MIT scientists think they’ve discovered how to fully reverse climate change
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bgr.com
However, there's isn't much more. No paper that I can find. Not a new idea, better than sulfuric acid SRM in theory, I suppose, though at the cost of the L1 Lagrangian.
We need to start thinking about how we can adapt to various scenarios, rather than imagine that we are omnipotent here (we are not and will most likely never be unless some miraculous breakthrough in predictive powers occurs).
Adapting and making sure that our footprint going forward is as minimal as possible is the only reasonable strategy, ASAP.
We should not accept that the world will change around us, we should make the world fit our interests. On a time scale at which the world changes, time scales which humans are not involved with (eg: global warming), we should be able to fix the problem before it happens.
An inevitable step is human progress it to realize that there is no controlling the planet's climate.
We might be at the top of the food chain, but we are still at the bottom of the interplanetary dust chain, and always will be.
1. Whether it's physically possible to accomplish this. The natural course of the Earth is to enter into another ice age at some time in the future. Is there a way for us to prevent this from happening, without compromise or sacrifice? Without side effects? I don't have the needed knowledge to disqualify that possibility, but I lack the confidence that it is an achievable outcome. I imagine the closest comparison points we have for such efforts is our attempts to introduce non-native species to impact local flora and fauna. And that hasn't typically gone well in the past.
2. Whether having such control is at all possible. If we develop the means to control the climate to such an extent, I can only imagine what that would lead to in terms of global politics. It has to be something that the entire planet is cooperative about, and hope that no personal agendas try to push for misuse of the technology.
We knew about fossil ressource depletion in the 70s and about the effect on Co2 on temperature in the 19th century (the earliest article i've found is from 1912, but the science was available earlier).
We could have invested in better infrastructure and better housing since at least the 90s, and pushed the research towards material science and fission/fusion after the 80s. Pushed to create more public researcher jobs would've been nice too (most innovation is built on top of public research, and forming researchers is nice for the industry too)
Instead we built more stuff for cheaper (by outsourcing the production and crippling the productive apparel of small third-world countries).
That’s an odd thing to say, we’re controlling it right now. We’re about half way through pushing up global temperatures by several degrees over a hundred years or so. We didn’t set out to do that, but we’re doing it nonetheless.
It’s not a question of whether we can significantly change the climate, we know we can, the question is how we should choose to do that going forwards.
> It’s not a question of whether we can significantly change the climate, we know we can, the question is how we should choose to do that going forwards
This I agree with. What the GP and I are trying to say is that, in our opinions at least, we should choose to do it by adopting practices that minimize how much we affect the climate.
Does it look like we have the climate under control? No, quite the opposite. We're not controlling the climate, we're the climate equivalent of toddlers who just set the house on fire.
They in total would need to be able to dim up to 2% of incoming solar radiation.
Technically we're already changing the planet today, it shows that it is very much inside of our grasp, it just requires the cooperation of every human on the planet and right now we just have that cooperation both incidentally and in a bad way.
We just need to get to a point where it does not require such mass cooperation, and as our energy scale increases that will become more and more possible with time.
That is assuming we don't collapse or regress or stagnate, which is possible, but I would hope that doesn't happen.
sounds pretty cool though. a techno solution just in time for every threat
It is not a binary, of course we make the world fit our interest to some degree. That idea that we can make the world fit our interest in every aspect, even on planetary scale is hubris and as such will likely always bite us in the ass if pursued.
Considering we've accidentally caused startling global warming in just 200 years, I'm confident we can solve the next ice age in the 50,000 years before it comes.
We are also living through an ecological crisis whose causes are far more entwined with over-consumption. But that's because it has causes additional to climate change.
Asking what will happen when climate-change initiatives are funded seems to be considerably jumping the gun. Currently I think these are all fairly speculative, at least in the sense that there's no clear best method, so they're not even at the point where funding might be considered; but, even if there were one clear best way that was guaranteed to succeed, at least from my viewpoint in the US, it's far from clear to me that even that one best way would have a decent chance of securing funding in any form.
This doesn’t reverse anything. It slows warming, but doesn’t de-acidify the oceans or decrease the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Solar engineering is a radical, risky Hail Mary that should only be considered as a stopgap emergency measure provided emissions are being managed. Without that the problem is not solved and if the mitigation (sulfur, bubbles, whatever) is removed the snap back will be extreme.
We need to stop putting CO2 and methane in the air and start removing what’s there, period
We haven't been on the moon a second time yet and you want us to believe that we are capable of deploying a mega-structure the size of Brazil in space?
Just because you can do napkin calculations of something does not make it relevant.
Yes we have, and in fact after Armstrong/Aldrin landed in the moon there were five more successful missions.
We’ll, the Great Wall of China was four times as long as the longest axis of Brazil. It would be a huge undertaking, but I wouldn’t completely discount it.
Brazil area = 3300000 sq mi = 9.2e13 sqft. A film 1mm thick of this area would be 9.2e13 sqft x 0.003 ft = 2.76e11 cuft.
