Link: https://www.wired.com/story/they-war-gamed-dimming-the-sun-it-went-even-worse-than-you-think/

archived copy of the article

Nice try Mr Burns

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/

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

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.

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.

"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.

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"

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

Also.
As a regular role-player, I can say this kind of game is silly for this kind of problem. It all depends on the starting assumptions of the roles people are playing. If you're choosing to roleplay someone more interested in their national power, than you'll play that character. If you choose to play a character who doesn't care about personal advantage, you'll play that way.

In addition, the GM can create the incentives by choosing the specific form and controls of the technology, and political landscape.

The term War-Game itself, predisposes the game to be adversarial in nature. Surprise surprise, that's how it played out.

And dumping a bunch of sulphur dioxide probably would do the opposite of help that

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.

But we are in on it we keep buying there shit.