this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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Sulfur dioxide added to the atmosphere through human action does contribute to reducing global temperatures. There's a Nature article about it. From their abstract:
Ships had been emitting a lot of SO2 and the effect of abruptly stopping that is apparently quite large:
In other words, the laws against SO2 emission by ships are making global warming twice as bad. It's ironic that environmentalists are contributing as much to global warming as everyone else put together.
The guys running this company sound like loose cannons, but it may take a loose cannon to overcome the bias that institutions have towards doing nothing rather than taking an action that involves risks. It's true that adding SO2 to the atmosphere may have serious unintended consequences, although the huge amount that ships had been adding until recently wasn't catastrophic. However, doing nothing as the planet keeps warming will definitely have serious unintended consequences! It's the trolley problem: these guys are pulling the lever and their critics are saying "They're going to kill one person!" but if the critics had their way, five people would die.
Sulfur dioxide added to the stratosphere might cool the world for a few years. They're selling offsets though, so they give people permission to add CO₂ which causes the world to warm for hundreds of thousands of years
There's a real problem with that.
I agree that the offsets have exactly the problem that you point out. I think the value (moral value, not financial value) that this company has is that it is setting a precedent for the deliberate release of SO2 as a form of climate engineering. Going from "responsible experts oppose using SO2 but weirdos are talking about it" to "responsible experts oppose using SO2 but weirdos are doing it" takes us one step closer to "responsible experts are seriously working towards using SO2 (or finding that it really is counterproductive as opposed to simply saying that there isn't enough evidence)".
This couple of guys with their balloons got a critical article in the NYT about using SO2, but it's still an article in the NYT about using SO2.
I'd argue it's the opposite. NFT's are an actually useful technology - it nicely creates a distributed open leger to track digital ownership. But the technology was basically used to run a scam before anything else - now every use of it has to convince people it's not a scam before you can get to the idea itself
These people are literally just taking money to release pollution and telling customers that it's fighting X units of global warming.
They're not testing the technology - there will be no measurable results at this kind of scale. They're not perfecting the technology - they're literally just releasing it out in the desert
This is just a scam - I don't think it's a particularly good concept to start with. But even assuming this is a good approach, they're not boosting the technology, they're using it illegally and irresponsibly
Tropospheric so2 is a problem for reasons beyond warming.
Stratospheric so2 might not be a problem, but geoengineering is always risky.
Plus, since so2 is significantly more reactive than co2, it will be removed from the atmosphere more quickly, meaning that it can only act as a temporary mask without constant maintenance. All-in-all, it’s probably best to see how much damage we are doing early on before we find ourselves in the so2 equivalent of credit card debt and slowly poisoning ourselves to death trying to stay cool.