Also, how do you imagine that Elon Musk is somehow going to elongate our usage of fossil fuels? Elon Musk has done more for EVs than any single person in human history, and you claim he's going to do something which will extend fossil fuel use?
Your post just doesn't add up, it sounds like you want further warming to occur?
It’s not that climate change isn’t real, or even a question of whether human activity is the root cause. But faced with a solution which doesn’t require massive societal change of a particular sort, the solution is rejected out of hand.
Just because it doesn’t force a specific set of political changes which up until now have been punctuated by the threat of nothing less than Armageddon,... we cannot actually reject a cheap solution that takes Armageddon off the table, just because it may make the other goals harder to accomplish.
It is morally unacceptable to let the Earth burn rather than be left to solve issues of pollution and clean energy independent of the almost unfathomable toll of a 3°C future. That to me is frankly an untenable position when you contemplate the actual number of lives in the balance.
But you're right that The Climate Change Movement™ dismisses these things out of hand. This is because it is only incidentally about combating climate change. It is primarily about giving more power to approved politicians and bureaucracies. This is also why we have made no almost progress on the underlying issues. We were never meant to.
We should be skeptical of any ways to address climate change that rely on technology and require very little behavior change.
Burning fossil fuels does more than just warm the planet, so trying to stop the planet from warming through some far out means wouldn’t address these other huge issues. Also, the easiest path to haunting climate change is to literally stop doing the damaging things.
Exxon, a big oil corporation, had accurate predictive models of climate change, agreeing with scientific consensus, already in 1982 and confirmed "it will cause dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050". https://twitter.com/i/status/1187719206562910209
Shortly after Exxon began to deny global warming and started "greenwashing" marketing campaigns, which today show up directly in the news articles on global warming, e.g., in The New York Times: https://twitter.com/status/1187435336185581570
1. The single cheapest and quickest way to make a difference is to - en-masse - moderate our behaviours. But guess what? People are so wedded to their monster-truck-driving, plastic-consumable-disposing, distance-product-shipping, holiday-air-travelling lifestyles that they won’t (on the whole) bear even the slightest personal “burden”. The relatively moderate costs associated with behaviour-modifying policies (eg a carbon price), are vehemently and successfully opposed (or neutered) by governments all over the world. And the reason they are free to do so is because there’s no political cost to doing so. Given all that, why on earth would anyone think it’s going to be politically acceptable to fund even costlier and potentially fraught geo-engineering responses?
2. Shades will do nothing at all for the ongoing acidification of the oceans and the consequent marine species destruction.
The cheapest and only long-term sustainable solution is to massively reduce the global population. Say we manage to massively transform society and half the average person’s ecological footprint. All that effort will be for nothing if we’re doubling our population in a couple of decades anyway. Any effort to modify our behavior will be pointless if we keep outbreeding the gains we make. By contrast, if we simply reduce the birthrate by a factor 10-100 we can drastically reduce our impact on our environment without any other changes.
Any other measure is just a stop-gap until we acknowledge the inconvenient truth: humanity is a plague. We’re breeding like cockroaches and if we don’t stop it we are doomed, regardless of any other measures taken.
I am very much a technology optimist. I believe that technology is the route to providing sustainable solutions across the board in energy, transportation, agriculture, and materials. Even more, I believe that the only solution is for technology advances to make the sustainable solution to be the preferred solution. When going green is also cheaper, faster, better, then everyone goes green by default.
The role of government here is to align incentives and subsidize market-driven R&D efforts which result in technologically superior products that also happen to be sustainable which can win in a competitive marketplace on their own merits. The perfect example of this is EVs. EVs will totally supplant new ICE vehicle sales in the next couple decades because they will ultimately be a better vehicle in every possible metric.
I think we are seeing the same effects in terms of renewable energy that can now compete on cost even without subsidies, and we are in the beginning stages of where we need to go with agriculture (I'm sure actually much progress has been made, but I'm less familiar with that tech).
From a materials science perspective, we need better alternatives for clothing fibers, and better alternatives for plastics in our products and packaging. Cotton is biodegradable but takes far too much water to produce -- possibly something that further genetic modifications to cotton could reduce. Plastic blends in textiles are great for performance, but end up as microplastic in our waterways and oceans. The alternative isn't that everyone is going to switch to hemp. The alternative must be a better material developed that provides superior performance, longevity, texture, carbon footprint, and ultimately clean disposal or recyclability. Government's role is to align incentives for this R&D to occur by taxing externalities or subsidizing new products that present lower externalities.
