this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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My point is that slowing down the heating of the planet is doable (though you'd need the majority of the world contributing, which is highly unlikely to happen), but we can't reverse the damage that has already been done, which some people seem to think is possible.
We're not as powerful as we think we are.
There are gasses and particles that can be released into the atmosphere that will reflect sunlight and warmth away from earth. In theory that could be done very quickly.
We could cause a new ice age easily. Just fire off a few percent of the nukes, and we will revert to an ice age almost immediately.
Of course a side effect would be massive starvation.
there is debate on that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_debate
As far as I remember, that was tried with ships and it has some collateral effects that cause different damages to the oceans.
I think I recall the opposite. After having somewhat cleaner fuel, the ships cleaner exhaust caused more warming as the sulfur in the fuel was having a side effect of mitigating warming somewhat. It was raised as a point of maybe we should consider the approach of we are in dire straights.
I remember to have read that change caused some other problems, and these collateral problems were unexpected.
But I don't remember if the problem were about the ocean currents or that the ocean was warmer or a mix of the two plus something else.
How is that relevant to ships? It's released to high in the atmosphere.
My point was that this already tested on a smaller scale with ships: the fuel changed and that changed the exhaust fumes ability to reflect sunlight which cause some problems the proponents of the solution have not foresee.