Cooling the Earth with a sunshade near the inner Lagrange point (2006)
pnas.org
pnas.org
Therefore, we need to look at solutions that don't require eighty percent of humanity agreeing on something.
And then, when the inevitable happens and it moves from theory to "you know ... actually ... our atellite could actually do that" and then to actually doing it against that really-evil-dude-that-totally-deserves-it du jour?
Or we do it first to lessen the economic impact of a cold not-very-well-oiled winter in Europe?
Plus, I'd like to point out that even when it goes perfectly smoothly, ironically, fixing climate change will make many climate change effects worse. For instance, currently meltwater is helping offset the draught in California (and in the nearly-1-billion-people Indus valley, and a hundred less important valleys). If we slow down climate change that meltwater contribution stops, today, almost entirely.
The same with many other effects. For instance the greening of the Sahara will stop, we will not only see less extreme weather, but less rainfall ... everywhere. And that will do a lot to prevent the countries from growing.
In reality, global dimming is worse than global warming. Much of the co2 is absorbed by the ocean planktons powered by sunlight. There are other ramifications too.
It seems you'd want to block infrared where most of the thermal energy is transferred, while letting the shorter wavelengths through for plants/plankton.
It's easy for a country to do what's in its own self-interest. It's difficult for multiple countries to come together and do things which are in everyone's common interest but which is against each individual country's interest.
The world did not come together. It was a shirt show. If the world came together we would have burried Covid sooner and with less people dying.
Rage gets engagement, algorithms boost the wild opinions and soon it feels like everyone is taking crazy pillS, but that is just your feed trying to keep you doom scrolling.
Nowadays I hear straight up batshit crazy things all the time. All the time.
It used to be that if you had crazy ideas you would receive feedback that you're crazy and people would not want to associate with you. Nowadays instead of thinking about it you just double down. Other nuts are coming out of the woodwork and all of a sudden "we have to consider all points of view". We cater to the lowest common denominator and entertain things that should be summarily dismissied.
Yup. I'm in the US. Yup it's a mess :(
And if any other nation down on Earth causes too much trouble? One quick flick of all the slats, and the sun briefly gets 10,000X brighter & hotter for them.
(Yes, I know enough optics to know that really wouldn't work. It's still a cool story.)
The entire narrative controlling trillions of dollars rests on code whose quality wouldn't pass 10$ bug bounty.
Quite like how the Fed economic policy which predicted transitory inflation was probably done with similarly bad models. Or how coronavirus spread models overshot and led to terrible decisions.
I don't trust centralized decisions done like that. They amplify expected errors into devastating proportions.
Plus, all the reports have been WAY too optimistic. Year after year there actual measurments come out and it's worse than the climate models.
Code quality is extremely relevant. These models are nearly untestable. Climate is too chaotic and these models don't predict anything successfully on short timescales, and some of them don't predict anything on large timescale either - look up the term "flux adjustment".
So at this point the entire trust in these and the entire narrative comes from a code that any experienced programmer with physics knowledge would never put the faith of the world economy on.
Do you know what's even worse than not stopping a human made climate change? Destroying the world economy just to find out that it did not solve anything and still end up with worse climate but without economic power to deal with it. Somewhat similar to coronavirus lockdowns.
:P
But I agree it's a technological bridge too far. I could see it help to fix the damage already done (and the damage to be done before we can move to fully renewable) but I don't think it's realistic.
But I don't think other mitigation methods like carbon capture are realistic either (not at a scale to actually matter).
Peak oil as a concept only ever made sense if you assumed a static price of oil. There are immense reserves when the price per barrel rises, or when new technology like fracking opens up new reserves.
Second, there are distinct advantages to higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere. It makes agriculture grow more quickly, leading to higher food yields. And the greenhouse effect is mostly independent of latitude so places like Siberia and northern Canada become habitable while the tropics do not become so hot as to be unlivable. Raising the global temp by 2 degrees could double the amount of high quality arable land suitable for dense human habitation.
Third, instead of a sunshade we could use a larger translucent film which blocks UV-B light like sunglasses. Imagine a world without skin cancer!
Do you have data on which flowers in which geographical areas reflect with UV-A and/or UV-B? Maybe to bolster your argument you will need to prove that this won't affect bees, and pollinators more generally.
UV-B is like mosquitos, one of those rare things that really only does cause harm and can be safely eliminated if possible.
People have evolutionarily adapted to the sun by producing melanin in their skin, but for some reason aerospace is the only answer?
Why the West (and frankly many on HN) seems so content on destroying the natural world for problems that only matter to a subset of rich people somehow still surprises and amazes me.
There are distinct advantages to making the internet unlivable, so that insane comments like this don’t have to exist anymore.
I always imagine these kinds of things starting in a conversation of a bunch of stoners munching on Funyuns while chugging Mountain Dew. "Like, dude, it would be so cool, if like, we made a giant sun shade in space. That'd be so rad!" Only someone thought it sounded smart when heard from outside the circle which is the really sad part.
Also, at least one of us can get a joke, and I'm guessing it's not you
If it's the US, it will "just" lose a lot of soft-power.