As to the queston of controlling the effects of increased CO2, one of which is global warming, and another of which is ocean acidification, I think we will come to a point where we need ways to effectively reduce atmospheric CO2 independently of efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, and technology will ultimately afford us that.
I think it's an open question whether the timescale over which atmospheric CO2 may ever be brought back below, e.g. 300ppm, will require engineering a more direct solution to both ocean acidification, and global warming. Even if tomorrow anthropogenic CO2 emissions dropped to zero, how long would that even take? Solar shields and atmospheric CO2 extraction are technologies that warrant future research and discussion.
The real obstacle is the confusion in the public opinion spurred by big oil marketing and lobbying. It's really hard to find quality information online, but it exists since many years and it's pushed down on purpose by interest groups. Here is an example:
Exxon, a big oil corporation, had accurate predictive models of climate change, agreeing with scientific consensus, already in 1982 and confirmed "it will cause dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050". https://twitter.com/i/status/1187719206562910209
Shortly after Exxon began to deny global warming and started "greenwashing" marketing campaigns, which today show up directly in the news articles on global warming, e.g., in The New York Times: https://twitter.com/status/1187435336185581570
We already know about them, for the most part. They're known-knowns or known-unknowns.
A sunshade is a giant cloud of unknown-unknowns, plus whatever we think we might anticipate.
Now that I've said that explicitly... how reasonable of an assumption does that sound?
I think we should prepare to have this tech ready for use in case things get significantly worse in the next few decades. In the meantime, there are less risky geoengineering approaches also worth investigating and pushing up the TRL ladder.
do you really think we should be repeating the exact same approach? Because to me it sounds insane.
Our thoughtless embrace of technology has caused much of our current problems - thoughtless embrace of technology will not magically solve them.
It's not our thoughtless embrace of technology that caused much of our problems - our problems were and are caused by people. In particular, by coordination problems. By our inability to do things together for long-term benefits. Our cherished democracy and free market only exacerbate this problem. So it's a good idea, IMO, to have a backup plan that doesn't require everyone to change their life styles - otherwise, in 50 years we may be wishing we had some prototyping done instead of it just being a theoretical idea.
How?
Collecting and disposing of 16 trillion objects is no small feat, before you consider fuel and energy to get there and back (or there and away).
Now L1 is an unstable point, so eventually the shades will drift out of position, but I imagine that will take a long time.
On one axis: beneficial vs. negative consequences.
On the other: immediate vs. eventual apparentness.
We tend to adopt technologies with immediately apparent and beneficial consequences.
This creates two sets of failures:
- Not adopting technologies with eventually-apparent beneficial consequences.
- Failing to reject technologies with eventually-apparent negative net consequences.
- Failing to adopt technlogies with non-apparent net benefits.
(We also do correctly reject technologies with immediately apparent harmful consequences.)
This is confounded by other factors. Technologies aren't single effects but sets (matrices) of effects, and can interact with other technologies.
There's a huge problem in that the non-apparent results, positive or negative, take time to become apparent. For various psychological, sociological, economic, and political reasons, there's also a frequent bias to promoting benefits over harms, at least by parties with an interest in the technology. (Those suspecting they may be disadvantaged will employ the opposite bias.)
When you're looking at planetary-scale actions and behaviours in which there's no ability to opt out (we're either all in or all out), then you've got a problem of assuming a major risk, and there being potential major negative unforseen consequences.
It's the unintended consequences of historical emissions which are the result of precisely that dynamic -- it was not widely seen when widespread use of coal, oil, and gas began, in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, that these could have a relatively immediate (decades-to-centuries) impact on the state of the environment on Earth. Even when proposed mechanisms and cautions were sounded, resistance to those warnings grew -- Cassandra's Curse.
Fixing one problem by going whole-hog in on a new technology, without having the time or opportunity to consider what might happen as a result ... strikes many people as a trifle rash.
It had been pointed out that the main reason for warming, advanced level of CO2, leads to bigger agricultural growth, so here we have to opposite trends.
We'd prefer of course to have the shield controllable, and shadow only a small (like, 10%) fraction of solar energy. More, the shield likely won't be ready all at once, so we can have early indication for how it works being partially deployed.
