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Comment by loeg

16 hours ago

So what? You still save millions of lives.

The research isn't there. Jury is still out on whether the long term consequences are a net benefit. In the end you're talking about increasing emissions for a temporary decrease in temperatures. And the chemicals we have that are good candidates for albedo modification are quite toxic. Today more than 10% of deaths globally can already be attributed to air quality

  • If India is experiencing large scale mortality from warming, they aren't going to give a damn about your concerns. They're just going to inject aerosols into the stratosphere.

  • Humans tend to not breathe in a lot of stratospheric aerosols, on account of that being pretty high up.

    As they sink down, they grow larger (condensation & coagulation). Once they reach the troposphere, they usually get down via precipitation, which also isn't really affecting a lot of breathing.

    They can absolutely have other effects (see SO2/acidification, e.g), but air quality isn't really the main concern. For SO2 specifically, there's actually very little mortality sensitivity: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/wa01010x.html

    You're right that the research isn't there yet to make statements with confidence, but that applies to the air quality claim as well.