Open letter regarding research on reflecting sunlight to reduce climate change
climate-intervention-research-letter.org
climate-intervention-research-letter.org
Yes, it might not become as warm, but especially plants need sunlight for photosynthesis / oxygen production. If we deny the plants that energy the ripple effect throughout the biosphere will be huge.
Satellites are negatively impacting astrophotography, but I don't understand how reducing insolation will destroy amateur astronomy.
I think the fact that the scientific community is writing these letters should also be interpreted as a data-point indicating that this point is close, perhaps even behind us.
Alternative solution. Stop worshiping economic growth. Fade out fossil fuels in energy (atomic), industry and transport (trains). Stop animal agriculture (30% of all habitable land), and reforest the grazing lands (double the forest area). Enable rewilding of nature (anthropocene) and repopulation of the oceans (90% of sharks now already gone).
But that would require a will to really do something. It's easier to spray some poisons into the atmosphere, I suppose.
> While we fully support research into SRM approaches, this does not mean we support the use of SRM.
> SRM does not address the cause of climate change, nor all of the effects of increased greenhouse gas concentrations, it likely will never be an appropriate candidate for an open market system of credits and independent actors
Madness is focusing on methods of mitigation of one particular aspect of the "climate change". I put this in the same bucket like the shading of the sun from the space (few weeks/moths ago?). Climate change is in fact a wrong term. We should focus on all aspects of anthropocene, especially on biodiversity and restoration of ecosystems.
With functioning ecosystems and with us not flooding the earth and atmosphere with poisons (stuff that does not belong in such big quantities, like co2, methane, pfoas, plastics, pesticides/herbidices, fertilizers, etc. etc.) the nature will return to the optimum state. Let's diminish ourselves and let the nature repair itself.
Hoping that some miraculous, non-existent technology will solve our problems while ignoring obvious and easy solutions (stop doing the bad stuff) exist is madness. Promoting such efforts makes the population complacement (no need to do anything personally, it's being worked on, let's consume more). Propaganda and greed. Same old, same old.
> Hoping that some miraculous, non-existent technology will solve our problems while ignoring obvious and easy solutions (stop doing the bad stuff)
You first.
“Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I'll bet you're still eating food that was transported by internal combustion engines, too.
Electricity is (should be, will be) practically free [0]. Unless somebody is living like a caveman they should not be advocating for responsible stewardship of earth resources?
> I'll bet you're still eating food that was transported by internal combustion engines
You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local [1] [2] [3]
[0] https://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/inst... - 254x254 km grid of solar panels is enough for the whole world
1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local - transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%.
[2] https://plantbasednews.org/news/plant-based-lifestyles-imper...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets - if the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares
The best and only way I agree with this is some sort of maneuverable lagrange-point satellite mirror. That way if we find we are totally fucking the environment we can reverse it immediately.
Also agree with all of the comments, that this is really just a way for us to continue our current trajectory.
Anything short of this in the "upper atmosphere" feels like an absolute non-starter, and this even feels like a non-starter as it is...
Carbon sequestration/extraction needs to be tied to heavy taxes on carbon emissions. What really annoys me about carbon taxes is that people want to do the offsets of the gas that burns now. Um, what about the untaxed previous century of emissions, which got us to that point?
A true carbon tax addresses offset for the emission AND eats into the existing backlog. Which is .... huge .... amounts of carbon.
If the US is spending more money on the military than addressing global climate change, you know that the power elite simply don't get it. I won't hold my breath on that.
The End.