We Could Brighten Clouds to Cool the Earth
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Imagine the city of Miami deciding that eliminating local hurricanes would benefit its local real estate market. They invest in a fleet of hurricane blockers to be deployed off their coast during hurricane season to reduce the odds of getting hit by any hurricane, and almost guarantee no more cat 5 hurricanes. This project is worth it for Miami because it has a dramatic effect on home values and insurance costs... And the world also benefits from the cooling that Miami's hurricane shield produces.
but its just a tiny current consistently protecting Miami at the last minute, for now
[1] https://cdn-codes-pdf.iccsafe.org/bundles/document/new_docum... 2017 Florida Residential Code Fig 301.2(4) Ultimate Design Wind Speeds V_{ult}
[2] https://cdn-codes-pdf.iccsafe.org/bundles/document/new_docum... 2020 New York Residential Code Fig R301.2(5)B Regions Where Wind Design is Required
I don't know GP is measuring, but indeed the value at risk in NYC is higher than Miami. But the way they wrote it, they weren't saying that, and there are more properties at risk in Miami.
BTW, if sea levels rise, property values in Miami are liable to go down the drain anyway, hurricanes or no hurricanes...
Question, what do we know about the ocean as a carbon sink? Is it's capture rate variable with anthing? Is it easier to capture carbon from the ocean than in the air? Could we try to increase the capture rate into the ocean and then extract rapidly from the same area?
Also yes, ocean acidification is likely to be the bigger immediate problem. People depend heavily on fish protein and other sealife. That plus poor farming yields will be bad.
But can you think of any forms of life on the bottom of the food chain that depend on carbon inputs as part of its own metabolic processes in order to reproduce itself? Because if you want a self-sustaining ocean-based carbon capture solution, that’s where I would look.
e.g, instigate some large bloom of plant matter or algae, and engineer/find the right conditions for the matter to sink to the bottom of the ocean without decomposing.
The second part, if you can find a profit motive to compost the ocean floor and actually do it in a profitable way, then it will get done. Else we’re stuck relying on natural processes.
CO2 is easier to chemically react when dissolved into water, and its mobility is about the same as on air. So the decision is about engineering something that can survive being immersed on the ocean vs. engineering something that can use atmospheric CO2. I believe there's no general answer, we can only answer that question for specific designs.
[0] https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/fertilizing-the-ocean-w...
Someone else pointed out that we can cause blooms. That's basically what you want, because plankton or algae sequester it. I don't know that we can "hack" that without risking damaging the oceans though. They're pretty good at what they do as is.
It is a gas exchange though, so heat and pressure have an impact. They're not great for marine life though. Surface area does as well, though it'd be hard to meaningfully change the ocean's surface area.
The bigger issue would be containment. The ocean is huge, and a very good CO2 sink. Anything that's going to make a significant dent in the total CO2 absorption of the ocean is going to have to happen over a very large area. Things aren't going to be much better if we sterilize the ocean in the process.
However, as other have pointed out, this might be able to buy us some time to develop negative emissions technology (which is ultimately the only way out). Hopefully we would use that time wisely.
SRM could help prevent that by directly lowering temperature, which means less CO2 released and less ocean acidification. And it buys us time to decarbonize before things all fall apart.
There is a moral threat of "with climate management tools, we don't need to act on carbon reduction." I think that is less dangerous than the threat of "we have no validated climate management tools to deal with rapidly accelerated climate change." Ideally, we would research and develop the science and technology of weather control and climate management now so we don't feel compelled to do anything drastic in the near future. For instance, we know that dumping sulfur in the upper atmosphere can cool the earth for <$10b/year. But we don't want to be in that position. Instead, maybe we mandate that all container ships loft saltwater droplets to support cloud formation.
Also, keep in mind that some approaches might be applied locally to protect certain ecosystems rather than aiming for a global effect. E.g., cloud brightening R&D to cool areas with lots of melting permafrost. We should be spending billions on this r&d.
We need time to transition, it's happening. In 20-30 years, we will have a much cleaner global economy, with no coal and minimal oil. But we don't want to have the permafrost melt in the meantime!
