“We’re past the tipping point for the glaciers in the Canadian Rockies (…) Even if somehow, magically, we’re able to stop global warming tomorrow and return the atmosphere to more normal CO2 concentrations, we would lose most of the Rockies’ glaciers.”
…
“We might have a 20-year window of this much water and then it will start to fall off a cliff,” he says. “How much water is flowing through the river as a function of that time of year is going to start changing remarkably.”
…
“It’s sort of become a catchment for contaminants,” says Criscitiello. Legacy contaminants like DDT are starting to melt out of the snowpack, she says. “This has become a concern.”
:doomjak:
Ok time to start spraying the atmospheric sulfur dioxide let's get on it can't make this any worse, roll the dice
Either that or pray to volcano god Pele for intercession
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age_volcanism https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/get-ready-for-more-volcanic-eruptions-as-the-planet-warms/
I hadn't heard about that concept before, but it does seem like our best option right now, short of some technology to pull carbon out of the atmosphere on a mass scale.
And it says the yearly cost would be less than a quarter of the $40 billion we just sent to Ukraine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection
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Lol I have been meaning to watch that, I've heard it's good.
One of the things I find interesting about it is that it seems like the particles would only stay in the atmosphere for a few years, hence the need to continually spray. But hypothetically that would mean we could have some level of control over it, with a relatively short delay of a few years for changes to take effect. So if it's way too much cooling, we cut back, and in 5-10 years tops it's at a good level again. Obviously fucking up the world for 5-10 years isn't a positive thing lol, but I'd say 10-20 years of fine tuning is better than just slowly letting the world die like we're doing now
:so-true: Surely the solution is to let capitalists put more shit into the atmosphere to keep the treadmill going just a little longer while we definitely stop the fossil fuels, pinky promise.
Lol as much as I think it's probably what would need to be done as a stop-gap while we get emissions down, I feel like that's exactly what would happen if this was actually done under our current system.
"Great, the warming is fixed, now we don't have to worry about emissions at all anymore ever!"
All geo-engineering under capitalism (and, more spicily, under a hypothetical industrial communism) is tech-saviorism and will be bought and wholly owned by the Gates Foundation or local equivalent for the express purpose of keeping the coal mines and oil wells going.
Oh yeah, I fully agree. I don't think any meaningful change is going to happen, in the US especially, until states start to collapse from climate crises anyway, so any actual positive geo-engineering probably wouldn't happen unless some kind of hypothetical post-collapse communist state has the ability to do it. I also won't be surprised if we just kick the can down the road with something like this eventually, and make the problem worse in the long term by acidifying the atmosphere for decades or centuries. I'd hope that an industrial communist state would fix it in the long term, but it's all hypotheticals from here anyway.
I try not to be a doomer as much as I can help it, but now truly is the time of monsters.