Further, have you thought about how we get off fossil for steel, concrete, plastics, hell even natural gas power plants? Climate change is the most important issue right now and even so, we are undeniably a fossil society. We need everything we can muster, and sunshade should be part of our tool kit to help the transition.
Lots of people are thinking about these questions! Still early research phase, but the chemistry works out.
Steel -https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611961/this-mit-spinout-c...
Concrete - http://news.mit.edu/2019/carbon-dioxide-emissions-free-cemen...
Plastics - no carbon emitted as long as you don't burn your plastics. Could also capture emissions from a plastic incinerator if you really want to burn trash
Natural gas power plants - replace with solar/wind + batteries?
Also, I suspect we'd be better off right now if we'd been land-filling plastic, instead of shipping it overseas to be burned, shredded, littered, dumped, or even discharged at sea. Even official estimates claim minimal percentages are actually being recycled, before accounting for fraud.
We might have significant reduced levels of micro-plastic in the ocean, and a greater amount of carbon sequestered, instead of the high cost and seemingly minimal benefit we've seen "recycling" plastic.
I’m not saying stop drilling fossil fuels, because we need it for almost every part of our society. I’m saying we should be pushing harder down the path of not using fossil fuels as an energy source. If suddenly it becomes way more economical to burn fossil fuels then we’ll stop pursuing any alternatives. That’s just how it works. I wish it wasn’t.
Get down off your high horse and pay attention.
The car is not driverless. You are just backseat.
The greatest risk you run with your current attitude is that you contribute to the "it's a crisis but I have higher priorities" thinking. This is what bends the horseshoe, ideology. If we weren't in a crisis, I'd be more sympathetic.
Not saying it's impossible or impractical, but the political consequences are non-trivial ... imagine being able to shave 10% off a nation's photovoltaic power capacity if they don't knuckle under to trade demands, or to mess with their storm frequency/weather patterns. It's a huge can of worms.
There are other suggestions for placing sunshades in MEO. Each shade there is ~60% less effective than it would be in L1 (because of the time it would spend not shadowing any part of earth), but it is much closer, so putting them up there would be easier and cheaper. Those could in theory be regional.
However, it's been pointed out that sunshades would also necessarily be pretty damned good solar sails, so they might well make their own way to L1.
Is that strictly due to time when it's casting a shadow, or does that take into account the geometry of the shadow cast and the flux density of the sunlight at each point (watts/m2)?
That'd be an interesting calculation to see.
If station keeping is needed, I would think you would want to make the shades as big as possible.
Probably this will be governed by the UN.
There could be some interesting implications if you do have active control -- like "should we cool this area to move this huricane".
"Yeah, but we can't make it turn back over water, but instead of it hitting country A, it could hit country B".
While shutting down 90% of the agriculture output and completely messing with local climate.
Tesla means a gigafactory’s worth of battery production, and the solar panels charge the batteries, but what are the rockets for? As discussed - a planet sized solar shade, casting the planet into darkness. Or at least into the shady side. Solar panels are mounted on the bright side of the solar shade, charging batteries on the shade. Those batteries get shuttled back to Earth on a rocket, and are replaced when the next rocket ship arrives. Musk becomes the primary provider of energy on Earth, selling energy where previously the Sun just gave the stuff away for free.
Selling energy to all the nations of Earth, just to run LEDs in order to grow plants, proves to be very lucrative, but at that point, Musk has no need for money. All that’s left is for him to use this power to open a rift to the next dimension over to get power over life and death itself, and the SOE’s agents can’t stop him. Or are they? (Last part stolen from parent poster and isn’t the book I’d write. Big fan though!)
Unfortunately even recognition of a capability to build such a thing will certainly reduce pressure to rapidly de-carbonize, even the acidification of the oceans is hailed as solvable now by putting vast but affordable quantities of mined olivine them.
Human depredation, mis-consumption and mis-appreciation of natural systems (as well as each other) remain gravely destructive and tragic modern persuasions until the narrative is healed.
Reflectors in on the ground also have the benefit of being controllable.
1) Solar isn't really cooling anything, it's just transferring the heat to the point of use through the grid.
2) There's a lot of square footage of pavement and rooftops before we need to seek out virgin land.
3)Adding any feature to a production of 16 trillion won't be trivial in cost or complexity. Anything besides passive steerage (akin to a solar-windsock) is going to sink the project, IMO. I suspect that once you start adding power, gyros, controls, communication, navigation, etc, it will be more economical/feasable to scale up the size of each deployable shade by 2+ orders of magnitude (4+ by area). Which isn't to say it would be feasible, just more feasible.