This means that we would have to continue them indefinitely, forever, without fail. (I'm assuming that we would just use the SRM measures to continue with business as usual, but having seen our progress against GHG emissions so far, that doesn't seem an unfair assumption.)
And should we fail to do so then the protective effect would dissipate leaving us with full solar radiation on a planet with presumably much higher GHG concentrations. This would not only cause temperatures to soar to hitherto unseen heights, but to do so in an incredibly rapid manner.
It's not clear that our ecosystems would be able to withstand such a drastic and sudden change.
This kind of all or nothing rhetoric is damaging to actual progress. Solutions are not mutually exclusive. We can do both. One treats the symptom and buys us a few decades without having to suffer a 4C air temperature rise (and the billions of needlessly lost lives and indeterminate human suffering). The other fixes it in the long term.
The idea people in the SRM research community have go more like that you have declining CO2 emissions, at some point you turn around by deploying negative emissions tech and SRM is basically your "let's cut off the worst effects in times of highest CO2 concentrations". This is e.g. often described by David Keith, who's one of the leading advocates for SRM research.
Whether any of that is feasible or realistic is of course debatable, also whether one should even go down that path and whether even the prospect of doing SRM is blocking faster climate action. (And I sympathize with all those concerns, but I think paiting a wrong picture doesn't help.)
We don't have declining global CO2 emissions and there are no signs we will have that any time soon. In fact, annual CO2 emissions continue to increase at an almost exponential rate.
So first of all we'd have to decrease emissions and invent and deploy some CO2 extraction tech to help lower the current atmospheric CO2 concentration.
To me, it seems far more likely that if SRM was deployed many would just see it as a way to continue with business as usual without having to suffer the effects of global warming.
And that's just annual emissions, Atmospheric CO2 concentration is even worse: https://climate.nasa.gov/internal_resources/1914
If we go into the 2030's and we are still doing business as usual with our near-exponentially increasing global CO2 emissions then I suspect a large amount of climate damage will already be 'locked in'.
Yeah, we're in pretty huge trouble. I'm definitely cynical in the short-term and medium-term, but I see potential for all these nascent technologies to work over the decades to save our bacon by 2100. Technology got us into this mess, but we're enslaved to our technology now, so we're going to just have to make better and better technology while being slightly more efficient and green-minded as well.
In particular, the figures in chapter 2 are particularly informative.
We are going to need to start sequestering carbon in the later part of this century, with as of yet unknown methods, but it's doable.
I would caution that climate scientists have been generally too conservative in their predictions, and there's substantial risk that they have missed something that could make warming much worse than we expect. (I would consider a 1% chance of much worse warming to be a substantial risk, I purchase insurance for far rarer risks than that.)
Additionally scientists have been overly optimistic about how much and how rationally society responds to the risks.
So in general I would say we are in somewhat worse shape than the SR1.5 report says, but there's no evidence of that, it's just analyzing the situation using standard risk modes rather than getting point estimates and confidence intervals on the best evidence.
Seems like a good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone here with the climate and housing crises if we just plant trees and turn them into apartments.
At some level it would be a complete and utter disaster and it's not clear where that is. I think if we could magically reach net zero tomorrow, we'd be mostly fine. Obviously instead we will continue driving full speed towards the edge of the cliff, hidden somewhere in the darkness. I hope we apply the brakes earnestly and soon.
As of now, we're still increasing our speed. Global CO2 emissions go up every year.
Anything that I find says the speed of increase has been decreasing almost steadily since 2008, and 2019 had a decrease in total emissions compared to 2018 (and whatever series I find, it never goes beyond 2019).
Yeah, that's a single point. The overall trend looks like it's a methodology fluke, and that the real trend is of 0 growth.
That's why I'm interested on more data :)
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_gr.html
Lower growth may also be corellated with human depression, strife and war. So the human systems are working against decrease of CO2 growth.
We have already committed to levels that I consider catastrophic. Particularly in the oceans, where CO2 partitioning into the oceans is bleaching coral and the habitats they create. In the terrestrial habitats, desertification widespread and rapid.
The long-term solution offered to us by the Earth system is getting carbon below the carbonate compensation depth to be buried, or at least dissolved into the entire ocean, and not just surface waters. But the ocean overturning time is 500 years, and our timescale is somewhat shorter.
