Cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near the inner Lagrange point
pnas.org
pnas.org
Our planet has two primary natural methods for lowering atmospheric CO2. One, natural weathering, is not impacted with this strategy.
The other, plantlife, is absolutely affected. If you were to take 10% of sunlight away from Earth, then it logically follows that plants would get 10% less sunlight to convert CO2 into starches and H2O into oxygen. The resource you're trying to constrain, in the name of fighting effects of rising CO2 levels, is the very resource you need in order to fight rising CO2 levels.
Sure, blocking or deflecting some light might lower Earth's temperatures temporarily, but you'd exacerbate CO2 levels semi-permanently.
We, as a community, need to come to the realization that our CO2 problem is not strictly a temperature problem.
Further, there's a substantial difference between "respiration" and absorption of sunlight. Pineapple plants, for instance, only "breathe" at night.
It works so well that this could even be how the current "icehouse earth" conditions got started in the first place. The Azolla bloom of 49 ma dropped atmospheric CO2 levels from 3500ppm to 650ppm in less than 1 my, and CO2 has been in that lower range ever since.
I recall there being experiments for areas are iron limited, so they spread iron sulfate and created algae blooms.
I suppose intuitively, if you scoop up a bucket of ocean water, it is not green. If light were the limiting factor you would expect the water to contain lots of light absorbing algae. This does happen in nutrient rich waters, like the sewage lagoons and creeks I grew up near.
"Atmospheric sulfate aerosols" means spraying sulfuric acid into the air. It's all the joy of this solution with the added bonus of primarily blocking visible light, destroying the ozone layer, and scattering light so that solar panels and plant life don't work as well. Oh yeah, and SPRAYING ACID INTO THE AIR. Intentional acid rain, forever. It's an incredibly foolish, destructive idea that people with zero drive to do basic research support vocally.
The cheapest, easiest and safest way to fight climate change is to stop emitting CO2. It would be so incredibly easy to stop 80% of anthropogenic emissions. These geoengineering plans are worse in every way.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfur_aerosols
I don't think it's as easy as you think it is to cut emissions by that much, and it certainly wouldn't be humane.
Biological sequestration is closer to a real solution, since it is analogous to how the hydrocarbons we're burning were created in the first place. It might be easier to irrigate the Sahara and flood it with Salicornia and salt mangrove than to stop China from burning coal.
No, seriously, it really is that easy. The average cost of a new car in the US is $30k, the model 3 is 35k. Every single passenger road vehicle could be replaced with an electric car for ~$1 trillion. It would cost even less to upgrade the grid to full battery-backed solar power and replace gas heating with electric. Over ten years thats 200 billion annually to eliminate 85% of the co2 released by the US and 50% of the methane.
In terms of threats to the country that barely registers as spending. The iraq war was 10+ trillion dollars, we shipped 12 billion in $100 bills on pallets and lost it. Renewable energy is near price parity to fossil fuels, even if you adopt it stupidly it still isnt that expensive.
You make china stop burning coal by buying them solar panels. Nobody says no to free electricity.
My frustration comes from seeing cutting co2 as somehow harder than seeding chemicals into the atmosphere over the entire planet, or building a tube to the stratosphere, or lanching a sunshield into space. Those solutions are an insane level of difficulty above cutting co2.
Yes. Both need to be addressed.
Saying "the problem is easy besides the political component" is not the same as saying the problem is easy. It's an intensely hard problem but the focus needs to almost entirely be on politics, because the rest is easy in comparison. I'm not drawing attention away from the political difficulty by emphasizing how easy the technical side is, i'm drawing attention to the difficulty of the political side.
Also, you miss the context of GP's comment by pointing the discussing in this way. They were replying to another comment that claimed cutting emissions was a difficult problem for reasons that are more... physical, I suppose you could say. GP was merely pointing out that technical challenges are not the obstacle holding us in our current predicament.
I don't disagree with you in that the real challenge we face is our species' collective insanity, but I hope you see that in asserting this point that we are both in agreement with GP here.
I don't agree with that. I don't see anything in the comment indicating that they saw the problem as anything other than easy to deal with. Have a look at the reply they made to me, where they said "if we would collectively stop chewing our cuds, it would be cheap and simple to do those things". That's still trivialising the social/political component, making it out as if somehow it's just a matter of making a choice as a society. You can't just wish for society to change its attitude, and while it's easy to talk about making such changes, there's the very difficult process of actually making those changes happen.
