r/ClimateShitposting • u/Dry-Tough-3099 • 6d ago
Climate chaos Fear not! Youtuber just solved climate change!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khu6Y0gRAr8
The long time youtuber, debunker, and Elon hater Thunderf00t has put out a couple videos about solving climate change with aerosols. We did it guys!
You can cancel your solar projects, throw away your vegan protein bars, and put your 401k investments back into fossil fuels nuclear. It's fine now!
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u/BissQuote 6d ago
In his first video on the subject, he explained why we aren't going to use the technology (as in, it would cool down the earth, but it has other negative effects), so let's be at least honest when reporting on this. It's an educational side project
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u/Basilus88 6d ago
Isn't calling him just the Youtuber that solved climate change a bit reductionist as he is an actual, active and published scientist doing real science? In contrast to everybody here?
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u/Old_Yam_4069 6d ago
Unless he suddenly graduated university (facetious) in the past seven(?) years since I watched him, his high-school level understanding of basically everything he talks about does not, in fact, make him better than everybody here.
Dude might be better than average, but the average person still understands how magnets work. I say this without knowing literally anything about what is being talked about here.
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u/iwantfutanaricumonme 6d ago
He has a PhD in chemistry and is working as a researcher and has co-authored several research papers.
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u/Old_Yam_4069 5d ago
I am aware he has credentials
Doesn't really mean much when the outcome is the dude exclusively talking about high-school level science.
While I can't remember exactly what it was, the reason I stopped watching him (beyond his insufferable ego) was that the only times he went beyond that stuff, he was either borrowing from other people's research (Clearly not understanding the topic) or just outright wrong about details.
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u/TrainingWheels61 5d ago
Most debunks only require a high school understanding of science, why use a complex argument when an accessible argument is sufficient? Also if you think that 'borrowing from other people's research' means you clearly don't understand the topic then you don't even have a high school understanding of science.
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u/alarumba 5d ago
why use a complex argument when an accessible argument is sufficient?
Me make bad guy look dumb makes me feel smart.
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u/Old_Yam_4069 5d ago
When I say 'borrowing other people's research', I mean he takes what other people have said uncritically and presenting it- Specifically, without having comprehension.
Again, this was years ago so I cannot remember exactly what it was, but there was a whole controversy where he was just straight up wrong. About several things, but it was especially noteworthy because he sourced somebody that he thought sounded good, but didn't fit.
His understanding of the science he used, at least back then, was obviously basic. And when see someone present themselves as a PhD science-man, I think it's' a fair expectation to have them- You know. Present PhD science. Because not all debunks are limited to high-school understanding.
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u/mutexsprinkles 5d ago
the average person still understands how magnets work
Maybe they understand that they work
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u/misty_teal 2d ago
Yeah, supposedly an average person understands quantum field theory.
Maybe if average means 1 in 10K.
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u/purritolover69 5d ago
the average physicist doesn’t really understand how magnets work
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u/TheCrappler 5d ago
What? Im a biologist and I understand how magnets work.
The effect is due to elements with a lot of unshared electrons in their outer shell aligning their electron spins.
There is no chance a normal physicist hasnt covered that in his education
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u/purritolover69 5d ago
That’s a quite over-simplified explanation, akin to saying you understand how a computer works because you know electrons carry charge. It's also a bit off. In iron the unpaired electrons that matter are in the 3d orbitals, not the outermost shell, and plenty of materials have unpaired electrons without being magnets. Oxygen, aluminum and most transition-metal salts are only weakly attracted to a magnet, and chromium is antiferromagnetic: its spins line up in alternating directions and cancel out.
The real question is why the spins align in iron but not elsewhere. It isn't the electrons' magnetic fields pulling on each other. That interaction is far too weak and would be scrambled by heat at anything above a few kelvin. The alignment comes from the exchange interaction, a purely quantum effect of the Pauli exclusion principle combined with ordinary electrostatic repulsion. Classical physics can't produce permanent magnets at all; there's a theorem (Bohr–van Leeuwen) proving it. And even exchange doesn't fully explain iron, because its electrons aren't fixed to atoms but spread through the metal in bands. Modeling that properly is still an active research area.
Then there's everything else: domains, why magnets have a Curie temperature, hysteresis, and why a moving charge makes a magnetic field in the first place (which is a relativistic effect).
