I hate to burst their bubble, but it's unclear how they intend to keep their bubbles from bursting prematurely. They could easily be popped by space debris, or solar flares, or projectiles launched by a rogue state, or just because that's what bubbles do.
I wonder if they could use a material that would "dry" or "freeze" in the shape of the bubble. Maybe harden from the UV.
If the James Webb telescope gives a reasonable indication for the amount of stuff floating around these Lagrange points, it would be popped around once per month [1]!
Perhaps it's as simple as "blow another one" - since they propose constructing them in space one might keep the construction mechanism nearby to replace any that are prematurely popped
Space debris, solar flares, and rogue states are issues that would impact other solar-shield type solutions (unlike popping).
What the bubbles do address immediately is the manufacture of something in space with a high planar surface area compared to the volume and density (for getting it into space).
They are proposing putting the bubbles out at the Earth-Sun L1 point which is far outside where most of our current satellites are. Space debris is not really a concern there and I wouldn't put projectiles launched by a rogue state up there (there's plenty of closer things they would want to hit first).
There are plenty of inflatable space-based structures that have been proposed and some number of them tested (large inflatable antennas, inflatable elements to increase drag and bring space debris in, inflatable space habitats).
Granted, nothing is even within a few orders of magnitude of what they are proposing building so there are certainly still technical challenges.
Edit: Another technical challenge is the L1 lagrange point is not a stable point, so the bubbles will require some sort of control system (i.e. thrusters) to perform small orbit adjustments and remain in that spot.
I agree that space debris isn't too much of a concern if they have a very large grid of these bubbles. A percentage popping over a decade will be calculated in.
But L1 doesn't mean it won't get hit. James Webb has already been hit at its point in space.
Looks like they are optimizing for having the ability to easily destroy the solar shield if, for example, the cooling effect is greater than intended. I think that’s a wise precaution. If the bubbles can also be produced easily, which seems plausible, then perhaps losing some of them to harsh conditions won’t be such a big deal. With reusable rockets becoming a thing, replacing them could become more cost effective and simpler as time goes on.
My napkin math is that a bubble with a shadow the size of Brazil and made out of graphene weighing 0.77 mg per square meter would weigh about 25 million kg. Using multiple smaller bubbles could reduce this by at most a factor of four.
At a cost of $1,000-$10,000 per kg it seems possible to get this to space with a total cost on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.
You could do a estimate of the graphene itself but I think the cost would be similar.
By comparison, direct air capture of CO2 costs something like $600/ton. At 40 billion tons of global CO2 emitted per year it could cost 24 trillion per year to remove current emissions.
That said, I would bet there’s better economies of scale / ability to innovate lower cost zero-carbon energy sources with direct air capture rather than a giant space project.
The article suggests that the bubbles are reversible if something does go wrong, and one of the safer options out there for reducing the amount of energy that is being captured by the atmosphere. It seems pretty hopeful to me, which is what we need right now. The climate trauma is intense these days. This is hope.
Human civilization could collapse to the point where we lose space exploration, then we're stuck with some space bubbles limiting how much sunlight the planet gets. As effects of climate change wear off, we are slowly plunged into an eternal, global ice age. All life on earth is exterminated, save for some most resilient microorganisms.
The proposed location for this space bubble system, Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1, is gravitationally unstable.
Any device located there must actively maintain its location , using calculated thruster firings, generally on the order of months, or it will drift out of position in less than a year.
So we're safe from that scenario. If the satellite loses power, it will just drift out of our line of site of the sun. No intervention required.
Other active spacecraft located at L1: NOAA's DSCOVR climate observatory, and NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer
Excess CO2, and the impacts on human cognition from it, are the great threat to civilization. We need geoengineering to strip CO2 out of the atmosphere. Iron seeding* and global Carbon Taxes seem like the best options.
It doesn't really matter if it's in your house or not; the problem is global warming that's caused by the greenhouse effect that's caused by the CO2 in the upper atmostphere. I like the cut of your gib though.