You might as well say "if we would collectively invent an infinite, completely clean source of energy, it would be cheap and simple to solve the problem." Well, sure. But that's just stating a goal. It doesn't mean it's easy to reach that goal.
The most green car is the one you already have, as long as you do, even if it's a SUV.
If people downsized in large numbers it might even move some buyers away from new large vehicles (if the anticipated resale value of large vehicles dropped).
[1]: http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life-...
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/35172/20150225/how-the-sah...
Which is absolutely true, but no one (basically) is doing it. And the U.S. is moving in the right direction in some metrics (solar, wind) but the wrong in many others (urban planning (https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/8/22/1617782...), nuclear (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603647/meltdown-of-toshib...), and politics (Trump, Cruz, etc.)).
So while I agree with the proposed solution, no one else does, and even then we have to deal with China and India joining the developed world and what that means for CO2 emissions.
Don't forget Africa!
Evidence disagrees. Chinese coal consumption is declining ever so gradually (~1% annually) despite their economy growing as normal. In fact their overall co2 emissions are slowly falling as well. Its an open question whether this is going to continue or if this is just a false peak, but if their commitment to renewable and green energy is a predictor then they may fall below the us emission level relatively soon.
The UK continues to meet its reduction targets set in Kyoto in 1990, and its reductions are so massive that it now uses less CO2 per capita than it did in 1900. The UK also has had one of the highest per capita economic growth rates over that time period in the developed world, higher than the US for example. France really has no need of cuts, because its per capita CO2 emissions were already so small (about 4/5th lower for each individual than in the US or Australia). This blanket statement is incorrect.
Enteric fermentation is still a big problem, but it's a problem for another day- the only reason to solve it now is if it truly is as simple as feeding cows seaweed. That seems highly suspect but I have yet to see anyone accuse it of failing the sniff test.
We know how to build solar, wind and nuclear plants, do that and just shut down coal power plants. That is like half. Then keep working to get old inefficient cars off the roads. Tax SUVs and give tax breaks to electric buyers.
None of these things are politically easy, but technologically require nothing new and might leave us with a stronger more economy because of the amount of new players and innovations in the fields affected.
But the current political discourse is functionally stalled on the issue because people don't care until it unambiguously affects them. That works great for many smaller issues but for this by the time it affects the average voter we are fucked.
Electrical emissions are more like 30% according to this[1]. Transportation is another 27%, electrifying half of that would get us close to like half.
We're a long way from any of that, but maybe it's technically feasible with what we have now.
1. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Long distance semi tractors drive 500-800 miles a day. That doesnt require a huge battery.
You're joking right? Do you realize how much weight they tow compared to the weight of a Tesla? On top of that most of the Tesla weight is the battery itself.
Battery powered semis for long haul is absolutely not a solution.
>On top of that most of the Tesla weight is the battery itself.
That is very, very wrong. According to wikipedia the Model S' battery weighs 540 kg, while the car weighs 2,200 kg.
Never mind that diesel engines, used in most heavy machinery, is not as picky about its fuel as a gasoline engine is. As long as it goes bang under pressure, a diesel engine can potentially run on it. what is not needed is to electrify anything, but that CO2 in vs CO2 out sums to zero (or a lot damn closer to it than it currently does).
There will be soon enough. And even if there was no way to match liquid hydrocarbon fuels for some applications then we just need to make those fuels from renewable sources.
Interesting historial fact: the reason the USA was able to engage the Japanese relatively quick after Pearl Harbor is because the shit bunker fuel ships use doesn't burn easily at all so the ship fuel reserves were left intact.
You're being hysterical about acid--- using a scary sounding word, even though it isn't. (You're not far off from the people who think that any chemical they don't understand must be bad, even though they never took an organic chem. class!) Volcanoes naturally put sulfur in the air, so what we'd be doing wouldn't all that different.
Honestly I think a big change that human industry will have to make over the next century is becoming comfortable with intermittent peak power. Some stuff will happen when it is sunny, or windy, and not otherwise. It's not crazy to say "maybe we should only smelt during peak solar hours", and probably not even crazy to say "maybe our bulk freight should only be moving during peak solar hours".
Once you get rid of the need to do energy intensive stuff at night, the power storage problems become a lot easier.