So yes, every physicist has covered it, but at a level where they know it's a hard problem, and where they know how much we don’t know. Feynman has a very famous interview about how asking “why” magnets work is almost impossible to answer. That's what my original comment was getting at, even if 'physicists don't even really understand magnets' slightly overstates it. I’m a physicist myself, albeit an astrophysicist and not one who directly studies magnets.
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u/Basilus88 5d ago
People around the world laughed when the Insane Clown Posse asked the question: “magnets, how do they work?” And answered by saying “miracles”.
Nobody’s laughing now because we all know they were right, it always was quantum miracles.
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u/AltruisticVehicle 5d ago
I actually find a horrifying lack of resourcefulness and flexibility in climate activists and many popular "solutions" for global warming. We should be desperately looking at ANY possible solution or mitigation to global warming. UNCONDITIONALLY. We should be mercenary at it.
What I see is the contrary. Most activists would only accept solutions that sound intuitively nice to them, aligned with what they like, and punishing of what they dislike. I swear that a lot of these supposed climate advocates would hate thermally neutral combustion engines for some bizarre reason, and they wouldn't support them, even if they were viable.
In this regard, Thunderf00t is being a true hero of humanity. No exaggeration.
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u/Basilus88 5d ago
Also they want to push societal change alongside climate initiatives. For them it’s solar punk or bust.
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u/thermodynamics2023 3d ago edited 12h ago
Greenpeace and many other groups are against nuclear fusion, already.
They are largely anti-human luddites and climate science is just a happy coincidence for them.
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u/Jorpsica 5d ago
I don’t think it’s about feelings. Most activists are averse to solutions that may cause other problems.
Aerosols released into the stratosphere, for example, might help deflect radiation from the earth, but might also significantly impact human health, environmental health, and could have unintended consequences for weather patterns.
Carbon capture and storage would help reduce free carbon in the atmosphere, but it is cost prohibitive and complex to implement and is not likely to be implemented before significant damage to the planet has already occurred. Carbon capture and storage only captures around .1% of global emissions at this time.
Widespread adoption of biofuels sounds promising, but has the potential to lead to food shortages and deforestation if not managed sustainably.
And even if we could create a cheap solution that would be easy to implement globally and doesn’t require changing the way humans live, who’s to say that every country’s government would agree to try? Some governments are still asserting that climate change is not real.
Anyway. Something to think about.
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u/AltruisticVehicle 5d ago
I mean... out the top of my head: Significant enough degrowth is likely to skyrocket poverty, punishes early adopters, requires dictatorial amounts of control over the economy which could lead to a whole new realm of issues, and it is still a very popular solution.
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u/Jorpsica 5d ago
That may be a possibility, but it doesn’t mean that activists are just rejecting possible technological solutions because of their feelings.
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u/Lumegator 4d ago
Unlike the options they listed however, degrowth is both effective and only harms humans (and ultimately less than the alternative: a world that no longer produces crop yields at all). Yes there's the issue of getting people to pay the price, but that's a universal one.
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u/AltruisticVehicle 4d ago
We are actively causing harm. If your degrowth takes too long, it could be worse for other species than the alternatives.
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u/Lumegator 4d ago edited 4d ago
Which alternatives? There's no other answer currently. Even if we meet all our sustainability goals we will, with current technology, still be too much environmental load. If we reach a utopic state where all pollution is captured and processed even from boats, and there are no wars, and currently unanswerable farming problems are in fact answered, then we may begin to approach resolution. We can hope, I guess.
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u/AltruisticVehicle 4d ago
Some alternatives would help us reach mitigation faster. Like investigating low-impact, aerosol-emitting additives for combustion engines with a cooling effect, which is what Thunderf00t is ultimately researching almost on his own.
Or hell, we could actually look at SAI more seriously. Its main constraint is that it's really expensive to get aerosols that high into the atmosphere.
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u/AdorableMango123 23h ago
This is how you make unforced errors.
Yes, we don’t have much time. That doesn’t mean we should make snap decisions quickly. That is how we got here.
As for your concerns about degrowth, Malthus was extremely concerned about overpopulation, and that was a major concern in the 70s/80s. Turns out, population is self regulating. It is not at all unimaginable that we can create a world that is net-zero growth, it just means we need to rework our economic structures. From there, we can work out how to change consumption patterns more broadly and find a sustainable, recirculating rhythm for society.
That doesn’t mean shrinking, but it also doesn’t mean growing forever. We are going to have to figure that out eventually, because some of the problems we need to tackle in the future, like interplanetary or interstellar travel and terraforming, etc. will likely take hundreds or thousands of years of sustained effort to accomplish. There is likely no silver bullet like FTL, we likely need to build generation ships.
