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Southern US Reaches Dangerous "Wet Bulb Temperature". Here's What That Means
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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There have always been people who opposed progress for various reasons, and sometimes their reasons were understandable and even forgivable. Nobody can care about everything at once in equal measure and sometimes the safest default is "let's not rock the boat when things seem to be going well."
There's one current obstacle to progress that I have a harder time forgiving, though. Every time there's discussion of the possibility of doing some research into geoengineering as a means to counteract climate change a whole pile of people come out with "but that will only encourage more burning of fossil fuels" and "haven't you seen Snowpiercer?" counterarguments. It's wearying. The same people usually love the "we've passed an irreversible tipping point" articles that go on about how doomed we all are and how futile any further attempts to reverse climate change are.
If they really think we're doomed and nothing more can be done, then get out of the way of the people who are still trying to come up with solutions. A generation ago the same problem prevented nuclear power from being a useful solution.
What's sad is nuclear power is still a useful solution. It's not a perfect solution. Not by a long shot. But as far as non-renewable power sources go, nuclear is by far the most efficient. Yet today the US has virtually no nuclear power development going on.
Well, I sort of push nuclear power back from the "useful solution" slot at this point in history because now the problem is no longer preventing global temperatures from rising - that's a done deal now. Drastically cutting our carbon dioxide emissions are still a good idea but no longer all that's necessary any more. Plus solar and wind power are really coming into their own, so nuclear's good but no longer the only game in town on that front either.
I fear that eventually geoengineering will have been put off for so long that we'll be in a situation where "yeah, reducing global temperatures would be nice, but vast regions of farmland already turned to desert so the real problem we're facing these days is how to rapidly spin up new farmland and that old problem of lowering global temperatures is no longer all that's necessary any more. Maybe if we'd seriously investigated doing it back in the 2020s it would have made a difference then."