US Is One Step Closer to Having Program to Study Blocking Sun

I'm surprised to learn less than $2M per year goes into this type of research in the USA. Given the massive unknowns, it's something we certainly need to better understand.

Kind of like research on deflecting asteroids.

"the U.S. Government and Accountability Office (GAO)"..."estimated that about $2 million were directed to “albedo modification and less conventional CDR approaches,” so less than 0.1% of the U.S. climate change budget focused on the strategies discussed in our report." (page 185 of the report)

Maybe they are thinking more about the subsription model?

- A 2% increase in panel efficiency would compensate for that. Most people say panel efficiency isn't a big factor in solar pricing anyway.

- The only near-term way to do this affordably would be on Starship, and at scale they're planning to fuel that with methane made from ambient CO2, for net-zero emissions

- The L1 point is about a million miles from Earth, so space junk is not an issue at all

Also:

- Not going to last any significant amount of time, due to the solar sail effect. Solar wind will simply blow them out of the stable L1 orbit in a few decades at most, maybe a few years

- Let people emit more CO2, because "the problem is solved" in the short term, and when it doesn't work and that 2% of sunlight comes back, it'll exacerbate the problem.

I assume you saw The Second Renaissance? If not, you're welcome! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sU8RunvBRZ8

With the same logic, let's add the option to move to another planet.

Yes, there are dangers in restoring forests. I'm thinking of China's Three North Shelter Program here. While very ambitious and farsighted, the monocultures they establish are vulnerable to diseases, pests and other factors, and are a weak starting point to rebuild ecosystems. If those trees die, all the resources put into the effort will go to waste. Also, the new forests put heavy strain on the water table, which worsens the effects of desertification. The water table can only recover if the forests become strong and dense enough to retain humidity and cool down the ground. My (totally uneducated) advice would be to strengthen existing forests and ecosystems, merge them (if necessary, by reallocating agricultural use to other ares) and slowly expand them towards the affected areas.

Insurance plans are a way of diffusing risk and making things more certain. This plan is just a wildcard to tweak one of the levers of a vast and complex machine. That lever may do something very different than planned. That isn't an "insurance plan", it is experimentation with the lives of billions of people and of even more animals; and it is experimentation decided upon by a few self-appointed "elites" who get to decide what to do if everyone else doesn't obey their dictates.

I think it would be more of an insurance plan to build a spaceship and terraform mars.

This is like saying put less gasoline in your car, since internal combustion engines are not 100% efficient, it won't make any difference enough to matter.

> And think about how many government computers around the world run Windows and Office. Then think about who uses Azure.

I absolutely think the government should be using OSS or literally anything other than MS products.

I also would rather tax Bill Gates than have him directly involved in any public project.

That would be neat, and the technology developed for doing it would probably be more widely applicable as well. Could have some interesting developments with creating a supply chain in space

1. Yes

2. Yes

The explosive eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 injected enough sulfur-containing compounds into the stratosphere to substantially reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth's surface. In response to the increased reflectivity of the planet, the surface temperature cooled by about 0.3°C during 1992, with temperatures returning to their normal levels by 1994. But what happens when a much, much large eruption occurs?

Roughly 74,000 years ago, a "super-eruption" took place in Indonesia, the largest know eruption in the past 100,000 years. The Toba eruption was enormous, throwing out roughly 1000 times as much rock as the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens (Fig. 1). Dust trapped in polar ice cores shows that ejected material spread around the globe, indicating that the eruption injected substantial material into the stratosphere, where it can strongly affect climate. How much and for how long the Toba eruption actually affected climate and life on the Earth's surface has been the subject of intense debate.

https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/shindell_12/

The current climate change is not caused by increased volcanic activity, because there isn't one.

If volcanic activity were to increase, the effect would depend on what kind of increase. Volcanoes do produce CO2, and more CO2 would of course worsen climate change. But they can also produce SO2, which cools the climate rather than warms it. Unlike CO2, SO2 degrades, so the effect isn't as long-lasting.

Volcanoes can also put particulates into the air which block sunlight. Again, the effect is temporary, as the particles fall out. So it would take a permanent, ongoing change in volcanism to counter warming. It would also cause a lot of other climate changes, which are hard to predict.

It's like rigging your house with explosives in case you get hit by a tornado.

no of course they are not

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-70205-9

Isn't the moon a better place to build a solar powered thin film factory? Build the whole thing into a single starship, or series of starships and use an EM launcher to leave the surface.

100T launch every day for 20 years is a lotta launches.