One example i ran into recently were concrete blocks that would be heated during periods of excess production, and then the heat converted back into electricity during slumps.
Never mind that smarter, nation wide, grids can allow electricity to flow in either direction depending on where the production and need is.
But every transformation you put your energy through between harvesting it and harnessing it has a cost, whether you are converting your electricity between DC and AC willy-nilly, storing it as chemical energy, or converting it to mechanical motion and storing it as gravitational potential. If you have a list industrial application that is not time sensitive, and is running at night from an 80% efficient storage mechanism (effectively, even if off the grid), you can boost your efficiency by 25% by running when it is sunny! Who wouldn't do that?
Larger grids are also more vulnerable grids. We should learn from the lessons provided by, e.g. the 2003 blackout in the northeastern U.S. We don't need bigger, more vulnerable, more tempting targets for the bad guys. We need more compartmentalization to limit potential damage and make systems easier to understand and repair.
It's all data-driven rather than opinion and while it paints a dark future, there is strong agreement in the scientific community that we have not yet triggered unavoidable positive feedback on a catastrophic scale. Even if we stopped emissions dead right now the future wouldn't be roses and perfume but it's not a nightmare. For the near and medium term the most important factor is still the amount of CO2 we emit, which far outweighs the current feedback loops and the ones that are likely to activate soon.
For instance siberian/canadian permafrost, clathrates and arctic albedo have all been triggered to some extent, but the releases have been outpaced by anthropogenic emissions. This will change, first with arctic sea ice, but at this point we are reasonably certain they won't pick up exponentially until we expect them to.
As far as I am aware, most (all?) discoveries were made from surface vessels, often seeing a foaming sea, foaming methane. It's real bad.
Please provide some evidence for this massive claim.
NB that this claim is in response to a proposed solution of building a gun to shoot a sun shield into space. The difficulty is relative. One is incredibly easy compared to the other.
While I agree with your general sentiment in this thread, simple electrification isn't enough; we also have to roll out major renewable energy generation and storage (which is still far wiser than building a gun to shoot a sun shield into space).
Please do more research before stooping down to sensationalism and fear-mongering.
Nonsense. The cooling is less effective at higher altitudes, and all the sulfate currently in the atmosphere provides a forced cooling of .4 W/m^2 vs the greenhouse gas warming of 2.4 W/m^2. The cooling relies on atmospheric water which decreases the higher you go.
We would need to dump way, way more sulfates/sulfites into the air than we do currently.
This hurts to read.
Blocking sunlight "might" not lower temperatures. It is absolutely certain. It's a very basic fact that sunlight is what heats our planet.
You can read this sentence as:
"Sure, you might block or deflect some light and that will lower Earth's temperatures..."
Moreover, as multiple posts in this thread point out, sunlight is not the limiting factor in plant growth.
No one is talking about 10%. Article mentions 1.8%.
Astute observation, but the problem is easily fixable. Plants use particular wavelengths of light (IIRC mostly from the visual spectrum) for photosynthesis. If the proposed spacecrafts were to block mostly UV and infrared, letting most of visible spectrum through, it'd do plants no harm at all.
The relevant technology is already available and widely used. For example typical car's windshield consists of two or more layers of special UV/infrared absorbing foil sandwiched between glass panes for structural support.
In case of a spacecraft, all you'd have to do is spin the fuselage at low RPM to keep the foil extended.
EDIT: my only contention with any sun-blocking spacecrafts is that they'd have to be carefully engineered to prevent use as a weapon for attacking ground & orbital targets with focused beams of light.
I'd also argue that energy use (at the moment) is pretty linked to how much CO2 you emit.
A lot of the biggest emitters live in democracies.
So, how do you get the majority of the population to vote in politicians who are going to make their lives less comfortable (by taxing / controlling / lessening the amount of CO2 they use)?
Frankly I reckon we, as a civilization, are going to dither and procrastinate up until the point it's far far far too late to do anything meaningful, and then people will try jump on the geoengineering to hack things into place. There was a nice piece in the book "This changes everything" where they were talking about geoengineering. I'll paraphrase, but basically someone said "we'll just alter things in this way", and someone else said "that'll mean droughts in my country". Fun times ahead.
If you haven't read it yet, I recommend "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air" [0] to get an idea of just how much less energy we need to use if we want to get by with just renewables. I really hope we can get there!