I think how you look at catastrophe solely from a perspective of civilization is wrong, but even from the perspective of a state, things like the drought that caused the famine that caused the civil war in Syria which caused a refugee crisis in Europe are troubling. Imagine how much worse it will be when a massive typhoon hits Bangladesh. But from a human perspective people are already suffering loss of income, home, and lifestyle from climate-exacerbated natural disasters. And the biosphere has been hit hard — adaptation will happen, but the mass extinction means we will lose ecosystem services that will be hard to replace.
We need to restore 350ppm asap. Meaning carbon negative.
I know you know this. Just expounding for the lurkers.
Given the potential to end civilization, I feel any outcome short of that is a win of some kind. Even if the consequences are still severe. I also have serious doubts that we'll actually remove enough carbon to stay under 1.5 degrees of warming. We may just have to live with the consequences. I definitely don't mean to imply in any way that things will be just like normal. It's going to get rough.
I can imagine a future where perhaps India or China decides to act on their own to this effect, risks be damned.
We know how to remove carbon from the atmosphere, in bulk, with super-plentiful olivine. Cutting off emissions and deploying olivine works. Almost anything else ends up doing no net good, at best, and funnels us deeper into the hole.
Soluble iron compounds scattered over the open ocean could help. Any way to get the sulfur hexafluoride and HFCs out of the air would be an important contribution, because even getting CO2 content down to pre-industrial level would not be enough; those other manufactured gasses trap heat thousands or tens of thousands of times better than CO2 does, and are already a big part of the Problem.
Couple of questions:
- Do we have any estimates yet on how long olivine would take to be effective? - Can we do HFC-capture in a similar way to carbon capture? Would this be more productive?
Of course it would do little good if we continued pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an increasing rate at the same time.
Getting the SF6 out of the atmosphere is a tougher nut. The present load already accounts for 10% of forcing. There are current efforts to phase out its use, and suck it out of the equipment it is used in.
The HFCs in current use, if all vented, would have as strong an effect as all the CO2 currently in the atmosphere. Collecting it all up and destroying it is a huge responsibility. Probably most that is in cars, window A/C units, and refrigerators will end up vented.
In particular, the alternative of spreading powdered olivine on cropland will require monitoring. Different sources of olivine have different amounts of nickel and chromium, and the sources with acceptable levels can be favored for that use. Use on beaches and shallows seems to tolerate more. There is no reason to do one but not the other, and dozens of other measures besides.
If by big you mean 1/5 of the problem, ok. But that is really not big enough to remove the focus from the other 4/5 And the way those gases work on the long term, in that the amount of them on the atmosphere is proportional to the speed of emission, instead of total emissions makes any change of focus from CO2 actually harmful to solving the problem.
And by the way, half of the non-CO2 emissions are methane, that comes mostly from fossil fuels mining and handling, and 2/3 of the rest are nitrous oxides, that comes almost entirely from fossil fuel burning. So "big" is really, really pushing it.
A source:
Just getting the excess CO2 out is a big enough job, and one responsive enough to known practical measures, that it leaves some time for research on the tails, if we start now.
Nothing about this unfolding disaster is small, or about any measure to counter it.
Well, it gets you >87% of the way, and stabilizes there as long as emissions do not grow. Where going to 97% depends on lots of changes on agriculture, and only the last 3% is about the gases you cite.
Of course, for 100% you will need to cure all the causes. But "87% solved and not getting any worse" does really not sound like an emergency. I maintain that changing any focus away from CO2 is a mistake.
According to EPA, just three companies release the overwhelming bulk of problem fluorine-containing gases today. It is much easier to get three companies to change what they do than to get tens of thousands in line.
In practice, carbon is such a big problem that a solution will only come very slowly. Anything that can be done more quickly has outsize impact.
- Humans and the earth will survive in any case, just not in our current form.
"If the Earth can't support seven billion people, then all seven billion of us just have to figure out a way! That's how science works!"
Could we do this with 7 billion people though? Will my children make it to this world? That’s what keeps me up at night.
Source? If anything, scientists have been too conservative in their warnings. Time and time again, we see that climate change is going _much_ faster than we anticipated.
Besides, you did not give any for your own affirmations either.
