White House is pushing ahead research to cool Earth by reflecting back sunlight

(I do think we'll ultimately need to do something like this simply because the cost of not doing it is too high but I understand why people are scared by it, and it's not just down to belief in wood spirits).

Around climate change as well, there are now talks about some of the changes we are observing being part of the natural cycle of the earth based on core samples. No doubt we’ve made things worse but maybe not as bad as we think.

Isn’t Florida supposed to be under water now?

Also kind of funny top of Reddits environment Reddit had two top threads recently where one was saying we are losing water around some land mass due to climate change and another saying complete opposite. They were right beside another on the feed.

Scientific communities aren’t in consensus about global warming and climate change. I frankly now (being a hardcore believer in the past) am now on the fence about some aspects of it.

I really don’t think we’re as advance a species as some of our ambitions might lead us to think.

You can’t really test stuff like this in a small scale and it could have drastic impact on us as a single planet species. People would be right to be dubious.

Finally don’t be fooled. Scientific community, just like the Engineering field, does shit for their gain. They all fudge the numbers. They all change the lenses to shed light on what they want. This is why we’ve seen some scientific inaccuracies. For example Sugar studies being quashed in the past… I guess also with the vaccines recently lol

It’s condescending to think that a reasonable amount of dubiousism means people think the “wood spirits” will punish us.

It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflexively ignore the potential unknown side effects that can occour when messing with a complex system.

Have you ever thought that perhaps it's people like you who have it wrong? Are you capable of predicting ALL the side effects of such an extreme intervention?

Are you capable of reversing unwanted side effects like a global winter due to this intervation?

How can you know if you even can reverse it IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE UNWANTED SIDE EFFECTS WILL EVENT BE?

That's quite the jump you are making there.

To me it's like startups creating robot bees: finding an inferior expensive potentially dangerous solution to a problem that was already solved for free since forever.

But you can't make money with preserving the health of the patient. Better have it sick and sell him pills.

Solar panels now cost just 20 cents a Watt and can convert sun into electricity with about 6 times the efficiency of photosynthesis.

If we make it cheap to punt, then the consequences could truly be dire.

Now, when Pinatubo blew in the early 1990s, it produced about a decade-long cooling effect relative to what otherwise would have happened, but that effect faded. So, you'd have to have a plan to inject a Pinatubo-scale amount of material into the atmosphere at least once a decade, and underneath that, the fossil CO2 and CH4 emissions would steadily be increasing in the atmosphere, so if the project was ever paused, you'd have a rapid heating period which would probably be worse in immediate effect than if you'd just allow the warming to progress more steadily.

Those are the practical reasons I think it's a nonsensical proposal, along the lines of parking a sunshade in space (getting that much material out to Lagrange 1 would be so costly as to be unimaginable). It's far cheaper just to replace, say, 1-3% of fossil fuel production per year with equivalent wind/solar/storage.

Undoubtedly there would be disaster with unintended consequences.

It's good to have skepticism about anything additive, as these decisions affect everybody and can have unexpected outcomes, for example using detergent to break up oil spills can make the effects worse on coral https://www.livescience.com/4567-bad-worse-oil-spills-cleane...

I'm not saying the proposed solution is good or bad, but trying new things on a big scale can have unexpected outcomes, and it's good to be wary.

Yeah, massively ambitious whiz-bang technology has never had unintended consequences. /s

Meanwhile farmers in Brazil are torching one of the planets lungs and no one seems to be doing anything about it.

Greenhouse gases heat the surface and the atmosphere, but solar radiation management (SRM) mostly cools the surface. If you use SRM to get the surface temperature 'right' that atmoshpere is still warmer that it would have been. This means you get less rain. Many places care more about rain than temperature.

This is a well understood consequence, but the specifics are where it gets very tricky. There is a non-zero chance that using SRM to cool the planet may also kill the Amazon rainforest by reducing rainfall. This obviously makes things a whole lot worse and no longer buys us time. [0]

This is not even an unknown unintendend consquence, it is pretty clear already. Obviously this doesn't mean we shouldn't look into it, but we already know the consequences of geoengineering are ... not good.

[0] - https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/12/10887/2012/acp-12-108...

I understand how people might be a bit shy to trust geo engineering since scientists will tell us we can’t precisely predict the results.

