The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 22 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Visioni: Solar geoengineering is probably better than unchecked warming
“It might still, and it probably is still going to be better than not doing than letting the warming just keep unchecked.”
Visioni: IMO 2020 sulfur cuts added roughly 0.05°C of global warming
“There's a few course estimates that, just based on Earth's sensitivity, say, suggested, says probably Alf, a 10th of a degree overall of increased warming.”
Visioni: Halting all human emissions immediately would cause near-term global warming
“We know that if today, if tomorrow morning there were no more anthropogenic emission of anything at all in the world, The main impact that we would see in the first decade, it would be a warming, because this aerosol effect that is masking part of the warming …”
Visioni: Unintended shipping aerosol drop reveals safe threshold for geoengineering experiments
“This example of the shipping regulation should really be Can really tell us a lot about this, right? So, because we're, we are claiming that this effect is maybe there, but it's small, and a lot of climate scientists are sort of saying already, in a way, befor…”
Visioni: Sulfate geoengineering ozone depletion would likely stay within 5%
“We, and based on what we've seen with previous volcanic corruptions, we know that the depletion of ozone wouldn't be catastrophic. It would probably be around plus or minus five percent of what it is now.”
Visioni: 20 years will not be enough to scale CDR effectively
“I do not think personally that in the 20 years are going to be enough to scale CDR solutions in a really, in a way that would really make an impact.”
Visioni: Rogue geoengineering planes could simply be shot down
“This could be another one of the things where it is maybe unlikely that a single actor could do it because, as one reviewer once pointed out to me, you can shoot the planes out of the sky.”
Visioni: IPCC estimates surface aerosols masked 0.3 to 0.4°C of warming
“Right now, the IPCC estimates that aerosol emissions from the surface have probably hidden a small fraction of the overall global warming, probably 0.3 to 0.4 Celsius. Whereas Pinatubo itself, just by that outburst of that tiny fraction of sulfate compared to …”
Visioni: Geoengineering research should rely on modeling over small-scale experiments
“When it comes to the kind of discussion that we need to be having right now, I am a bit skeptical about how much small-scale experiments could move the needle. Whereas, I think that once we're going to go to the point where we've sort of gotten enough people o…”
Visioni: There are zero active solar geoengineering field experiments globally
“So there are absolutely no small scale or large scale experiments going on anywhere on the planet.”
Visioni: Abruptly halting solar geoengineering immediately reverts planetary temperatures
“Once we were to do it for long, once we were to keep it up for a couple of years or more, and so we actually have that cooling, then yes, of course, interrupting the injection immediately would just bring us back to whatever temperatures we would have without …”
Visioni: Solar geoengineering cannot fully replicate a low-CO2 climate
“By cooling with these methods or with any methods, we would not be just turning back the dial of time to a time where there was less CO₂, because the sulfates do cool differently than the CO₂ warps. And even if maybe we can try and get it as close as possible,…”
Visioni: Decades of literature showed shipping emissions brightened ocean clouds
“There was a very strong suggestion in the literature for decades about the fact that shipping, ah, was making clouds brighter. Burning from shipping was making clouds brighter, especially over the North Atlantic and in general over the oceans.”
Visioni: IMO 2020 cut shipping sulfate emissions by 7-8 megatons
“But so we, the estimate for now is that there was probably a reduction of around seven to eight megatons of sulfate emitted less from shipping. That's 10% of the overall emissions right now of sulfate from the whole world, from anthropogenic emissions.”
Visioni: Planet-altering geoengineering deployment is extremely unlikely in next decade
“Whatever happens, we're not doing, we're not going to change the planet in the next decade. There, we just, there's no upside. There's, it's extremely unlikely.”
Visioni: Space mirrors for geoengineering unlikely in next 50 years
“It is very unlikely that in the next 2030, 50 years, we could scale up space industry in a way that would allow us to have large, gigantic, controllable space mirrors at L Two.”
Visioni: Governance is the hardest challenge in solar geoengineering
“There's a lot of agreement over the fact that the governance part is actually the hardest part when it comes to solar geoengineering.”
Visioni: Smaller cloud droplets create brighter, more reflective clouds
“If you have more cloud nuclei, so particles that allow this coagulation, this condensation to happen, the more nuclei you have, the more this water vapor that condenses is distributed across more nuclei, and so you have smaller water droplets. And the optical …”
Visioni: North Atlantic clouds were the perfect target for aerosol brightening
“The ones in the North Atlantic, the clouds in the North Atlantic, tended to be the perfect target where these aerosols would reduce the size, and there were a lot of them. There were a lot of shipping tracks.”
Visioni: Mount Pinatubo injected 10 to 20 megatons of stratospheric sulfate
“Pinatubo happened in 1991. It released anywhere between 10 and 20 teragrams. That's megatons. So that's a million of tons of sulfate in the stratosphere. We called that a big number, but it just released it once, and it had an effect for a couple of years, and…”
Visioni: Global bodies like White House and UN published geoengineering reports
“In the last year, there's been a lot of advances in bringing the conversation around geoengineering to a more global public, right? There's been plenty of reports from very influential places. The White House has had a report, the OSTP, the Office of Science, …”
Visioni: Major 20th-century volcanic eruptions measurably cooled the planet for years
“On the other hand, when these sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere, they stay for one year or longer, and so we have observed in past volcanic eruptions, Pinatubo in 1991, other three or four that have been in the 20th century, that they have cooled the planet…”