The "few trillion dollars" part is a problem. Not because it represents a particularly high cost scheme for neutralizing the warming part of AGW, but because it's so all-or-nothing. If you invest "only" $10 billion in this scheme the marginal abatement effects are going to be pretty close to zero, because so much of the cost is front-loaded into enabling technologies that will eventually deliver direct benefits.
I refer the interested reader to the classic The Political Economy of Very Large Space Projects:
http://www.jetpress.org/volume4/space.htm
With minor adjustments, it could be generalized as The Political Economy of Very Large Projects.
I am not particularly convinced that this requires a few trillion dollars. Is there some hard evidence that sunshades are impossible to deploy with less than $10 billion?
http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/space/Self-deployed%20extrem...
In this case, though, it seems relatively trivial - it seems like it's more work to keep them in place then to have them scatter to the (solar?) winds. Once they've moved out of the Lagrange point, then they become a non-issue. All we've lost is the money to put them there and the materials. Compared to some of the other ideas I've heard, this appears to be much safer.
Edit: Second is a concept aimed at reducing transportation cost to $50/kg by using electromagnetic acceleration to escape Earth's gravity, followed by ion propulsion. The paper says that if there are rockets involved, they will be used outside of the atmosphere.
Where?
edit: located below (italics added) thanks. The environmental costs of launch are considered. I can't see the environmental impact of manufacture considered explicitly, though.
Abstract:
If it were to become apparent that dangerous changes in global climate were inevitable, despite greenhouse gas controls, active methods to cool the Earth on an emergency basis might be desirable. The concept considered here is to block 1.8% of the solar flux with a space sunshade orbited near the inner Lagrange point (L1), in-line between the Earth and sun. Following the work of J. Early [Early, JT (1989) J Br Interplanet Soc 42:567–569], transparent material would be used to deflect the sunlight, rather than to absorb it, to minimize the shift in balance out from L1 caused by radiation pressure. Three advances aimed at practical implementation are presented. First is an optical design for a very thin refractive screen with low reflectivity, leading to a total sunshade mass of ≈20 million tons. Second is a concept aimed at reducing transportation cost to $50/kg by using electromagnetic acceleration to escape Earth's gravity, followed by ion propulsion. Third is an implementation of the sunshade as a cloud of many spacecraft, autonomously stabilized by modulating solar radiation pressure. These meter-sized “flyers” would be assembled completely before launch, avoiding any need for construction or unfolding in space. They would weigh a gram each, be launched in stacks of 800,000, and remain for a projected lifetime of 50 years within a 100,000-km-long cloud. The concept builds on existing technologies. It seems feasible that it could be developed and deployed in ≈25 years at a cost of a few trillion dollars, <0.5% of world gross domestic product (GDP) over that time.
> The CO2 added to the atmosphere from burning 2 billion tons of rocket fuel cannot be negligible.
The quote from the abstract that addresses it:
> Second is a concept aimed at reducing transportation cost to $50/kg by using electromagnetic acceleration to escape Earth's gravity, followed by ion propulsion.
More detail later in the paper:
> Because of its enormous area and the mass required, shading from space has in the past been regarded as requiring manufacture in space from lunar or asteroid material and, thus, as rather futuristic. Here we explore quantitatively an approach aimed at a relatively near-term solution in which the sunshade would be manufactured completely and launched from Earth, and it would take the form of many small autonomous spacecraft (“flyers”).
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/climate/carbon-in-atmo...
As for 2 billion tons of rocket fuel, it's not trivial but it's something less than 5% of one year's current CO2 emissions, and we're talking about spreading it out over a couple decades.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_(rocket_engine_family)
I have a feeling that there are a bunch of these "plan B" solutions to our global climate change problem. It's that they are mostly just giving us more time before we have to actually deal with the problem. If the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation ever comes to a halt then we are really screwed, so if there's anything which could prevent that from happening it might be worth the risk.
Knowing about the eventual heat-death of the universe doesn't make the immediate prospect of my family and I dying in a water riot any more palatable.
I don't watch a lot of movies, and I recall even fewer, but there is an appropriate line in The Matrix about how a human can be smart but humans are pretty dumb as a whole. It seems to be remarkably true.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."
AFAIK the collapse has already begun and is happening right now.