Agreed it would be difficult and heavy to add minature gyroscopic and solar cell, comms and control unit to the 16 trillion disks proposal, since they are just 60cms wide. That plan seems basically like throwing confetti into L1, where it might get drifted away by solar ejections, out of stable orbit, in matter of years.
Since each of those disks is 1 gram and about 0.25 square meters, that scheme involves total of 4 trillion square meter shades orientated randomly. If shades are squares for simplicity and 8 meters in diameter, so 64 meters square and similar material would be 256 grams, add some stiffening and a control unit for say an extra 150 grams. Maybe a clever unfolding feature like an insects wing. Its a bit more material to launch but probably less than double at some control/shade ratio, and the tracking shades will block light about 30% more effectively than randomly orientated ones. Works out around 50 billion of the 400gram 8 meter wide shades with mini solar-comms-gyro units to produce. So I'm still overconfident in the practically of this kind of scheme, especially since cost to space has been minaturised since they previously had expert attention.
I have to admit its just one of those hunches Im hawking of late, cheers for following :)
For example, the author does assume 1gram (2ft diam) shields, but also specifies the necessity of precise angular orientation, and relatively modest location control / steering. This is to be accomplished by an unspecified number of "control satellites" using aimable mirrors and passive radiative pressure, which keeps the discs simple and the weight at 1 gram. Required disc area is ~7x the required total shading area, due to indecent angle and required transparency and spacing. A new gps-like network of "navigation beacons" will also be required to maintain spatial reference. He then says that to track individual disk locations/ orientation, that each disc needs a GPS-like nav receiver, 2 cameras, some processing/ communication ability, and a power supply, presumably solar. But he doesn't account for (or even reconsider) that there will be added weight and cost due to this.
He also doesn't consider the cost of inventing, manufacturing, and deploying the control satellites or the new type of nav beacon network, or even estimate how many of each will be needed. (GPS tech won't work, but if he knows that, he doesn't state it.)
There's other questionable assumptions, like a launch cadence of every 5 minutes for 10 years to leo, and that cost of launch will roughly equal cost of fuel due to the scale.
He also estimates the method of transfer from leo to L1 will require delta-v of 1km/s and assumes it will be solar powered / ion propelled, but leaves it at that, also without scope or cost.
It's interesting, but less convincing than I expected, given all the missing details, and also makes me more convinced that risk assessment, management and mitigation haven't thoughtfully been considered. That said, the shading, geometric layout, and required material properties calculations are quite impressive.
+/- 16 trillion self-powered, locally communicating "cellular" elements, each with some minimal sensory and processing capability. Add to that the mobility presumed by the author, and the fact that it is literally designed to block the sun, and you've got everything you need for a matrix rewrite...
The control coordination of trillions of L1 satelites doesnt strike me as a huge challenge to people already working in similar fields. I do some work on simulations and read about related technics. Control units just get individual and group call codes that they can respond to, in timed windows if helpful. A number of manager satellites beam signals to sectors and listen to responses. They could likely often pinpoint individual transmissions themselves with modern radar style tech, although trillion is a large number, sheilds will rarely eclipse one and other because they would be very dispersed and relatively small. They dont have to relay all messages individually through neighbours but perhaps could. The options for implementation are extensive but I believe familiar to network designers. They don't really have AI processing to do, its just a matter of maybe reporting their neighbors numbers so position can be determined and relayed so they know where to 'light-sail' and can receive schedules for when to let light past - if that becomes necessary or is deemed advantageous. Im just rambling but there are loads of possibilities for how to organize them. As a multi-node processor it would be rather slow because of the average latency between nodes being many kilometers, rather than millimeters to meters in a supercomputing cluster.
Personally, I'm terrified by how people here suddenly are so enthusiastic about the sunshade, without even knowing its side effects, when the problem can be solved at its source.
Buying time is always good if it forestalls doom.
Climate change activists who let perfect be the enemy of good will get all of us killed.
Nothing short of catastrophic events will make people give up on their unsustainable lifestyle.
If your primary goal is to force people to do something they don't want to do, on principle, call yourself an activist, a freedom-fighter, or a terrorist, I don't care. It's all the same to me.
If your primary goal is the survival of the human race, you shouldn't moralize.
Could you expound on that a bit? The assertion alone doesn't parse.