Indoor CO2 scrubbers (even just to separate CO2 from inside air and exhaust it outside) would be a great technology right now, since it would allow us to reduce ventilation requirements and thus save on heating/cooling costs.
There's a good video on this that talks about how a similar technique might be used to terraform Venus over hundreds of years [0]
The main physics problem I see is that Langrange points are naturally unstable [1], so the bubbles would need to be constantly correcting their orbit. This problem would be compounded by solar radiation "blowing" the bubbles back to Earth. There are clever ways to mitigate this for other designs which are addressed in the video, but I don't see it addressed in the article.
Edit: it looks like it is addressed somewhat in the source article linked in another comment, by placing the bubbles a bit further towards the sun than the L1 point to compensate for solar winds. Also, If a bubble does eventually become unstable, they may be cheap enough to destroy it and send another one up.
However, the primary problem I see with this approach is that we are simply not politically ready as a species to attempt a global-scale engineering project like that. Some countries may find that climate change actually benefits them [2], or may even impact a geopolitical rival even worse. These countries may be inclined to send a few missiles toward L1 if thats the case.
Edit: Additionally, even if this does succeed, countries may see this as an excuse to keep burning stuff despite the additional negative consequences of carbon emissions [3]
> However, the primary problem I see with this approach is that we are simply not politically ready as a species to attempt a global-scale engineering project like that.
What's the point of bringing this up? Are you saying that their research is futile and that they shouldn't bother? That we should be funding something else?
There are separate groups of people working on the social aspects. Let MIT and other research institutions deal with coming up with solutions, and let politicians and activists deal with getting the world ready.
From everything I've seen, it'll take a global-scale engineering project of some sort to solve this problem. Might as well have the group of solutions ready for when/if the world is ready.
> Are you saying that their research is futile and that they shouldn't bother?
Not at all! We should absolutely be researching and developing this type of solution. I fully believe that eventually every populated planet will have some form of solar mitigation strategy like this, but our political structures would have to evolve as well.
I sincerely hope we're able to politically and societally support such a project this century, but I'm not optimistic on that timescale.
I like your venus idea a lot - always seemed like the better planet to terraform anyways. Probably a LOT more chemicals and gasses to work with and of course more sunlight / heat. It has to be easier to remove shit we don't want than it might be to ship it all the way to mars.
So does posturing. People disagree on the real problem: some think it's fossil fuels, some thinks it's overpopulation, some think it's industrialization. Can you be briefly specific about your focus and preferred outcome?
Reduce greatly the extraction and use of fossil fuels (cleaner energy sources, efficient and not for leisure travel) at the same time than massive carbon capture efforts. And I mean not to keep emissions as something is being captured, as some "green" alternatives are trying to be sold, like capture carbon into fuels that will be released shortly anyway.
At a big enough scale, GHG may start to reduce globally. That is the disease. Without that won't be any solution, just fragile mitigations in our way to the end of civilization as we know it. No matter how expensive or damaging it looks, the alternative will be always worse.
If, besides doing that, you want to add some mitigation to the warming, and that don't slow down nor stop GHG reduction, be may guest. But applying nail polish instead of stopping an hemorrhage is somewhat shortsighted, priorities should be clear.
Fantasizing that we can eliminate and reverse fossil fuel emissions without dramatically affecting global standard of living (acutely in less developed societies) is also a non-solution. We are going to have to deal with slowing but non-zero emissions for a long time, which essentially implies we will need to "deal with the symptom" as a primary remediation action.
> dramatically affecting global standard of living
What's wrong with that ? That's the issue many have and fortunately, you tell it like it is. People don't want to change.
Public transportation, changing the "dream of traveling" into another one, having electronic that lasts for 10 years instead of 5, better insulation, and the list goes on. Yes, one can change the global standard of living into other not lesser global standard.
Or you think it's already too late and then, well, it's effectively too late.
You can’t expect a majority to understand, much less accept, the probabilistic systems thinking required to conclude (and act on) dedevelopment.
Ambitious (and probably also clueless/disbelieving) ideologues will spin junk food narratives that move the masses.
