Jesus Christ. What a freaking mess.

And of course Israel and Musk are out in front pushing for this.

also:

https://www.wired.com/story/a-mysterious-startup-is-developing-a-new-form-of-solar-geoengineering/

What frustrates me is that this small cabal of people have decided that they don't need nor want to have any input from the remaining 99.999% of the population before just doing crazy shit to the planet.

While the title here isnt exactly inaccurate, I will say, for the people that read the headline and not the article, that this doesn't say what I would have expected to, with that title. I was expecting it to be about the simulated climate effects of a geoengineering effort being worse than expected, ie "the side-effects are underestimated and show up when we gamed things out", wheras the article barely even touches on what the simulated results for the climate were, and is instead meaning more "people proved unable to cooperate on this and powerful countries preferred to develop their own geoengineering programs and sabotage efforts to make them work with their rivals by lying about everything"

"Better we all die than let [the other guy] score any points."

That's how the whole thing played out on all sides. Score as many points as possible and consequences to humanity be damned.

Absolutely sick.

Tensions escalated when the team running the simulation handed the Russian delegates an “intelligence report” indicating they had found a plane near the Bering Strait believed to be involved in a US geoengineering research program. The US team—which was indeed flying research missions—accused Russia of disinformation.

Just incredible. They can't help themselves even when playing a game

Furthers my conclusion that we're just not (socially and scientifically) evolved enough to handle geoengineering.

Politically it really shouldn't be under the control of one country. Perhaps the UN (or a reformed international council without 'major power' veto). Way too easy to freeze some poor bastards for profit.

Scientifically it really needs to be easily and completely reversible when the inevitable fuck ups in climate and ecology show up. Random chemicals into the stratosphere GO! is not that, maybe it's just a distraction to keep fossil fuel profits rolling, maybe a scam for funding, maybe batshit insane narcissists with a god complex.

I could get behind a dimmable shade in synchronous orbit somewhere (preferably outside the earth moon system), shading the whole earth equally but that's a bigger project. Perhaps better patterns than whole earth exist, but that needs to be a testable hypothesis. Reverse by making transparent, if that fails rotate to edge on, or just blow it up.

The real solutions are get rid of fossil fuels as fast as possible, economy (or 1% profits) be damned, actually functional now carbon sequestration (e.g. sinking trees in deep cold water) and shit-tons of renewables. Everything else is nice to haves.

It wouldn't help much anyway, ocean acidification is also a problem that is rapidly getting worse.

Most experts agree it would take a superpower’s reach to ensure the safe passage of planes needed to deliver payloads of dust to the stratosphere in a geoengineering exercise. But neither the US nor China would lightly cede control over the global thermostat, says Nielsen, and distrust and poor communication are a significant risk: “Any action related to the issue by one actor can be perceived as malintent by the other.”

Overall result not surprising, but I didn't anticipate the details.

Nice try Mr Burns

This reads like the plot for the movie Arrival (or the short story it was based on).

How disappointing.

This is fascinating as heck. I've never even heard of the concept of wargaming sciency stuff. I'm going to have to make a video about this on my channel. Thanks!

I feel like they failed by telling the people involved that it was a "game". When people hear that, they want to win. Win what? Doesn't matter.

Calling it a simulation would have maybe made people realize that it was a serious experiment. Some of the wording made me think they did call it a simulation, but then this guy: "worse than no deal at all is any deal that favors China" says it all.

It's just a game to them. Even the acts of bombing other countries is a game to them. If they had framed this as more serious, people like this guy would probably not participate and the simulation would have provided better data.

What a weird concept, to have these complicated games when you could just look at history or current events and come to the same conclusions.

A more interesting story is where people get the hope that humanity isn't going to exterminate itself.

I wonder if their take on human history is that the only consequences of interfering with complex natural systems are those that were intended.

That read was about as depressing as I was expecting.