It makes me wonder about the people doing the moralizing: do they really care to contribute to the solution, or are they grinding their own personal axe about the behavior of others?
Enough. This isn't a Parliament and you don't get a liberum veto.
* that good black chernozem soul which makes up the Russian breadbasket would turn into desert in south of this region, while in the north the soil is too poor
* mass forest fires would choke the air
* melting permafrost would destroy existing badly maintained infrastructure and cities
If Russia is hoping for positives out of climate change they are in for a surprise
Risks 1) Social destabilization driven by collapse of southern agricultural communities and their migration northward. Keep in mind that already the northern communities are being heavily impacted by the thaw of the permafrost that many cities and towns are built on - to establish more infrastructure means building on a growing swamp. To be able to get crops to market, it means building very long roads on a growing swamp as well - remember that Russia suffers from a lack of internal rivers to convey agricultural products throughout it's vast geography.
2) Consequences of disturbances to fish stocks for northern communities - who are dependent on either fish directly, or seals and other species indirectly
3) Limited societal benefit of new hydrocarbon resources given the existing klepto-oligarchy - it's unlikely that new resources will be used to stabilise the broader community or social fabric.
4) Possibility that they cannot exploit said hydrocarbons due to global moratoriums or increased uptake in alternative energy sources
5) Broader geopolitical implications of social collapse of soviet satellites; some of which are currently heavily dependent on current rainfall patterns for cotton, wheat and other grains - Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, etc - if these countries go to the wall - what does that mean for the Russian state? It's likely that Russia would have to invest aggressively in shoring up the southern borders. 6) China; the eastern regions of Russia could be a tempting acquisition for China looking for new agricultural land or control of northern ports such as vladivostok as ice coverage decreases- further exacerbating pressures on the central Russian government.
On the other hand a fractured/weak Europe means higher gas prices, no medling in russian affairs, less pressure by russian citizens drooling over the fence with their eyes fixed on european stability and wellfare, free hand to do as Russia pleases in ex Soviet states and so on.
The plan also requires a certain amount of stationkeeping, probably with solar sails, and if you can do that then you can also move the elements out of the way of the sun entirely, with a little time.
2) It sort of misses the point- that might address the known-unknowns of the primary effect (solar radiation hitting Earth). It does nothing to address unknown-unknowns or even secondary or tertiary effects.
The mere presence of the shields might block solar wind, distort Earth's magnetic field, reflect / refocus cosmic radiation, amplify affect of solar flares, interfere with radio or satellite communication...
We just don't know. And the stakes are too big, even compared to worst case global warming.
The bigger the potential impact a project has, the better prepared you should be to undo or mitigate it, before it causes problems worse than the ones it's meant to fix. I don't see that here.
All the "mights" you mention can be easily evaluated by straightforward physics.
You can't possibly think that it's straightforward to model all those physical aspects for 16 trillion objects. We don't even have the 3-body solution solved; just predicting the gravitational behavior is unbelievably complex and chaotic. That many degrees of freedom is simply unsolvable (without quantum computing).
It's hubris to believe we can predict even basic behavior and interference of such a project, let alone intended or unintended side effects, whether known or unknown.
1. the alternate proposals won't work (at all, which seems unlikely)
2. the expected case for climate change isn't actually as bad as people are saying it is
or
3. people don't actually care about climate change as much as they care about using climate change to push their own agendas
Personally, I lean towards #3. But that still doesn't make me very happy with climate activists.
Intentional projects would be an improvement over current state of unintentional changes.
But the money is on the side of renewables - from [0]:
> Not a single coal-fired power plant along the Ohio River will be able to compete on price with new wind and solar power by 2025, according to a new report by energy analysts.
Solar prices are dropping so it'll eventually beat fossil fuels in the market. Sunshades or similar geoengineering projects may require less political will at the right price point and allow us to kick the can down the road long enough for our own greed to save us :)
[0] - https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25032019/coal-energy-cost...
I honestly don't know or know of any quality modeling of it.
But if we're speculating... with cheap launch capacity and cheap/efficient solar, we could start talking about building solar farms in space.
Also - again speculating - if the shade has limited coverage, there should be a temperature difference on the edge of the shadow. That may cause increased wind, which could benefit windmills.
At the end of the day, we’re a part of nature too, just doing our part to increase entropy via energy dispersion. Can’t stop the second law. Just gotta find ways to do it that kill us off slower.
Most of the energy we have used comes from the sun. Aside from nuclear.