Silicon Valley Renegades Pollute the Sky to Save the Planet

2 comments

1. [deleted]

2. Paywall-free link here: [archive.is](https://archive.is/hOO57)

   To be clear, I’m not sharing because I support this startup; I posted this to raise awareness of the fact that people are charging ahead with little if any oversight. Regardless of your stance on geoengineering, I would hope we we’d want to approach this with an abundance of caution, not “move fast and break things.”

   Dave Karpf [writes in response](https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/bullet-points-techbros-telling-stories?publication_id=387131&post_id=149817678):

   >The article is about a solar geoengineering startup called [Make Sunsets](https://makesunsets.com/), run by a YCombinator alum (of course) who read Neal Stephenson’s *Termination Shock* and decided it was an [instruction manual](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus). Make Sunsets has decided to disrupt the solar geoengineering industry, rushing ahead of the academic research on the topic and just launching balloons full of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere.

   >The problem with Stephenson’s story is that, in real science and engineering scenarios, you never have everything go according to plan. The premise underlying the book asks the reader to take a leap of faith behind two types of science and engineering. First, we have to believe that the science of geoengineering is rock-solid. Second, we have to believe the science of real-time climate modeling and forecasting has been basically perfected. You need your climate models to be extremely good in order to forecast what the effects of geoengineering will be. And you need the geoengineering not to have any surprising downstream consequences that the engineers couldn’t predict. You particularly need this because “termination shock” is itself a warning – once you start this process at scale, you cannot end it without disastrous consequences. You had better be right.

   >Actual science is just a lot messier than it looks in Stephenson’s books. It is far too easy to put too much faith in precision computer models. We have built an entire digital economy atop the fiction that the data fueling surveillance capitalism isn’t mostly garbage. None of it works as well as its evangelists claim. We privatize the rewards and socialize the risks, resulting in a tech billionaire-class whose most abundant gift is their unearned confidence.

   >Can climate modelers really offer precision-accurate predictions of how sulfur dioxide “acupuncture” on the stratosphere would work? It’s a fun simplifying assumption for a novel, but a terrifying risk to take in reality. Never once in Termination Shock’s 700 pages do Stephenson’s characters have to deal with the assumptions of a model being wrong.

   >Geoengineering would absolutely be a minefield of unintended consequences. It has never been attempted before. We are incapable of testing it at scale without, y’know, actually pulling the trigger and trying. The degree to which we just don’t know what the unintended impacts of geoengineering would be is off the charts here. The models are based on two major volcanic eruptions, with limited contemporaneous data collection. We’re starting from an N of TWO! Model it all you want, but those models will be based on assumptions that can only be refined once we’ve pulled the trigger on the giant silver bullets.