That being said, we’re currently conducting an uncontrolled climate experiment with the warming gasses we’re releasing. Reversing some of that is probably safe and sane.

Yeah, but the alternative is lower profits for entrenched corporate powers, so ...

In all seriousness, though, I'm glad someone is considering all options, because the political reality of this planet is that the common-sense approach may very well be off the table, meaning a moonshot is all we'll have left.

That said, I'd rather just take my chances with the warming than engage in some mad-scientist cooling plans...

Tangential, but I really enjoyed this podcast with a climate modeler:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYCrDuxal6k

This isn’t sufficient on its own. Reduction of emissions, carbon recapture and carbon sequestration are all needed.

And how do you calculate the probability of success here? And the probability of success of reducing carbon emissions?

The natural way to remove carbon is weathering rocks over millions of years, and it's not hard to accelerate that process so it only takes decades: https://vesta.earth

Why wouldn't that be the best strategy? Just like contraception is the best strategy for teenagers, I think natural methods of geoengineering are the best strategy for climate change. (I'm not saying aerosols are natural, that one is a horrible idea)

A strategy that has consistently failed across multiple countries for the last 30 years is not a good strategy.

The anti-human ideology of environmentalism needs to end or mankind probably will.

The massive carbon reductions being called for won't happen once people realize the massive toll in human suffering they would cause. A pre-industrial Earth couldn't support anywhere near 8 billion humans.

Introducing an exotic species for pest control can work, but sometimes it just makes everything much, much worse.

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2018/05/top-10-inv...

and like a volcanic eruption, the dust goes away in a few years.

stop the hysteria.

Certainly carbon capture won't be enough; we do need to reduce emissions. We have the technology to do that, but often not the political will. I don't know how to fix that. Fortunately the move toward renewable sources of electricity does continue to march on, just a lot slower than it needs to be.

> Yes, unintended side effects.

What if the unintended side effects are worse than the effects of climate change?

We've had extinct species for the last 200 years of Industrial Revolution, not sure a forced terraforming will change anything about that.

I think I see your point, but you are missing the elephant in the room. And you are not alone in missing it, so don't panic about being blind.

> Without some drastic step, global temperatures will rise by more than 2 degrees...

This, we know it for sure. Why not just accepting it (as the fact we know it is) and start to plan accordingly?

More and more land around the equator will become inhabitable, and people will be forced to emigrate en masse? Let's help them to start emigrate today!

Those tiny islands in the Indian Ocean that will be submerged by the rising water? Stop building there, and teach the children that their future will be somewhere else.

Widespread viruses? Learn from Covid 19, cooperate world-wide to have express vaccines and so on.

Sure, I'm talking about very, very sad scenarios, but so are you. But my proposals:

1- are based on what we know today;

2- we know that they can work;

3- we can estimate the amount of pain they will cause.

None of this point applies to any other proposal I've ever heard about concerning global warming.

What about degrowth?

More reflective footpath and road surfaces (think paler in colour rather than mirror like) are cooler - urban heat will be a problem that also needs solving and that solves both. Solar panels are also somewhat reflective.

I think it's a mistake to think 'large mirror' than to think about what we can change about the massive surfaces that we are already covering with man-made structures.

I disagree with this. The downsides will be things the same 15% of the population that always points these things out will point out. They'll then be soundly ignored.

Living in a draft proof, highly insulated home with mechanical air filtration and heat recovery, driving an EV that’s powered by the roof of your house doesn’t sound like any kind of worse life to me.

Abundant, locally generated electricity is a game changer. You can even extract drinking water from the air inside your house in all but the driest of locations.

Surely the close the blocking object is to the sun the better how close could we get a parasole?

Agreed.

> Honestly, at this point tech is probably the only way climate change will be fixed.

Disagreed. I think it would be a really bad idea to ignore the power legislation has. People don't exactly agree on taxes. They just don't disagree enough to want to suffer the consequences (direct and societal)

Legislate things that people don't disagree with too much.

You left out a word: wealthy people.

The lower 50% of the world's people income-wise are responsible for 15% of global CO2 emissions, and the top 10% for 34% of total emissions.

It won't matter how many people are riding around on e-bikes instead of cars if we have rich assholes flying half-way around the world 3-4x a year for vacation.

This. The sooner we understand this, the sooner it will be possible to have useful propositions.

> no matter how much activists keep trying to push that.

