The original aricle's title is "Scientists Are Just Beginning to Understand How Life Makes Clouds, and Their Discoveries May Drastically Improve Climate Science." Indeed, this knowledge will improve the models we use to understand and predict the climate.
The supplied title "Cloud-forming isoprene and terpenes from crops may drastically improve climate" is completely different, as it states that crop emissions may change climate for the better.
"Understanding cloud-forming isoprene and terpenes from crops may drastically improve climate science" would be a much better title for this post.
I changed the title to better reflect the aspirations of the Smithsonian. Because some people might take "plants" to mean "chemical plants" :)
In clearly better faith, there was a HN submission this week finding cryptic isoprene emission in soybean (3pts). The crop that's Taleb-famous for the GM in GMO. Title & theme of that paper seemed to have bounced off the enthusiasts here..
I guess FloridaMan won't be doing this as they've recently passed legislation to ban this type of stuff. I think this is one of those cases where it was done for the wrong reasons, but it kind of works out in the end
Democracies around the world are already doing a fine job not making the changes voters expect, how can we expect them to take responsibility for effects that are not entirely predictable?
That's why I changed the title to better reflect the aspirations of the Smithsonian. Because some people might take "plants" to mean "chemical plants" :)
Less ironically, there was a HN submission this week finding cryptic isoprene emission in soybean. You know, famous for the GM.
This is exactly backwards from what I would think: "Bright ones at low altitudes generally reflect solar energy away, whereas wispier ones up to 20,000 feet tend to trap heat.". I would have guessed high ones reflect it before it gets lower into the atmosphere.
The whispey ones are largely transparent to incoming shortwave radiation but largely opaque to outgoing longwave radiation. You just need to put on your ~10 micron wavelength goggles.
You might be surprised to learn how much global warming impact from jet aircraft is actually from creating "high-up wispy clouds" in the form of contrails (which are just water vapor).
It really does seem like it’s going to be impossible to stop rich lunatics from having a go at geoengineering instead of just actually helping to slash emissions.
Cut carbon emissions to zero tomorrow and we’re still in a great deal of trouble. Earth is a lagging system and the damage has been done 10 times over.
I don’t blame anyone for looking at radical solutions. We’re not putting out the fire by putting the wood back in a pile.
What about blaming people for grabbing an assortment of different non-wood, non-water objects and throwing them on the fire?
There’s obviously some need to experiment to see if we can find solutions, but historically our track record for engineering complex systems has not been great.
I mean, we're already having democratized geoengineering: Make Sunsets (https://makesunsets.com/) allows you or anyone else to fund deploying high-altitude clouds for geocooling.
Don't know what rich assholes have to do with it, when all things I've seen proposed hurt poor people the most. Make meat unaffordable, make private transportation unaffordable, make travelling by plane unaffordable, make new clothes unaffordable, and the list goes on forever.
That's exactly what rich assholes have to do with it. Why do you believe all the consequence falls onto the working class and the poorest, when the richest have per capita the largest emissions, by whole orders of magnitude?
Yeah, the changes required are systemic and go from the top all the way to the bottom, and the things you mention are part of that process, but pricing people out of everything without offering an off-ramp is sadistic bullshit, and the only reason it's a thing is because rich people and stock prices have more representation in politics than the poor and the environment.
Who cares about per capita emissions? Billionaires could have 1000x the emissions as normal people, but there are so few of them, cutting their emissions down to zero would have absolutely no impact on climate change.
You could cut the emissions of the top 1% in half, or reduce the emissions of the bottom 4 billion to 0. Same result.
Which do you believe is likely the lower hanging fruit, has a higher return per dollar spent and is likely to be more ethical and less invasive?
So yeah. I care about per capita emissions on the grounds that things need to change fast, and adjusting the lifestyle of a few million is radically easier than wiping half the planet off the emissions map.
You're not actually looking at per capita emissions, you're looking at overall emissions. It isn't that the 1% to .1% are the biggest emitters, it's their emission levels multiplied by the size of the class.
Billionaires aren't the 1%, they're the 0.00003%.
Top 1% globally is basically anyone making more than $100k/yr.
If you deleted all billionaires from existence, it would make no impact on climate change. If you deleted all 1% ers and left the billionaires, there will be a huge improvement in climate changing emissions
Do you consider the factories, farms, etc that they own to be part of the equation? I do, and so if you were to “cut the emissions down to zero” of the owner of a large chicken processing company, all those factory farms disappear and that’s not peanuts for climate change.
Yes. Poorer people buy things made overseas that requires a lot of shipping, and are lower quality that require more frequent replacement. They tend to have more children. They usually have more polluting energy sources. And there are many orders of magnitude more of them than rich people.
None of this is their fault, but ignoring it isn't good either.
All aircraft emissions are just 3% of US total. If all rich people (either the top 1% or 10%) reduced their emissions to zero tomorrow we would still not reach reduction targets needed to avoid catastrophic warming.
>Yes. Poorer people buy things made overseas that requires a lot of shipping, and are lower quality that require more frequent replacement. They tend to have more children. They usually have more polluting energy sources. And there are many orders of magnitude more of them than rich people.