I see no reason to assume that governments are suddenly going to spend significant parts of GDP on climate engineering if they could not be arsed to spend a tiny fraction of that on mitigation so far :(
So they all agreed that wearing maskings in public and private gathering, plus universal adoption of the vaccine would be the easier, if not ultimately more expensive path.
While the pandemic did stick around for a bit, by spring it was basically gone. Now when I go out I see people in packed clubs, happily drinking and dancing mask free.
Sure by comparison universal mask adoption and vaccination is to climate mitigation like building a lego castle is to building the pyramids by hand, but since we solved that problem so effectively I'm extremely optimistic about how we're going to tackle climate change.
We showed that we can solve pandemic without effecting the economy or our lifestyles, and we can just as easily to the same for climate change.
With climate change, once we really start to feel the symptoms it might well be too late to change the trajectory and we might suffer the effects for millenia...
Take COVID. Every government knew it could happen, and the damages to the economy (i.e. cost) it could have, yet none of the countries in the West did anything to prepare for it, and had to foot a much bigger bill in the end than say Taiwan or Japan. Again, because the threat was elusive and didn't feel immediate.
Reducing the amount of photosynthesis might reduce the carbon fixation by plants. Not sure if that’d be a good idea.
Most plants cannot use all the carbon they already get. Instead, they get less able to compete as the weeds choke them.
Quotes below, sources below that: - CO2 increased leaf area, water use efficiency, and harvest index (in tomatoes) [1] - Optimal levels for tomatoes may be 2 to 5 times the normal atmospheric levels (1000 to 1500 ppm CO2 versus ambient levels of 350 ppm) [2] - Combining increases in CO2 with fertilization and irrigation could greatly enhance leaf area which when coupled to observed increases in net photosynthesis as a result of elevated CO2 could greatly increase productivity of loblolly pine trees. [3] - demonstrating an optimal CO2 concentration of 889.6, 909.4, and 894.2 ppm for aboveground, belowground, and total biomass, respectively, and 967.8 ppm for leaf photosynthesis (in winter wheat) [4]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783... [2] https://cals.arizona.edu/hydroponictomatoes/nutritio.htm [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s004680050111 [4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26253981/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S197830191...
High-fructose corn syrup and cane sugar happen to represent the greatest public health disaster since smallpox was eradicated and smoking started down.
Phytoplankton rely on photosynthesis and are the food for a large fraction of marine life (either directly or indirectly).
Probably this would have minimal effect on light cloud cover and there is already not a great deal happening during heavy cloud.
Meanwhile, ocean acidification, unchecked, would go on to collapse the whole ocean ecosystem.
Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near the inner Lagrange point (L1) https://www.pnas.org/content/103/46/17184
The better the efficiency of the solar panels, the worse the shadowing effect. Even worse, the solar array in orbit also reflects heat back at Earth! If the size of the array is significant enough to shadow Earth from the sun, it's obviously significant enough to impact this flipside of the balance of radiative transfer. Keeping it on the day side always would offset that ... maybe - but for that it would have to be in solar orbit.
Any energy you transfer to Earth (fusion reactors in orbit, off-planet solar arrays, whatever) is part of it, the form of energy does not matter much, almost all of it is heat in the end and affects the thermodynamic equilibrium of the planet.
As an exaggerated example, if you put a giant solar array into solar orbit and beamed the converted power to Earth, it's like Earth suddenly having a larger surface but just for receiving solar radiation. For the purposes of Earth radiating heat back into space, the solar array does nothing.
Sure, the effects wouldn't be multiplied as with an atmosphere with too many far IR-scattering molecules that we have now but the power wouldn't come for free.
Besides, whatever the power conversion technology is, it's unlikely to be anywhere near 100% efficient. That means you need to be getting rid of thermal energy in large quantities anyway. As long as you're at least pointing that away from Earth, it's a win.
I think you’ve found a great solution. Unfortunately it only works for spherical cows in a vacuum.
Sure, everyone reading and responding to this did profit from CO2 emissions for sure, but reducing emissions without going back to the stone-age is perfectly possible and this should be clear to anyone:
We could simply start taxing Co2 emissions, which would boost renewable energy buildout INSTANTLY:
One example: Right now, electricity (and concrete) are DIRT cheap-- my electricity bill is a complete joke compared to e.g. groceries (or mobile data, even).