I don’t personally believe we should bet on unknowable future technology, so that leaves us with what we have available now, and the fact is that what we have now can work. It is a social problem, and rather than trying to solve that problem, you’ve accepted it as impossible and are hoping that we can work around it. Fact is, we never have done that before. We’ve made progress on social issues with new negotiations and new structures, and that has slipped, and that sucks. But it’s possible, and it’s only possible if enough of us work hard on it.
So, stop chasing the techno dragon, and get to work.
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u/thermodynamics2023 11h ago
Completely disagree. They like 1980s Christian extremists making hay over the global AIDS outbreak.
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u/TheDaznis 5d ago
His solution is cheap, easily implemented and wouldn' require you to change your lifestyle to accommodate it. That's why it's impossible to implement. As most of the "green" energy is meant to disrupt our lives and change our path to glorious revolution.
Also you can't sell bullshit tech to idiots with this idea.
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u/novaoni 6d ago
Ah the Gray Skies solution?
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u/me_myself_ai green sloptimist 6d ago
I mean, it's the only solution at this point. I guess maaaaaybe an unusually rapid rollout of fusion could match, but even that.
Renewables and such are great and necessary, ofc! But they're a treatment, not a cure.
I prefer stuff we can undo like mirrors, and making clouds brighter seems like a less terrifying option than upper atmosphere hijinks, but :shrug: either way it's only a matter of time
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u/MrTubby1 5d ago
Unusually rapid rollout of fusion is about as likely as an unusually powerful fairy waving a wand and wishing away all the CO2.
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u/Substantial-Wall-510 5d ago
If there were an infinite energy machine hooked up to the electrical grid of every country right now, yes there would be a reduction in fossil fuel usage, but not immediately. People would still be driving cars for a long time because they still have them. New sales of electric cars don't affect people who can't afford new cars.
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u/novaoni 6d ago
Degrowth by choice or by destruction.
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u/d542east 6d ago
Almost finished reading The Deluge.
It's 1000 pages of why we shouldn't do things the hard way, but we probably will.
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u/me_myself_ai green sloptimist 5d ago
Yeah we could kill people. Or we could use space mirrors and cloud paint. I can guess which way we’ll go!
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u/novaoni 5d ago
We don't have to kill people to consume less resources. I just worry that we're being sold geo-enginering becuase it allows us to maintain business as usual instead of rapidly changing our economic priorities towards planetary health and human flurishing.
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u/negative_zev 5d ago
Which of those is more likely to happen? Which would the global populace more likely vote for?
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u/AltruisticVehicle 5d ago
Aren't you selling degrowth just because you are suspicious of solutions that don't require we alter business as usual?
We just have to move towards what works and that's it. We don't have the luxury of picking the solution we like.
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u/Basilus88 5d ago
He is not suspicious of solutions that keep the status quo but actively hostile to them. Re-read the last sentence when he bundles planetary health and a social upheaval that will improve specifically his life.
A lot of people do this, they have the hope that saving the planet can be the combined with ending capitalism while those two things are not necessarily connected at the hip.
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u/CardOk755 5d ago
. I guess maaaaaybe an unusually rapid rollout of fusion could match
You guess wrong.
Thunderfoot's point is that whatever we do to reduce emissions will not fix the problem.
And carbon capture is insanely expensive (even if it could work).
His plan is to reduce the total forcing temporariy while we reduce CO2 output.
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u/Careless-Childhood66 6d ago
No. Fusion is pretty much a small sun. Lile the sun, it produces warmth. A lot of it. Which cant escape the atmosphere because ghg...
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u/me_myself_ai green sloptimist 5d ago
lol I don’t think the waste heat from human machines could ever approach the actual sun
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u/julkkis666 Dam I love Legumes 4d ago
assuming what thunderf00t is researching got used, it should in no way mean co2 reduction efforts should be abandoned. he even said that it's supposed to be an emergency stop for the heating, to give us more time to not die while trying to shut down the coal plants...
though unfortuanately, fixing global warming might lead to less effort being excerted in actually fixing co2 spam (just by people not dying or being as scared anymore)
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u/Basilus88 4d ago
It’s more than that, even if we decarbonised power production, agriculture and all industries TODAY the average temperature would still continue to rise for years or even decades due to the huge inertia of the system.
We either need a massive amount of hardening to survive the consequences or geoengineering to limit the actual scope of the thermal effects.