However, note the end of the wiki, where they state that the oxygenated state of the ocean currently is likely not the 'default' state of things if extrapolated beyond human history. It is certanly a concern. However there are ways to stimulate blooms, which may help serve to sequester carbon, and add oxygen in one fell swoop. Perhaps it is time to investigate the feasibility of such an action.
<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
<Message>Request has expired</Message>
If the USA, Russia or any other nuclear power does it there won't be a war. Nuclear is the key word here, Those wars are much more costly than any amount climate change.
Maybe we should focus on ocean fertilization with iron as a way of increasing fish yields. Who can begrudge some poor fishermen trying to bring home more fish? It's not their fault if it also sequesters CO2.
Solar radiation management also offers possibilities though. We already spew lots of soot and other pollutants into the air without anyone rolling out missiles. We just need to figure out industries with the right kind of pollution and we're good.
How about this: Are people allowed to act in a way that will save themselves, even if it sames everyone else on the planet, and has some side effects? I think the answer is an emphatic yes!
Who decides which ways will save and are therefore allowed?
If I pull off some massive project like this what is another person/business/country going to do about?
If someone "solves" climate for some value of solved are you going to invade them and start a war over your economy being saved?
Am I understanding you correctly?
When it comes to saving countless lives, the economy and in the most extreme of possible outcomes all civilization... YES.
Your attitude is dangerous, because you can use it to justify anything (e.g. you think you're about saving lives). It is evil, because it places you above everyone else and leads to death (e.g. you think you're saving civilization, which requires destroying the bad parts of it).
You either have not learned from history, or have learned the wrong lessons from it and are following in the footsteps of millennia of anti-heroes.
Something on this scale would be pretty much impossible to pull off if all the G-8 countries put you/your company on an embargo list for high tech materials.
It helps to be claiming to be acting in humanity's best interest instead of obviously being a despot. Think about the political aftermath of interfering with someone claiming that they are trying to save the world and having a reasonable argument that is the case.
Someone attempting this would likely be in a major country and would likely have the approval of most of the countries. If the USA attempted no amount of embargos could stop them, the same with Russia and maybe a few other countries.
It is even possible that Germany, France, Israel or South Africa could pull it off with a little politics and clandestine dealings. They could delay politically and pester larger nations and demand UN actions while continuing development.
If the US and Russia were dead set on stopping they could with a few bombing runs from aircraft carriers. I don't think that is likely because neither of these countries is crazy and would love to be saved at no cost while having a political bogeyman they can use in the future.
EDIT - Have an upvote for a thoughtful and reasonable reply though.
This view is also a specist one, what about all the other lifeforms on the planet that we could not have life favorable condition on earth ? insects, plants, ocean life, corals, etc.
Switch from compete to cooperate mindset and there would be a lot less lifeforms rights violations. Also instead of having the USA lifestyle as a model we try try to reach and have for ourselves, we should aim for the India lifestyle so we could all live on earth without destroying the planet.
(Feel free to edit your comment to add detail instead of replying; keeps the thread shorter that way.)
A tidally-locked body would have nearly 50% of its area "cold," in other words it is not radiating any heat from the primary heat source out into space. Only heat reaching the cold side from atmospheric convection or internal conduction would be able to reach space. In Mercury's case, the lack of significant atmosphere reduces the flow of heat from the warm side to the cold side.
A spheroid with any given amount of surface area exposed to equal heat / cold has the highest chance of preserving equilibrium. If that logic is true, correcting Earth's axis tilt should slightly increase the amount of energy radiated away. That would also produce more consistent temperatures between the equators and poles (raising sea levels by reducing the amount of frozen water proportionally). Needless to say that would have nearly incalculable side effects.
A hotter object loses heat faster than a cooler object.
It's actually a fourth power relationship to temperature. See Stefan-Boltzmann Law for the details.
However, the loss of ice does accelerate the warming because less light is reflected from the earth.
Edit: Here is a decent article on a study of some cognitive effects of CO2 levels (http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2012/10/17/elevated-indoor-carbon-...). Actual study paper (https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/1104789/)
450 ppm is often held up as a catastrophic point of no return. I don't know if that's alarmist. Let's say it is! Maybe we'd have to get all the way to 600 ppm before it was genuinely a catastrophe. But I'm pretty confident that if we reach 700 ppm, we're fucked.
Switching to biofuel or solar or wind at the same massive consumption rate will not fix the issue.