A few cheap gadgets are dwarfed by a flight to Bali, new SUV or large house.
Aircraft emissions are 3% of the global total, for the US it is much higher (~9%)[1] and for the richest 10% it is higher again.
You can't get away from the fact that emissions are going to be reasonably well correlated with spending [2] and the poor don't spend very much.
>Everyone needs to contribute.
If we get a real handle on our carbon emissions then the lives of the poor will improve.
Besides anything else although the birth rate varies according to income the variation isn't that big. It's dwarfed by the difference in income and hence consumption.
Having a child is on of the most carbon intensive actions any given person can make.
The numbers are what they are. Rich people have much greater obligation to reduce their emissions. They benefit most from economic activity and they cause the most emissions per capita.
If there were zero rich people tomorrow we would still have an emissions problem for the climate.
I indelicately started a contentious topic that didn't have to exist. If I were given a fresh chance, I'd have just said that carbon emissions and the changes they are causing to the planet are a bigger problem than any single economic class or nation.
That might have caused some controversy, too, but is closer to what I meant. Your point is well taken, but maybe if I posted differently the ensuing discussion would have been less acrimonious.
I think you spoke directly to the room's elephant. The topic is contentious because it is less than zero sum. It isn't even that the pie cannot be grown larger, but some people have already eaten most of it and must continue to eat as more people decide they also want pie.
Human activity will have climatic impact. At a specific emission rate per capita, what is the number of humans that can exist? Who decides which humans continue to exist?
The edited title is misleading.
The original aricle's title is "Scientists Are Just Beginning to Understand How Life Makes Clouds, and Their Discoveries May Drastically Improve Climate Science." Indeed, this knowledge will improve the models we use to understand and predict the climate.
The supplied title "Cloud-forming isoprene and terpenes from crops may drastically improve climate" is completely different, as it states that crop emissions may change climate for the better.
"Understanding cloud-forming isoprene and terpenes from crops may drastically improve climate science" would be a much better title for this post.
I changed the title to better reflect the aspirations of the Smithsonian. Because some people might take "plants" to mean "chemical plants" :)
In clearly better faith, there was a HN submission this week finding cryptic isoprene emission in soybean (3pts). The crop that's Taleb-famous for the GM in GMO. Title & theme of that paper seemed to have bounced off the enthusiasts here..
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44377401
(Maybe yours is a bit long,maybe not, but imho we're a bit closer than only "understanding".)
I guess FloridaMan won't be doing this as they've recently passed legislation to ban this type of stuff. I think this is one of those cases where it was done for the wrong reasons, but it kind of works out in the end
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/23/c...
Sounds like florida man needs to ban plants
Democracies around the world are already doing a fine job not making the changes voters expect, how can we expect them to take responsibility for effects that are not entirely predictable?
Industrial production of isoprene is about 800,000 tons/year. Global emission from plants of the chemical is about 600 million tons/year.
In the US, the large natural emission of isoprene is why emission control for vehicles shifted to focus on NOx emission.
That's why I changed the title to better reflect the aspirations of the Smithsonian. Because some people might take "plants" to mean "chemical plants" :)
Less ironically, there was a HN submission this week finding cryptic isoprene emission in soybean. You know, famous for the GM.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2502360122
This is exactly backwards from what I would think: "Bright ones at low altitudes generally reflect solar energy away, whereas wispier ones up to 20,000 feet tend to trap heat.". I would have guessed high ones reflect it before it gets lower into the atmosphere.
The whispey ones are largely transparent to incoming shortwave radiation but largely opaque to outgoing longwave radiation. You just need to put on your ~10 micron wavelength goggles.
You might be surprised to learn how much global warming impact from jet aircraft is actually from creating "high-up wispy clouds" in the form of contrails (which are just water vapor).
Contrails condense from water vapor, but are not themselves water vapor.
does it have some kind of nuclei and have water vapour surround it? I'm guessing from impurities of burnt fuel?
Particles in the exhaust from incomplete combustion, I think.
Rain follows the plow?
Clever, but no. This is about cloud formation, and doesn't indicate any (significant) increased chances of precipitation.
I think I saw this movie
It really does seem like it’s going to be impossible to stop rich lunatics from having a go at geoengineering instead of just actually helping to slash emissions.
Pretty embarrassing overall for the species.
Cut carbon emissions to zero tomorrow and we’re still in a great deal of trouble. Earth is a lagging system and the damage has been done 10 times over.
I don’t blame anyone for looking at radical solutions. We’re not putting out the fire by putting the wood back in a pile.
What about blaming people for grabbing an assortment of different non-wood, non-water objects and throwing them on the fire?
There’s obviously some need to experiment to see if we can find solutions, but historically our track record for engineering complex systems has not been great.
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> just actually helping to slash emissions
The word just here hides a lot of complexity and difficult tradeoffs.
What do you suppose is the net worth of the people spearheading efforts in solar power and electric vehicles?
I mean, we're already having democratized geoengineering: Make Sunsets (https://makesunsets.com/) allows you or anyone else to fund deploying high-altitude clouds for geocooling.