And you will have war everywhere.
So it makes sense to roll the dice on remediation and hope slow social change takes. The only alternative is a horrible age for humanity, one way or another.
Economic forces are not slow. Renewables are radically cheaper than any other energy source. Getting out of the way of such change is all we need for it to happen very, very fast.
Distracting people with things that will not end up working brings catastrophe nearer.
Renewables come with major constraints that fossil fuel sources do not share. The value of the grid is rooted in its consistent availability. Renewables cannot replace on-demand generation because they are definitionally cyclic, constrained by availability of sun, wind and water [1]. Large scale energy storage is required to replicate the energy security offered by fossil fuel generation, which is not feasible with current tech at the required scale, and regardless the storage costs eliminate the argument of renewables as "radically cheaper".
[1] Geothermal is an exception. Gas is also technically a constrained resource, but not on a timescale relevant to this century.
You neglect the multiplicity of storage alternatives, all of which work, at different price points. The most cost-effective will be the ones used. Idiotic ones (e.g. Energy Vault's) won't be.
Of course very little storage is built yet, because it would be beyond stupid to build storage that there is not renewable capacity, yet, to charge up. Money is overwhelmingly better spent on generation capacity, first. Storage cost is falling faster than solar. When we build it, it will be very cheap.
Energy security is mainly what I was referring to. Inconsistent access and/or prohibitively expensive electricity and gas is a huge problem for personal health, healthcare, education and access to economic opportunities.
How is it not? Our civilization is burning through its resources at an unsustainable pace, in several major ways, and the obvious projection is overshoot and collapse.
Many people have faith that as-yet-unknown technological innovations will save us. Other people have faith that Jesus will return from heaven and save them. Faith sure must be comforting!
Given the knowledge we actually have, and the tools which are actually available, there appears to be a choice between working our way down to a lower standard of living now, gradually, as we transition to renewable energy, or dealing with an abrupt shock later, coping with the sudden chaotic arrival at a lower standard of living involuntarily, after the wheels have come off the fossil-fuel party all at once.
Cheap energy, fresh water, arable land/fertile topsoil, a functioning marine food web, functioning boreal ecosystems, pollinators, climate stable enough for consistent agriculture and reliable shipping. The more energy we use, the more CO2 we emit; the more we destabilize the climatic & ecological systems we depend on, the riskier a predicament we place ourselves in.
Given the ~40 years it will take to reach net-zero CO2 emissions, we will certainly miss a good number of climatic tipping points, and the environmental changes which result will add even more pressure to our existing risks. It is only sensible to buy ourselves as much time as possible by reducing energy demand. How do we do that? Well... that was my original remark.
ACs can be coupled with solar power, with only a very small battery (reducing CO2 a lot). Or, as has become common in some European countries, an electric air heat pump could both heat and cool housing. With the additional benefit that you get hot water as a side product in cooling mode.
Well, if we could wave a magic wand then it is obviously better to stop climate change even if it means reducing the global standard of living simply because out-of-control climate change will harm living standards much more. But we can’t and developing nations are likely to go full steam ahead, like we did back in the day.
I mean it's fine for a system where the only thing that matters is the symptoms. The only reason we care about the extra CO2 in the air is because it's effect on the planets temperature; if we fixed that who cares about the CO2?
We need a quick fix. I'm based in the Netherlands, two thirds of which is threatened by a sea level rise within the next hundred years. If that sounds far away to you: my grandmother died at age 99. There's a very reasonable chance my children, teenagers right now, will live through this.
It seems likely the sea rise will be a multi-century, unrelenting, ongoing event of rise upon rise that will not stop at the levels envisaged by anyone planning any mitigations. So, no.
There is a reason scientists are concerned.
On the positive side for the Netherlands, their expertise will be coveted worldwide as hapless nations futilely seek to forestall the inevitable stage by stage.
I'm not sure you understand how much baked-in catastrophe we already have in store for us. Even with 0 new emissions starting tomorrow, we will still need to address the changes that are coming our way over the next decades...