A huge part of the problem are the (usually) most vocal among the activists, who spit utter idiocies like: "It's too late: run!"

No! If it is too late, there's no point in running. If global warming is irreversible, there's no point in freaking up the whole word economy. Propose something that works and we will discuss the benefit-cost ratio. Going around howling nonsense only creates noise and lessen the credibility of the great people who are trying, with their heart, to solve the biggest problem humanity has ever had to deal with.

A better way would be to build a large mirror at a Lagrange point between earth and sun. With the huge reduction in launch cost by Starship this would become possible. And it’d be “easily” reversible.

But nothing of this will get done, because there are way simpler solutions.

Nuclear also isn't the best solution in any case, for multiple reasons that have been explained here over and over.

1. People think a non-renewable resource is somehow a permanent solution

2. There is only ever one solution and not a combination of multiple solutions all working towards a common goal

Nuclear or hydro or solar+wind. These are all good solutions.

Nuclear is far more expensive, but it can provide 100% of needs by itself.

Solar+wind is far cheaper, but the variability means that we can only get about 70-80% of the grid that way (no storage needed), with the remaining 20-30% made up by cheap storage or gas.

But it does have one disadvantage: if you don't like the effects, you have to paint all those roofs again. With stratospheric aerosols, if you don't like the results you just stop doing it, and they'll fall out of the atmosphere in a year or two.

Plus would also mitigate acid rain somewhat, and isn't noxious the way SOx is.

I'd highly recommend it, though the opening is very hard to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future

Stopping a billion separate entities polluting the atmosphere is organizationally infinitely harder.

Late stage capitalism and globalization would be my guess.

I've heard it said that the US is good at coming up with technical solutions to social problems and this seems like the perfect example of that. (Analogous to our terrible highway/stroad system in most cities, that moves a lot of vehicles and kills a lot of people)

coordination problems are tough, and there's no reason to believe that the largest one ever encountered should be easier than one organization deciding to engage in a large scale engineering project.

We need short term solutions like this, medium term solutions like reducing carbon emissions and longer term solutions like carbon capture. It's a complicated problem and the world is a complicated place.

We had a climate scientist make the statement in a colloquium over here, basically saying that he doesn't like humanity starting with geoengineering solution because we barely understand the system. He's of course correct with the latter part. We don't understand the earth's ecosystem. But he is _at least_ 300 years late with the first part. We are already doing geoengineering for quite some time, it just happens that the earth is a rather inert system and it takes a while to react.

It's cheaper to just start bottling the acid than to stop producing widgets.

Cry wolf enough times and people stop listening altogether.

The history of 'scientists' making outlandish claims about what will or won't happen - and then being provably wrong - is a big part of the problem.

In fact, things like dimming and sunshades get very very little funding.

Problem is most forms of biological carbon capture aren't sustainable (e.g. don't dump that carbon back in the ground, you need to instead continuously sustain that forrest or those pilot whales). The ideal form of carbon capture is probably growing forests then chopping them down and putting them in landfill, but you get soil depletion like that...

I'm personally much more concerned with the concentrated individual power of the likes of Putin or Xi than I am of Buffet or Gates.

I'm not arguing against measures to decrease wealth inequality. But is the sum of (potentially richer) individuals' actions likely to address climate change in a better way than a hypothetical billionaire's geoengineering project? I'm not convinced in either direction.

Probably still plenty of feudal Lords out there willing to accept some new serfs to work the land.

Their main points were all the patents, whitepapers, and testing which indicated the government had a secret program to inject the stratosphere with various substances to partially block the sun. They literally used the terminology "stratospheric aersolized injections", because that's what all the documents called it as well.

Why do you think they would go nuts? Because the government is now openly admitting they are going to do the literal exact thing they accused them of doing the past 15+ years?

I would think the people completely oblivious to the entire concept and body of research would go more nuts.

Failing to draw down atmospheric CO2 ensures increasing ocean acidification, threatening the basis of the whole ocean ecosystem.

> Source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/harvard-group...

> "The chemists think the solution could be calcium carbonate — the stuff of chalk, limestone, marble, and seashells. It may be less harmful to the ozone, and it’s not a big health concern. The team is studying how the substance affects chlorine and nitrogen oxides, which also exist in the stratosphere — largely due to man-made emissions — and speed ozone destruction. The researchers think the calcium carbonate might help to lower levels of these gases."