So why stop there? And as always, the Simpsons have predicted it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LbxDZRgA4
It's important to control the space junk problem, of course. But not at the cost of not using the space.
[1] https://www.universetoday.com/103650/space-debris-a-tale-of-...
Without that, turning on a dime away from hydrocarbons toward renewables only will inflict lots of damage to progress and people in both rich and poor countries as well.
We need an intermediate solution to attenuate the impact of hydrocarbons while we transition to alternative energy sources gracefully.
Lots people who advocate for the "bandage tear-off" fix are those who envision being able to withstand the consequences of such a choice. (Oh, I'll telecommute, I'll take the train, I'll get geothermal, I'll move to a mild climate, etc.) Most people don't have the above choices.
One thing I remember about a solar eclipse I saw was once it began, and a tiny corner of the sun was covered, all the heat from the sunshine seemed gone. We were in the middle of a hot field under some trailer awnings. It was miserable in the sun until just 1% of the sun was covered, and then the sunshine was barely different than the shade. There was no visual difference in the sun, but you could feel the change in radiant heat.
Was this confirmed? It's easy to underestimate because the sun is so incredibly bright that it bleeds outside and maintains it's perceived intensity and radius much more so than the actual numbers, due to various optical phenomena.
For instance, our eyes have logarithmic intensity response curve, so a 2x increase feels more like – say – a 1.1x increase.
I did look at the sun with glasses that made it appear as a dim orange ball, and as soon as the moon barely started to cover an edge it was comfortable to walk around in the sunshine. By totality we were all wearing jackets. This was in Idaho.
> The concept builds on existing technologies. It seems feasible that it could be developed and deployed in ≈25 years at a cost of a few trillion dollars, <0.5% of world gross domestic product (GDP) over that time.
EDIT: Ah, someone sniped me.
The paper cited here is from a U of Arizona professor who previously won a MacArthur "genius" grant, and develops the optics for some of the largest telescopes in the world. Not a quack. Harvard has a Geoenigineering department. Smart and credible people are working this problem out. We should give them our attention, money, and talents. The paper in this post lays out a plan to reduce climate change for under 0.5% of world GDP in 2006. The price of launching weight into space has plummeted in the 15 years since this paper was written.
If you're worried about unintended consequences of geoengineering, then contribute to reducing risk by helping to develop AI. Then we'll be better able to model its effects and mitigate risk through increasingly accurate simulation. We need to tell people to study materials science or something that will actually help if they're concerned about the climate.
Climate Fatalism is so mid.
Ok, I'll bite. Let's read up on this claim. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1129098184/van-gogh-sunflower...
> Climate protesters threw soup over Vincent van Gogh's "Sunflowers" in London's National Gallery on Friday to protest fossil fuel extraction, but caused no discernible damage to the glass-covered painting
I also don't mean to rag on the kids, I appreciate their passion. I just think it's misguided, and that if the wider array of potential solutions were better known then people could be more productive working on solving the problem. I think the fatalism about the topic is sad and unnecessary. I didn't mean the comment to be a cultural war "pick a side" post. The passion around the subject is justified, but I think it could be channeled more productively.
Many people use to agree with Malthus in the 1800s that the world was about to run out of food. Then the Haber-Bosch process was discovered, and problem solved. More mental energy should be put into finding a similar solution for climate change versus this century's equivalent of "the world needs less people because of food limitations".
tried to ruin. The painting was protected by a piece of protective glass. Doesn't mean these kids shouldn't be prosecuted, but the good news is that a priceless piece of cultural heritage was NOT destroyed by teenagers.
Funny because lots of very rational climate scientists [1] who spent quite a bit of time thinking rationally about climate science suspect that we are on track for several degrees of warming (2, 3, or 4 deg C) and express concern that we’re not doing enough to mitigate things getting worse.
Ex: Paul Beckwith https://youtu.be/2HZsUhAzSDc
I think that confusing can with will is a good way to increase the chances of won't. "Solving" climate change seems to be within our technical capabilities, but we currently appear to lack the collective will.
Oh sorry, i forgot we can techno-fix that with iron-seeding and massive alcali dumps.
So to make it short: these "solutions" provide FF companies more arguments to pump more oil.
BTW we are already MASSIVELY reducing forcing (0.8W/m2) with sulfur aerosols from sea shipping. When that goes down expect even faster heating, with consequences beyond what the bleakest models predict.
I leave you the size of the sun shade to get that negative forcing as an exercise.
If you take medicine as an example, all drug development comes with unpredictable side effects. The process for putting the safe label on a drug is through testing it on 10s of thousands of people – it's extremely primitive and only works if we're willing to accept catastrophic failures from time to time. Even when something goes wrong, we often don't know why. And even when we know why, Pharma companies have so much invested that they often hide it for profit reasons.
Or: When we started producing CFCs we had no idea that we'd weaken the ozone layer. How could we? It's a miracle that the causal link was found at all.
The problem of having only one planet makes climate engineering extremely risky. Obviously it depends on what method is used. Carbon capture is ~easy to test for side effects in isolation, whereas chemicals in the stratosphere or a space sunshade is harder.