No they're not, at least coal isn't because it was formed from trees and other heavy cellulose based plant matter that wasn't broken down by microbes millions of years ago, but would be broken down today. Oil and Methane may be "renewable" but not in a timeline worth considering.
Switching to other methods of generation would fix the problem of climate change caused by the release of CO2. Other issues are definitely important, but not on the same level as unchecked global warming.
In other words, how much does believing we will inevitably engineer our way out of the problem keep us from making the hard choices that may be necessary.
Exactly what kind of solution are all the things that are recommended to do to lower global CO2?
The only difference is the current recommendations are inefficient and take a long time.
Enviros: You can enjoy longer summers and shorter winters, or you can be poor.
Sane people: Longer summers and shorter winters sounds pretty good to me.
this would be simpler for sure but it would require very difficult things to attain such as having people relinquish their air conditioning, stopping capitalism and consumerism, changing the global industrial process, diminishing our energy consumption, replacing the current political systems with democratic ones, returning to ways of producing food that do not cause soil infertility.
And obviously this whole discussion about technological solutions is due to the fact that all those things you list seem to be impossible or happening too slowly.
I doubt artificial ice is the easiest solution, but e.g artificial clouds could be perhaps.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
Sort of related, I happen to like the looks with said turbines. There are still untainted vistas.
My understanding is that closer to the equator is better, with some caveats.
For this project, I don't think it matters. They even said they will orient the launcher vertically.
The reason you normally want to be closer to the equator is that you get some sideways velocity from the rotating earth, and that is faster nearer the equator. This is important for low earth orbits because the sideways velocity is very high.
However, in this case they don't really care much about sideways velocity. They want to reach escape velocity. As you go higher, the sideways velocity needed to stay in orbit gets smaller, until finally it's practically zero. So, any gain they would get from being near the equator wouldn't be needed.
I think.
Much more optimistic numbers than I had previously guessed.
It's all space-nerd talk for the moment, but none of the technology needed to achieve these goals is very far from reach today.
It opens up the avenue for many more warming and CO2 mitigation techniques that are a reality today (e.g. desalination on a global scale and massive reforestation of Africa and the Amazon)
As well as the ability to stop burning fossil fuels much quicker than transitioning to solar/wind.
The space based sunglasses would shield the entire earth.
I think it would be more difficult to get millions of square kilometers of solar panels evenly distributed.
Regarding deflecting light, for a long time white roofs have been pushed as a reflection mechanism[1] to deflect and lower energy costs thus reducing emissions. Though white roofs may actually increase warning in the way it reflects light onto other particles and doesn't help block it from coming into the atmosphere. Solar roofs capture it better and may be a better emissions lowering tool.
Seems like a better idea to do it from space, unless of course it goes too far and is difficult to control.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/oct/27/white-ro...
Deflecting is still better than absorbing on the roof top, since roof top means 100% warmth absorption and deflection always less than 100%, probably only a fraction of that.
The atmosphere is more transparent to sunlight than to IR, thanks to greenhouse gases.
That's why absorbent roofs heat the Earth more than reflective roofs.
This is why we need a space elevator! Costs would be reduced from $40k / kg to ~$400/kg.
I spoke to an engineer at a space-focused company about space elevators. He, unfortunately, burst my bubble. While the elevator itself might be feasible, he thinks that countries would never let an asteroid large enough to act as a counterweight, with thrusters large enough to move it attached, enter Earth's orbit. The potential of it being used as a catastrophic weapon is just too dangerous.
The elevator would need to avoid or divert space junk.
And we haven't actually practiced asteroid capture, much less orbit keeping on a scale that large.
I'm not sure of the dimensions of the inner Lagrange point-- I agree that the shadow would be centered on astronomical noon, but I think it would be so blurry, and have such a wide blur radius, as to be unnoticeable except as a change in absolute light.
>'The Sun Blocker was a device developed by Charles Montgomery Burns. As the name suggests, it was created to literally blot out the sun outside, in order to ensure Mr. Burns' electricity was sold in a monopoly, covering Springfield in perpetual darkness otherwise.
The machine was extremely infamous alongside the theft of Springfield Elementary School's oil well for riling the Springfieldans' hatred of Mr. Burns, enough to want to murder him, especially Smithers, who had earlier been fired by Mr. Burns when the former protested against the plot and cited it was too heinous of a plan for even him to nominally support.
