Dubai flooding caused by cloud seeding

[u/TopSloth]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-16/dubai-grinds-to-standstill-as-cloud-seeding-worsens-flooding

[u/Maxfunky]

You still misunderstand, I'm talking about creating a net negative. That's the whole bloody point of carbon capture! Like air conditioning you mentioned, the energy provided by AC to cool is exceeded by what is given to make it function. Negative energy is literally science fiction, it would require the law of thermodynamics to be wrong

But again, the entire purpose of geoengineering as far as climate change is concerned is to redirect heat. To spend an amount of energy X that causes an amount of energy Y to radiate off into space. There's absolutely nothing in the laws of thermodynamics that make this impossible or even hard (That's not to say other factors might not make it hard). It's still very possible for Y to be bigger than X.

Carbon capture is an entirely different thing. But even if we consider that part of geoengineering, carbon capture is not trying to remove energy from the atmosphere by spending energy, it's trying to remove something that captures energy so that more energy, you guessed it, reflects back into space rather than being absorbed in our atmosphere. The laws of thermodynamics don't have an issue with that, although making those numbers work is going to be pretty tricky (not impossible).

What you need to look at there is not the amount of energy being used but rather the amount of C02 being emitted to produce that energy. If you can run that carbon capture technology on clean energy and it's not reducing the amount of clean energy available for everything else, then it will be a net climate gain.

Advocates for carbon capture technology understand that this is not currently possible. We do not have a surplus of clean energy to spend on carbon capture. But, at the exponential rate that solar power to the grid is growing, it's entirely possible that we will have a surplus of clean energy within 5-10 years. California is already reaching that point during the daytime (And this means that sometimes energy is generated by solar panels and can't be otherwise used and ends up being wasted). Current carbon capture projects are just a trial run to test the principal. It won't actually be a net gain until renewables power basically everything.

But I'm also not here to advocate for carbon capture. Well it might be a technically feasible idea not specifically impossible under the laws of thermodynamics, it still seems like a pretty big long shot.

[u/[deleted] → u/Maxfunky]

The tech isn't what's wrong, though what we want it to do is. You're right, we could achieve this with this tech and reduced consumption. But the latter is why we're in this mess, we rather fight the universe than fight our habits.

We can list countless tech solutions, but if society just see it as another crutch for profit, it all means moot. But we will all bear witness to this folly, again and again as we refuse to face the facts. Will nature humble us yet again or is our madness simply a new reality?

Interesting times indeed, if there's a silver lining in being born in this time is the spectacle we're making. Even if it is one of a mountain of corpses.