Unfortunately we past the point of just needing to address the causes. This patient is in the hospital and needs all the medical intervention we can provide.
Putting the patient in an ice bath reduces fever, fast. But it does not save the patient. Instead, it actively interferes with controlling the infection, thus with saving the patient.
We have an antibiotic that would work. We just need to use it. Each second's delay administering the antibiotic increases odds of death.
That analogy is super wrong. An antibiotic in the analogy would be renewables AND massive CO2 capture. Which is not even on the table right now. We only have a HALF solution to the problem.
First stop adding to the problem. Then, reduce the problem.
Diverting resources to capture would steal from displacing CO2 emitters. There is no way you can capture more than is being emitted until the amount emitted is driven way, way down. Only after you cannot displace much output anymore are other methods of any use.
You get overwhelmingly more benefit from each dollar by displacing output.
When you buy candy, are you diverting resources away from cutting CO2 emissions? When you buy a movie ticket? Every month when you pay your Netflix subscription?
Keeping with your medical analogy, palliative care exists because it's just practical to acknowledge that treating a disease is also about dealing with human nature. You can't just focus on the illness and ignore the discomfort it (and the treatment) will create. Every effort counts.
We are making progress on CO2, it's just not nearly fast enough. This solution potentially treats the symptoms quickly while we slowly cure the disease.
They don't give more information about the size than "brazil", they do state the density as ~1.5g/m^2. Just multiplying that by the area of brazil we get 1.3×10^13 grams or 13 million metric tons.
> but within the realms of what SpaceX is claiming they want to make possible
Is it possible to talk about space faring without mentioning spaceX theories? Why not talk about companies that have been sending stuff up there for decades?
No one else has suggested that they are anywhere close to lifting this amount of mass, or even have any future plans that might change that. For reference, all time total mass to orbit so far is < 20k tons.
Lunar regolith seems to be about 20% silicon (by mass).
We could try to lift that much silicon from earth's gravity well, or try to build a refinery and launch system on the moon, with ~1/6th the gravity of earth.
Theoretically, but to make that work you're talking about a far greater advance in space capabilities than "just" launching from earth. You're still talking about launching 10 millions tons of material, and you're going to need local infrastructure to do everything like "make launch vehicles and fuel" if you want it to be an efficiency win over launching from earth.
Or instead of relying on essentially magic we could deploy current and known solutions that will solve the problem, but we will have to invest real $, conserve, and consume less. Sadly, there’s no chance practical solutions that require worldwide coordination will work as humans, especially those with money and power, are generally selfish.
Current known solutions cost much less than carrying on as we are. Current economic winners, who are personally responsible for the looming catastrophe, would take in less.
At this point it isn’t about giving up fossil fuels anymore and more about acting to revert the damage already done. We appear to already be to late to prevent the 1.5degree global warming and even 2.5 which could cause a runaway effect. The only viable option is to let less energy hit the earth.
Not everyone--in fact, nearly everyone--doesn't subscribe to your sky-is-falling comments throughout this thread. Your ego and your news bubble may make it seem like everyone thinks the way you do, but they don't. Instead, people like you further radicalize and polarize everyone, which will only lead to conflict, not rational solutions. Take a moment and breathe. We're all alive, and life on Earth has never been better.
You are wrong. You do not understand how you are wrong, because you have not thought it through. You can start on that any time you like. Or keep on working toward making things worse. Your choice.
Fossil fuels aren't going to be given up even remotely soon. They'll still be in use a century from now... because the alternative is pre-civilization, and nobody's going to go for that. Nobody. Billionaires are definitely not giving up their private jets, their 300 foot yachts filled with Russian whores, and their 15,000 square foot mansions that show just how grand and powerful they are.
Normal people aren't giving up their 70 degree indoor air conditioning in the middle of Florida, Texas, or California summers of 100+ degrees, either. You know what else us normal people aren't going to give up? Going to the store and getting a ribeye steak.