Significant electricity costs (like 1$/kwh) would definitely help reduce emissions, and this could easily be done in a way that would not completely ruin the poorer half of the population by moving other taxes correspondingly.
This is just not done because people (and their governments) simply don't care enough (still!).
And other companies will compete to find cheaper ways to remove pollution, lowering costs for those who pollute.
That way we can tax the crap out of all those productive people people and companies over there without worrying about any economic consequences.
You can just change e.g. income tax accordingly so expected tax load stays the same-- only now your citizens are financially incentivized to save electricity...
Also you have a convenient excuse (as nation state) for protectionist import tariffs hitting all countries that don't practise Co2 taxation themselves (which might be nice for local economy)
In the whole of Europe electricity prices are currently through the roof, marking records on many countries... daily. [edit: mostly because CO2 emission taxes and because gas producing countries can charge whatever they want because the whole continent (but France) depends on them] Just because people (normal everyday working-class) people pay higher prices everyday for what they need to live, electricity doesn't come from cleaner sources suddenly; and it sure won't in the short/medium term. We are decarbonizing but in the meantime we have to use gas; the other alternatives (eg: nuclear, which is currently the only solution) are expensive as f* and take a looong time to be build. Renewables are not constant and there lies the problem, they also need a lot of ground allotted to be installed and account for a reasonable part of a country's usage.
We're stuck deep and there's no easy or quick way out. It also isn't "people just don't want to", people can't. Electric cars are very expensive to be adopted massively, and if they were comomn, the energy wouldn't be clean anyway, we have to change the infrastucture. Where do you suggest we get the energy from?
There are no easy and quick solutions.
The amount of clothes, electronics, food and such that gets wasted is just enormous on our societies. Only places in the world where people live somewhat ecologically are those where they simply can't afford such waste. So, IMO everything that isn't a basic necessity should be made much more expensive to force people rethink their consumption habits.
If by "through the roof" you mean like 30cents/kWh, then thats exactly what I'm talking about: if you don't have a farm of bitcoin miners at home your electricity bill is bound to be a complete joke compared to groceries, rent or even mobile data.
If we had actually expensive electricity (and car fuel and concrete etc.), which could easily be compensated by e.g. income or even sales tax modifications, then people would have ACTUAL financial incentive to buy efficient fridges or bike to work (without any additional burden).
If the US put its mind to it (WWII levels of mobilization), it could probably achieve full renewable electrical conversion (all fossil fuel infrastructure obsoleted and removed) within five years or so.
Climate change is only a small part of the equation; pollution, deforestation, destruction of biodiversity, &c. are all equally problematic. As long as we produce and consume more and more we won't get away from the inevitable.
At some point we'll run out of half assed solutions and we'll have to face the consequences. So yeah, make the clouds brighter and paint the rooftops of buildings white, I'm sure it'll help a loooot.
If your house is on fire and you use an ice cube to cool your neck it'll feel good for a bit too, but you would achieve nothing, or even worse, you'd be under the impression of doing something while losing precious time.
We know what the right solutions are, but doing the right things is hard, hence we focus on meaningless half assed solution which are, in the end, only aggravating the situation. Notice how all these solutions always are about adding things to the system, never about slowing down, using less, producing less.
At the end of the day every single metric point to the fact that we're fucking up big time and that our slow incremental half assed solutions are nowhere near enough. The best case scenarios of our best current solutions are still not enough, and we're never meeting our own "not enough" goals.
You don't fix a problem by fixing it's final symptoms
Not hard. Impossible.
[spoiler]
the planet is getting hot because the all-powerful entity messed up, so it makes big clouds, which in turn kill all the plants, so he makes all plants able to run with less light ..
Mao Zedong thought so too (sparrow killings) and produced hunger and suffering.
I always wondered how large a satellite we would need at the ideal spot between the earth and the sun to block a portion of the sunlight in order to cool the planet down a few degrees.
Not that it would solve humans being a cancer to the planet, but it would give us a few hundred years to get to a solution before billions of us find ourselves in some sort of post-apocalyptic world.