[...]
According to Mr. Burns, the Sun Blocker was conceived due to Mankind overall having an innate desire to destroy the sun, and that, due to the infeasibility of actually doing such an act, he settled for "the next best option."'
In fact, it may be even less feasible. Not to sound too much like a skeptic, but my bet is on terrestrial methods of mitigation, solar/wind/tidal, reforestation and, hopefully one day, fusion.
Most people underestimate by several orders of magnitude how hard it is to launch something into space correctly.
Citation needed I know but it has stuck with me
Oh FFS. If we have a few $trillion to devote to global warming, we can enormously reduce it using known technologies.
There is an important clue in this spectacular self-own to the emotional allegiances of the people who get excited about ideas such as this one.
For perspective, Gerard K. O'Neil gave a ballpark estimate of $31B (correction: $31B in 1972 dollars, $172B in 2013 dollars) for a v1 O'Neil cylinder made of steel. http://www.nss.org/settlement/physicstoday.htm
A couple of degree increase over the next hundred years (which is their worst case estimate based on the most advanced models, even though no model has been able to predict anything, only fit historical data) will change nothing. Sea levels will probably rise by a few feet and people living in their beach houses will have to find another vacation spot in 20 years after they notice that the sea has been coming closer to their house since the last decade.
Ice age is just as unpredictable (except they don't even have a make-believe explanation for it) and could start any time giving us very little time to prepare. If we want humans to suffer less because of it, the least we should do is try to give over a billion people who have no access to electricity some way to make sure that they will be able to heat their houses if it's cold, like most of the developed world can... in addition, meanwhile, they can enjoy clean drinking water, washing machines, industries etc.
This is not the omly effect, particularly countries in the middle east will dry out, leading rural inhabitants to gravitate towards in excess of their capacities, leading to destabilised countries.
This has already happened with Syria and millions if refugees, now wait for the remaining countries to follow with hundreds of millions of refugees in the next 100 years.
Naturally, even heavier hurricanes, more devastating floods will happen.
Keep in mind, a rise of only 6 degress fahrenheit, means a rise of 20 degrees fahrenheit in some areas and less in others. This is catastrophic for the areas that are among the ones with bad luck and will induce mass migration/fleeing.
A 2 degree rise is considered to be the absolute limit without likely catastrophic consequences. It is certainly not the worst case.
Sea levels could certainly rise by more than you claim, but sea level rise is far from the only problem. See here for instance: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-...
If you're being honest about your introduction, that you don't understand why people are concerned about climate change, then that's a start. If you're instead trying to convince people of your point of view, please provide evidence for your assertions.
That is useless. People follow it like a religion, I am merely trying to have a conversation to few reasonable ones so I can understand their point of view if they have anything interesting to say apart from repeating the same tired tropes.
>You don't need a particularly complex model to show that if more energy is absorbed by the earth than is radiated, which is the case due to greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, the temperature will rise until it returns to a steady state at a higher temperature.
Do you have reference to a graph that shows the amount of CO2 in the air vs how much heat is absorbed? Has this been isolated? Can't be that difficult to create a green house and study the relation by varying CO2 concentration. Could it be that the temperature rise is an independent phenomena which is the cause for CO2 rise, not the effect of it? None of the political arguments seem to be questioned ever and no scientific studies seem to come out of it. Given that most research findings are false (http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...), there ought to be some research findings that show evidence against climate hysteria, even if they are wrong, but those don't seem to surface. It is as if any questioning of political propaganda is systematically silenced (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GujLcfdovE8).
This paper from back in 2001 demonstrates that the changes in spectra radiated from earth as detected by spacecraft match expectations given the effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.... It also links to a number of papers around the supporting science.
Those are just the first two good examples I found. There are plenty more. I don't agree with your argument (as I understand it) that most research is wrong, and therefore the fact that there's no research supporting your position somehow itself supports it. Rather, while of course not all scientific research is done well, and scientific understanding is always evolving, that does not mean that it is impossible for anything to be known. The great deal of evidence supporting human-caused climate change, and the lack of robust evidence of the contrary, should reasonably lead one to the conclusion that it is a real phenomenon.