Technology is going to have to come up with solutions that we can live with, and we're going to have to accept some of the negatives of climate change. Period, end of story. Rich people aren't going to voluntarily suffer. And most of the Western world is "rich".
Planet scale geoengineering that may or may not be possible with existing or near technology.
Or
Just blast sulfur, calcium carbonate, or some other particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight. Elon Musk could do this by himself. Single digit billions with technology we've perfected decades ago.
Waiting patiently for a a majority of people to realize it's the only realistic path to buy us enough time to transition to renewables.
Bubbles are not safe. Reversing it partway is far worse than not starting. Even starting would be disastrous, to the exact extent it distracted from doing something that works.
We know what works: cut CO2 emission. Nothing else does.
Blocking or reflecting sunlight does not seem like a great path forward for wind or solar energy, considering that both require that sunlight that's being blocked. Hydroelectric, nuclear, geothermal, maybe. Until we get a nice little ice age and the water freezes too much. Maybe a better solution here would be to just accept that civilization as we know it needs to adapt rather than forcing the entire planetary ecosphere to adapt around us.
The article mentions the fatal flaw with the particle technique, but may I request your source that leads you to believe that we have "perfected" deploying particles in our atmosphere on a global scale?
Also, please don't give Elon any ideas, he already has enough futile showboats.
It utterly fails to mention the fatal flaw of both schemes. Neither addresses the problem, which then carries on until the ocean ecosystem, thence civilization, collapses.
It will keep the planet habitable and buy us time to solve the fundamental problems. We don’t have the technology or global political will to reverse or even slow global warming. We’re not even close. We need more time.
Ignoring this reality will just guarantee our collapse. Geoengineering gives us a plausible way out.
The alternative is people continuing to clamor for global cooperation, a comically naive goal that has gained near to zero traction in 40 years.
Renewables are radically cheaper than any other source of power, ever. Scrapping the old stuff and building out renewables is cheaper than keeping any of it.
We don't need to achieve "global cooperation". We just need to each act in our own self interest, as quickly as we can. It is the only strategy that can work. It still might not work. But directing resources elsewhere makes it happen slower. Too slow is the same as failure.
It’s scary how many people think we have a way out of global warming that doesn’t involve a scheme like this. We’re perpetually 30 years away from carbon neutrality which is actually comically far from reversing or even slowing runaway warming.
Your reaction is why I mentioned that I will patiently wait for others to give up on this absurd idea of saving the planet with renewables. We need more time. Geoengineering is the only way to buy us that time.
Cheers to waiting for more to come to this realization. Let’s talk again in 2030.
Reducing sunlight to slow warming seems like the most desperate move with unintended consequences. The planet has evolved for billions of years with a constant amount of sunlight. Greenhouse gas sequestering is the most direct reaction to a Greenhouse gas problem.
Indeed. The amount of photosynthesis going on is proportional to inbound sunlight. So you might be able to reduce the temperature of the planet in this way but you will also reduce the amount of photosynthesis happening.
Depends where you reduce it though. Theres not a ton of photosynthesis happening in the middle of the REALLY brutal deserts and reducing some sunlight would also reduce the heat and maybe increase plant life and photosynthesis. Thats assuming you can control it that granularly though.
If the bubbles can be coated, then the filtered spectrum can be influenced. Eg if 20-300Thz is filtered out, then we only lose heat that’s probably not really useful to plants.
Yes, this would be ideal (although I've rarely seen light measured like that - isn't wavelength almost always used?) If you could have a bandpass filter allowing in ~400-700nm light that would be kind of awesome - definitely a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too moment. (of course with our luck there will be some process we need that we don't know about that requires the rest of the spectrum too)
Not to mention one of the risks that they mention seems pretty disastrous:
>One of the most serious potential risks of solar geoengineering is termination shock. If we were to use solar geoengineering to suppress global temperatures, but we didn't do anything about CO2 emissions, and if for some reason you were to stop suddenly, all of the solar geoengineering, then those temperatures would suddenly spike back up. And that would mean that human and natural systems had less time to adapt to the new conditions.