Don't know what rich assholes have to do with it, when all things I've seen proposed hurt poor people the most. Make meat unaffordable, make private transportation unaffordable, make travelling by plane unaffordable, make new clothes unaffordable, and the list goes on forever.
That's exactly what rich assholes have to do with it. Why do you believe all the consequence falls onto the working class and the poorest, when the richest have per capita the largest emissions, by whole orders of magnitude?
Yeah, the changes required are systemic and go from the top all the way to the bottom, and the things you mention are part of that process, but pricing people out of everything without offering an off-ramp is sadistic bullshit, and the only reason it's a thing is because rich people and stock prices have more representation in politics than the poor and the environment.
Who cares about per capita emissions? Billionaires could have 1000x the emissions as normal people, but there are so few of them, cutting their emissions down to zero would have absolutely no impact on climate change.
You could cut the emissions of the top 1% in half, or reduce the emissions of the bottom 4 billion to 0. Same result.
Which do you believe is likely the lower hanging fruit, has a higher return per dollar spent and is likely to be more ethical and less invasive?
So yeah. I care about per capita emissions on the grounds that things need to change fast, and adjusting the lifestyle of a few million is radically easier than wiping half the planet off the emissions map.
You're not actually looking at per capita emissions, you're looking at overall emissions. It isn't that the 1% to .1% are the biggest emitters, it's their emission levels multiplied by the size of the class.
Billionaires aren't the 1%, they're the 0.00003%.
Top 1% globally is basically anyone making more than $100k/yr.
If you deleted all billionaires from existence, it would make no impact on climate change. If you deleted all 1% ers and left the billionaires, there will be a huge improvement in climate changing emissions
Do you consider the factories, farms, etc that they own to be part of the equation? I do, and so if you were to “cut the emissions down to zero” of the owner of a large chicken processing company, all those factory farms disappear and that’s not peanuts for climate change.
Do you think carbon emissions are coming from poor people’s consumption?
Even in the US only half the population will fly in any year and you can be sure it’s not the poorer half.
It’s not the rich half using public transport, they are only going to benefit from a transition away from private car ownership.
Yes. Poorer people buy things made overseas that requires a lot of shipping, and are lower quality that require more frequent replacement. They tend to have more children. They usually have more polluting energy sources. And there are many orders of magnitude more of them than rich people.
None of this is their fault, but ignoring it isn't good either.
All aircraft emissions are just 3% of US total. If all rich people (either the top 1% or 10%) reduced their emissions to zero tomorrow we would still not reach reduction targets needed to avoid catastrophic warming.
Everyone needs to contribute.
Shipping the things that poor people buy is almost unfathomably eco-friendly.
Gargantuan slow ships are actually a great way to move stuff.
>Yes. Poorer people buy things made overseas that requires a lot of shipping, and are lower quality that require more frequent replacement. They tend to have more children. They usually have more polluting energy sources. And there are many orders of magnitude more of them than rich people.
A few cheap gadgets are dwarfed by a flight to Bali, new SUV or large house.
Aircraft emissions are 3% of the global total, for the US it is much higher (~9%)[1] and for the richest 10% it is higher again.
You can't get away from the fact that emissions are going to be reasonably well correlated with spending [2] and the poor don't spend very much.
>Everyone needs to contribute.
If we get a real handle on our carbon emissions then the lives of the poor will improve.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/transportation-sector-emiss...
[2] https://climatefactchecks.org/worlds-richest-10-linked-to-tw...
I'm a little sceptical of claims like "poor people cause more pollution because they have more children than rich people do".
Besides anything else although the birth rate varies according to income the variation isn't that big. It's dwarfed by the difference in income and hence consumption.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
Having a child is on of the most carbon intensive actions any given person can make.
The numbers are what they are. Rich people have much greater obligation to reduce their emissions. They benefit most from economic activity and they cause the most emissions per capita.
If there were zero rich people tomorrow we would still have an emissions problem for the climate.
> Having a child is on of the most carbon intensive actions any given person can make.
What about continuing to live at all? That is a decision people make every moment of the day and are not being held accountable for it at all.
If there were zero people tomorrow there would be still be an ongoing problem for the climate from the changes wreaked already.
I indelicately started a contentious topic that didn't have to exist. If I were given a fresh chance, I'd have just said that carbon emissions and the changes they are causing to the planet are a bigger problem than any single economic class or nation.
That might have caused some controversy, too, but is closer to what I meant. Your point is well taken, but maybe if I posted differently the ensuing discussion would have been less acrimonious.
I think you spoke directly to the room's elephant. The topic is contentious because it is less than zero sum. It isn't even that the pie cannot be grown larger, but some people have already eaten most of it and must continue to eat as more people decide they also want pie.
Human activity will have climatic impact. At a specific emission rate per capita, what is the number of humans that can exist? Who decides which humans continue to exist?
You're correct that 24h is not enough time, but wrong to suggest that the world would remain perfectly static instead of changing.
There would be dramatic reforestation, algae growth, etc.
What if the child is a climate activist?
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