I think what will kill the human race is the "climate engineering" humans fighting with the "no nuclear, no engineering" humans while the "fuck you, I got mine" humans deliberately egg them on. Nothing gets done and the bulk of humanity dies from runaway temperatures that make significant parts of the world unlivable, drought, and rising sea levels ravaging coastal cities.

Do you feel similarly about freezing CO2 out of the air in the interior of Antarctica and burying it as dry ice? The natural temperatures are within spitting distance of the freezing point already (supposedly there have been occasional natural CO2 snows, although this is dubious because of the low partial pressure). Seems like it would be much less intrusive overall, although it would undoubtedly cost trillions to accomplish at scale.

Related papers:

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217183858.pdf

https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-12-0110.1

Well you have your answer already: the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. If anything, it was a grand scale experiment to see how well human beings can listen to and obey Orders. How well human beings can adhere to lockdowns and mask mandates and how well they will work. How well the Government and so called "Experts" will handle the grave situation. To weigh pros and cons of dying due to the virus vs dying due to starvation and poverty.

The result is that everyone fucked up. Big time. We are extremely lucky that the virus had a low fatality rate and was not like the black plague which wiped out 60% of Europe's population.

None of these "Executive Orders" were through Consensus or Vote. We were forced to "trust" the Government and the "Experts" to do the right thing. And how many of us know anything about viruses or developing vaccines to make any sort of reasonable judgement anyways? A tiny percentage of the entire populace. We had no choice really.

Irrespective of how bad they fucked up — from flip-flopping on mask mandates to imposing extremely harsh lockdowns that caused economic distress and induced the recession we are in now — not to discount the crazy Wars going on in the World especially after a devastating pandemic. We have proven ourselves to be the most inept "superficially intelligent" species which is due for another genetic evolution — the last one being the Neanderthal extinction some 40,000 years ago [1].

We let the elites and experts take decisions on our behalf and we saw how it fucked everything up. This is going to be no different. When push comes to shove, some old buffoons, holding desperately on to power, in their 70s, 80s or 90s, with little to no cognitive abilities, will be deciding the fate of approximately 8 billion people. To support these buffoons will be those greedy good-for-nothing companies that will be looking at how best to profit from the situation... all while being on the verge of extinction.

We are royally screwed. There is no denying that. If some highly evolved super-intelligent species of the future writes a history on Homo Sapiens, it would definitely be that we were the only species to have "fought amongst each other, stuttering and stammering our way to extinction, taking with us a perfectly habitable planet".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction

An excellent question. I'd be just as skeptical as you are about all this. And this seems to be a US effort, not a multi-national one? I would hope the US government wouldn't unilaterally decide to do something like this without getting buy-in from... well... literally the entire world. But presumably that would be impossible to do, so it would never get done if they chose a consensus-building approach. Which... might not be a bad thing.

In fact, I think it is deeply ingrained colonialist thinking that nature would need guidance from humans.

Rather, it's the other way around: as long as we don't see ourselves as part of the ecosystem and take our assigned role instead of constantly trying to patronize everyone else in the ecosystem - we would actually have a chance of survival.

The best strategy is to adapt. We are part of something bigger - but just a part and not the CEO of it.

I remember the federal government tried to stimulate internet growth, or help jumpstart solar companies or similar - they became giant cash grabs with little to show in the end.

I'd like to know ways the government could help stimulate really good solutions without giving money away or picking (unproven) winners.

My naive assumption is that the amount of CO2 released to put them into orbit would be a net negative, since they'll eventually fall away, revealing the the now increased CO2 to the sun.

Since it would break down and burn up upon reentry (or maybe just float down?) there might not be that much interaction anyway.

Compare that with the unknowns of longer-lasting particulates of sulfur and other nasties, the back-of-the-napkin math really doesn't sound that bad.

For those that don’t get the reference:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Shot_Mr._Burns%3F

There's a lot of human suffering underneath that anodyne phrase. Deadly storms and refugee camps and all the rest.

The trouble isn't the final temperature, it's the speed of the change. Given tens of thousands of years ecosystems can adapt. Change the climate in a few decades, though, and many species will just die. We aren't going to know all the consequences of that biodiversity loss until it's too late to fix.

You're absolutely right however that there's a narrow band of temperatures consistent with a habitable Earth. Which is why research into tools we might need to stay in that range is a good thing.