of Earth s climate, and perfectly understood. We can only approximate that, but hopefully converging closer to perfection. With the passage of time and a lot of effort on the part of researchers working on how our species thinks, we can inch forward— if we pay attention. With that in mind, two papers in this week s trawl land very close to our home. Each sports results important to climate science communicators but differing in paths and challenges to practical applicability.
Natty Ice The climate has been rapidly warming, to the degree that scientists and politicians have been seriously contemplating desperate measures to forestall its total collapse, such as spraying sun-reflecting particles into the sky to cool the surface temperature of the planet. The method is called solar geoengineering, which operates from the same principle as […]