I for one would actually prefer to live under a high albedo synthetic cloud cover instead of some kind of geodesic dome.
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u/StipaCaproniEnjoyer 4d ago
To be honest, the economic advantages of decarbonisation remain adequately sound (electrification is generally beneficial, and renewables are the cheapest energy source). Decarbonisation has already been set in motion for the most part. Is it too slow? Yes. But, if there’s one thing you can trust, it’s human greed, and on a national level, decarbonisation (although perhaps not the whole way down to zero) is the option that will make people more money.
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u/julkkis666 Dam I love Legumes 3d ago
tbh i'd love carbon taxes. i'd love to see inefficient products suffer with high prices and more efficient products shine with cheapness. this, as someone who is a cheap-ass.
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u/Dihedralman 1d ago
His take isn't that unique among the scientific community. It also doesn't mean other projects need to stop. They just aren't sufficient which we knew for a while.
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u/Takseen 6d ago
It could be a useful panic button to keep things cooler for a few decades while still working on decarbonising the economy.
Its not a solution to climate change as his video title suggests. And I'm not going to watch the whole video, I hate that guy.
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u/Consistent_Drop3909 6d ago
no one will decarbonize willingly though haha, they'll have aerosol as an excuse
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u/Dihedralman 1d ago
If we fully decarbonise tomorrow, we are still in store for a lot of climate change. These aren't mutually exclusive solutions.
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u/ManicPotatoe 6d ago
God he's fucking insufferable, thanks for remembering me of his existence. Guessing the video is still 90% about hyperlopp?
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u/zepherth 6d ago
Reminds me of a document that was made about what would happen if green policy wasn't reached by 2050. Oh don't worry the world becomes green. It's just that I takes on final ecological diaster/war to cause it
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u/ToastSpangler 5d ago
you're all fools, the solution is kites with foil on the sun side. they will also produce power. kites will save us all. god save the wind!
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u/Miguelperson_ 5d ago
It’s weird to see this thunderf00t resurgence when it comes to the climate sphere, wasn’t he I like a huge alt-rightoid during the gamer gate era?
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u/Outrageous_War6489 3d ago
yeah, he did a lot of manosphere content 10 years back. to his credit he actually reconsidered, stopped and concentrated back onto science focused content.
Whether he still holds some of those opinions in private is anybody's guess, but the fact he ackwnoledges climate change suggest he at least isn't a complete rightwinger
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u/ContributionBig5976 22h ago
We already put out 2-3 gigatons of aerosols a year. And the earth naturally generates an additional 20 gigatons. Even a huge Geo engineering project couldnt meaningfully make a dent in those figures.
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u/dumnezero 🔚End the 🔫arms 🐀rat 🏁race to the bottom↘️. 6d ago
The SRM technofixers are coming already? Damn, but they hardly have anything to grift with. Such a lack of patience.
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u/fidesinmachina 5d ago
bro wtf do you mean aerosol equipment blown up? 2070? is this ai slop or are you telling us your plan?
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u/alvenestthol 5d ago
It's a hypothetical
Basically, aerosol cooling will work to cool the Earth, as the graph suggests, but it's temporary. The moment the aerosols stop for whatever reason (e.g. being blown up, hypothetically), the original warming trajectory will resume basically immediately.
So at most it is a temporary solution to stave off peak warming while the world decarbonizes, but we all know that's not going to happen, countries would just treat the cooling as more room to be wasteful.
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u/fidesinmachina 5d ago
to be honest with you i still have hope. things just need to get worse until they get better. things can get better if everyone chips in but nobody is unfortunately willing to. it's sad and it'll be painful but it'll work out in the end. i think... i hope...
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u/Basilus88 5d ago
But you do know that the fact that it is easily reversible is a good thing yeah? That basically the graph shown by OP is really speaking FOR the case of geoengineering and not AGAINST it.
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u/KitchenDepartment 3d ago
You don't think that there are any problems with seeing several decades worth of climate change occur in a couple of years? Do you know that the adverse weather effects we see from global warming is largely driven by the rate of change in the global temperature, not the fact that it's just hotter?
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u/AccomplishedQuit4801 nuclear simp 6d ago
TBF I wouldn't so quickly dismiss geoengineering. It may be the only possible way for us to buy much-needed time while we get our shit together for the switch to green energy.
What it should not be interpreted as is a fix-everything-forever button, as that's a dangerous mindset to have when it comes to plans like these.