Hmm... the "established facts" for thousands of years in textbooks and everywhere was that the earth is flat. I guess I should believe in that too. Anyways, I will link you to an article which argues that CO2 acts as a coolant: http://www.biocab.org/Overlapping_Absorption_Bands.pdf
So, Given that plants grow better at higher CO2 concentrations (as experienced by indoor growers https://university.upstartfarmers.com/blog/why-and-how-to-su...), it seems like it is good to try increase CO2 concentrations higher and see if we can achieve the desired cooling effect while we are at it. Meanwhile, we will also be solving world hunger, preventing deaths due to unclean water, freeing up time used by people of poorer countries in farming, processing food, washing etc. using industrial machines and letting them enjoy the same standard of living as the western countries... all of this can be done by letting them use fossil fuels... taking the taxes and international restrictions away from the industry.
> http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/sci....
I read the article and it seems to be posted on a site for "Union of Concerned Scientists", which it seems is an advocacy group for what they think is "scientific". I think that is a very closed minded way to view science but let's examine their claims:
>CO2 has caused most of the warming and its influence is expected to continue
To back this up, they link this IPCC page: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/ and I finally found the report after some time: https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Cha..., they could have linked to the report directly, but OK.
Anyways, in the report, they compare various chemicals and how much heat they trap. What they don't compare is how much heat 280 ppm of CO2 captures vs how much 1500 would capture. My guess is not much because a 40% rise in CO2 changed the average temperature by a couple of degrees in the last few hundred years. So, it seems like the relation is either very weak or that there is no relation at all. It can't be that hard to create two greenhouses next to each other, fill them with different levels of CO2 and note the difference and it is very surprising that nobody has done it... but given how modern science works, what is much more likely is that the experiment didn't come in their favor and hence it was never published.
>that most research is wrong
I am not the one claiming that. There have been multiple studies in the fast few years which have shown that most modern scientific publications don't hold up on peer review... and most scientists don't spend their time on peer review. It seems that it is not in their interest to review a study that someone else published. Making new and extraordinary claims with doctored data seems to get all the attention from journalists (and hence more funding), so that is all everyone seems to be interested in doing.
>The great deal of evidence supporting human-caused climate change, and the lack of robust evidence of the contrary, should reasonably lead one to the conclusion that it is a real phenomenon.
100% of Nazi scientists believed that Jews were an inferior race. Maybe scientists are biased by politics of the countries they work in, among other things? Can you name one other "scientific fact" that has not been politicized but still "settled"? Let me help you: it doesn't exist. Science doesn't "settle". It's always open to enquiry and new evidence can always change it.
May I direct you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law which suggests that at this point you have likely lost this thread. Don't worry, you can come back in a few weeks and will likely be able to put up more FUD about how the climate isn't changing and there's "no way to tell" whether putting more CO2 in the atmosphere will trap more infrared sunlight.
Nevermind that this property of CO2 is an established fact, and we have Venus as an example of what a runaway greenhouse effect looks like in real life. Also ignore the advice of the 95% of scientists who have studied this for years.
> the "established facts" for thousands of years in textbooks and everywhere was that the earth is flat
Most people (including scientists/philosophers) didn't believe that the Earth was flat. The Greeks used the theory that the Earth was spherical to determine the circumference of the Earth thousands of years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes). And sailors recognized that the Earth had to be spherical from early observations with spyglasses as well. The controversy was between religious leaders who wanted to continue to push the official "Geocentric" model (that is that the round Earth is the center of the universe) in spite of evidence to the contrary.
Of course, the fact that the Earth is round didn't affect most people's daily lives at the time the way climate change will today, which is why they didn't care much either way. A luxury we do not have.
Taking into account that since the start it has been called climate change, the rest of your post can be dismissed as the same wrong claims
ok... even if you build it 5km in the sky, a 1km long launch rail would still apply 6,000 Gs of acceleration. Good luck designing a spacecraft that can survive that.
Tether from the lunar surface, through the Lagrange point.
In the plan described here, the craft would be actively controlled to adjust how much light they're diverting and at what angle in order to stay balanced at the Lagrange.
If the steering system is turned off all the reflectors would harmlessly blow away.
lifeisstillgood 16 hours ago
I remember a quote from a US geo-engineer to the effect of "half of my job is not to come up with geo-engineering solutions that will be used, but to show people that plan B is soooo extreme that they start taking plan A much more seriously"
Citation needed I know but it has stuck with me