Great wall of China, average of 33 ft tall and 20 feet wide, with a length of 13,170 mi (69,537,600 ft) is a volume of 4.6e10 cuft.
According to this a 1mm film the size of brazil would be an order of magnitude more volume than the great wall of china.
Using silicon’s density of 2.32 g/cm3, at a volume of 2.76e11 cuft (7.82e15 cm3) gives us 1.8e16 g, or 1.98e10 tons.
The falcon heavy launch capacity to geostationary transfer orbit is 26.7 tons. However, L1 is much further altitude (1.5 million km) than GTO (42,164 km @ apogee). (But we’ll just use GTO capacity since the only other listed capacity for the falcon heavy is for mars transfer orbit and I couldn’t find an altitude for that from earth.) 1.98e10 tons would require almost three quarters of a billion falcon heavy launches. If we did 100 launches per day, this would take 20,000 years.
Maybe there’s some solid silicon asteroid out there, but even if that were the case, we’d have to lift up the machinery and fuel to move it in space. Vesta, one of the largest known asteroids with a mean diameter of 326 mi, if a sphere would have a volume of 1.8e7 cumi = 2.65e18 cuft. So by volume we could flatten that out with enough to spare, but you’re dealing with maybe a lot of undesirable content.
I’m bored now so Ill let someone else calculate how much fuel it would require to move Vesta the required distance, or guess at how much of it is useful and what it would take to convert it to the necessary structure.
But my guess is that in any case, “huge undertaking” is underselling it. Sounds like pure fantasy to me. Actually sounds remarkably similar to the scale of the problem humanity is faced with in The Three Body Problem trilogy. (I’m half way through The Dark Forest now, guess I should go back to that!)
There were six successful Apollo crewed missions to the moon and many additional uncrewed missions.
Wouldn't Whipple Shields be needed to avoid them popping?
I'd like to think that this could be used to buy us time to transition off carbon-intensive and fossil fuels, on to solar and other renewables.
But then, I don't think that human nature is that long-sighted. It would be a mandate to continue.
Space bubbles, atmospheric flak, or other irreversible, completely untestable and entirely unprecedented interventions terrify the shit out of me.
Especially when we are trying to modify something complex as our climate.
Its about time we analyzed our actions and changed the way we modify for the better
Other than that, I agree, it would be way to easy to rely on this kind of measure. I'd like it to be a measure to give time to "draw down our unsustainable industries". But I don't think that human nature works like that. It would be taken as a mandate to continue.
In fact we might have the opposite problem: too easily reversible. What if we become dependant on it being there, and then it fails, as stuff in space easily does? What happens "when the levee breaks" ?
1) https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/L1_the...
Every time I see someone say why don't we "just" do X to fix climate change, the thing they suggest we just do is either drastically inadequate, really hard, or too slow.
We're way behind at this point. Climate scientists used to say 400 ppm was the highest level that might be safe, but we're at 420ppm and still adding 36 billion tons of CO2 every year, plus a lot of methane.
We're at serious risk of positive feedback effects taking things out of our hands entirely. Higher temperatures bring things like melting ice caps and methane release from permafrost melt, which heat up the planet more. Solar radiation management is a chance to head those things off, and buy time for the changes you're talking about.
And none of the proposed SRM solutions are irreversible. Some of them reverse automatically, shortly after you stop maintaining them.
Some people have tried to make a big deal out of higher CO2 making plants grow faster, but plant growth is limited by lots of other things like nutrient availability, disease, and drought. A lot of forests are not doing well these days.
Evidently not, or we would have done it already. Starting today, even if we adopted those strategies successfully, it would still be too late to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. In fact, the only thing that would prevent such a scenario is an aggressive and distasteful technological solution (maybe this, maybe something else). That's the situation we're in, like it or not.
Here's a simpler plan: 1) Crack down on the deliberate and aggressive misinformation pretending climate change isn't real. We allow this under the guise of free speech, but it's obvious it's being perpetrated to deliberately push a known falsehood. We know who's doing it, we know why. We know where the funding originates and where it goes. There's no ethical dilemma, no slippery slope. Just one lie that's killing the planet. 2) Shift all subsidies from carbon intensive energy to renewables and make it permanent. (This accelerates decarbonization and costs literally nothing). 3) Create a replacement for the Paris agreement but this time focused around collaboration, technology sharing, and a stack-ranked collaborative plan. (Develop and share technology around methane reduction, grid stabilization, electrification etc)
That's it. 3 step plan, net zero cost. Guaranteed to work. Won't ever happen if we don't address the public opinion campaign turning us against each other. But it is way easier than space bubbles.
The problem is not intractable. It's quite solvable. The one blocker is that we're working against ourselves. Let's stop working against ourselves and actually work together to save the livability of our planet.
The US will never be a leader in climate change reduction till we address tiny the minority that inexplicably wishes to profit from the destruction of the only place in the universe that is perfect for us. This is the literal garden of eden, we are willfully destroying it.
No plan can succeed if we don't address the cause of resistance to the plan. That's deliberate deception and manipulation of public opinion by a handful of billionaire oil barons.