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> but also would almost certainly cause environmental impacts at least on the scale of climate change, and possibly worse. Or, possibly better. The deep oceans

> but also would almost certainly cause environmental impacts at least on the scale of climate change, and possibly worse. Or, possibly better. The deep oceans don't have a lot of marine life because there's not much plankton, because all the nutrients have sunk to the bottom. Regions where there are natural upwellings that bring bottom nutrients to the surface tend to have massive plankton populations, leading to massive fish populations (Grand Banks, the west coast of South America, others). That's why it would be important to do experiments to see what happens when it begins to get scaled up. "We don't know what would happen" is not a reason to avoid experimentation (indeed, "we don't know what would happen" is pretty much the reason why you do experiments).

nwiswell 2y ago
I definitely agree, but in the meantime we cannot depend on these strategies when making long-term plans to combat climate change because we don't know whether their side effects will prove to be tolerable.
- Turing_Machine 2y ago
  How do you know that the "long-term plans to combat climate change" won't prove harmful in their own right? They would produce massive economic effects at a minimum. Then there are the unknown effects of (e.g.) removing a lot of energy from the desert and transporting it to other regions. I'd be very surprised if that didn't have some effect. Same thing with extracting energy from the winds on any large scale. Wind energy turned into electricity is energy that's not available to (e.g.) move rain clouds from one region to another. And so on.
  - nwiswell 2y ago
    In general the incoming power from the sun is so many orders of magnitude greater than the amount of power we usefully extract that it's hard to imagine it having any material impact on the biosphere. The physical presence of solar cells and wind turbines is a different matter, but it's largely a local effect.

nwiswell 2y ago

I definitely agree, but in the meantime we cannot depend on these strategies when making long-term plans to combat climate change because we don't know whether their side effects will prove to be tolerable.

Turing_Machine 2y ago
How do you know that the "long-term plans to combat climate change" won't prove harmful in their own right? They would produce massive economic effects at a minimum. Then there are the unknown effects of (e.g.) removing a lot of energy from the desert and transporting it to other regions. I'd be very surprised if that didn't have some effect. Same thing with extracting energy from the winds on any large scale. Wind energy turned into electricity is energy that's not available to (e.g.) move rain clouds from one region to another. And so on.
- nwiswell 2y ago
  In general the incoming power from the sun is so many orders of magnitude greater than the amount of power we usefully extract that it's hard to imagine it having any material impact on the biosphere. The physical presence of solar cells and wind turbines is a different matter, but it's largely a local effect.