So if it works for awhile, and then for some reason stops working, we end up shocking every system on earth. I appreciate that the scientists are hammering "we need more research" but I don't think we are capable of identifying all of the catastrophic failure modes.
I think this argument really suffers from the fact that aerosols from the burning of fossil fuels is currently suppressing the full amount of warming we should be experiencing given the composition of the atmosphere. In other words, we're already masking some of the warming and as we move globally off coal we're going to see warming spike.
It sounds like you're making an argument for slowly decreasing the aerosols from fossil fuels, so that we avoid the risk of termination shock, rather than an argument for adding more risk to termination shock by adding space bubbles.
My point is that we will have to do some sort of solar management given the fact that we are currently doing it without even putting any thought into it.
Arguably we are currently experiencing a "termination shock" given the move away from coal and other fossil fuels to clean energy. But honestly I don't even understand what "termination shock" really means. Does it matter if removing aerosols happens over the course of a decade or a century when the rise itself is the issue, not the speed of which it happens. 10 years or 100 years is too soon for any ecosystem or species.
Except it hasn't. Solar irradiance has steadily increased over billions of years, and fluctuates regularly with the solar cycle. I'm not saying that this couldn't have unexpected consequences, but you can't start from the premise that solar irradiance has always been constant.
From the perspective of users of solar energy on Earth, wouldn't an increase over billions of years appear constant? My intuition tells me that evolution is much faster than that, and any fluctuations due to solar cycle dynamics would already be mitigated as expected by the same process, if it is indeed so regular.
What I was getting as is that you can't start with a false claim to make a convincing argument. I didn't see what the expected reduction is from the MIT research, but if it falls within known effects of the solar cycle, Milankovitch cycles, and recorded volcanic activity it's less risky than stating that it's a change that the earth has never seen.
Not my area of expertise, can you please share reasoning as to why reflecting sunlight is disastrous. also please share evidence that attempting multiple strategies is guaranteed to lead to failure or is even probabilistically worse than only relying on current trends of attempting to decrease co2 emissions
Simple: reflecting sunlight does nothing to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, or to reduce the amount going into the atmosphere. The CO2 is the problem, not the temperature. The temperature is a measure of the CO2 problem. Force the temperature, and it ceases to become an accurate measure.
As CO2 continues to build up, ocean pH decreases, reflecting increasing acidification. As pH decreases, the base of the ocean food chain begins to collapse. When the ocean food chain collapses, the main protein source for much of humanity vanishes. Global war follows, and civilization collapse. Slightly lower temperature is unnoticed.
So all the experts who talk about the 2 degree celsius goal did set the goal on the wrong measure? Please be more convincing than just restating your previous hypothesis.
As far as I understand the situation, the increased average temperature is the problem. Not because every day would be exactly n degrees warmer/hotter, but because it leads to way more variance in the atmosphere, i.e. storms, hot and cold extreme wheather etc. The CO2 itself might also induce problems. But they do not dominate the situation.
Failing to control CO2 leads inexorably to global collapse of civilization, regardless of temperature.
Civilization would also collapse as a consequence of extreme temperature.
Temperature increase is easier to limit, but redirecting resources to limiting temperature accelerates CO2 increase, thus collapse from that.
Directing resources to reducing CO2 also limits temperature rise.
Each dollar directed to intervention A is a dollar not directed to intervention B.
Extreme fever can kill the patient. Plunging the patient in ice water cuts fever, but fails to save the patient. Antibiotics may take longer to reduce fever, but offers the possibility of saving the patient.
But betting everything on one horse, company, or intervention is rarely a good strategy. I think Nicolas Nassim Taleb makes compelling arguments in his books, starting from the Black Swan.
Nuclear winters occur somewhat regularly in earth’s history, usually after a very large volcano erupted but also sometimes after a large asteroid strikes. Unless I’m mistaken the last such natural nuclear winter was after the Pinatubo eruption in 1991, which caused a small but significant global cooling effect of 0.5˚C between 1991 and 1993.
Volcanoes of the same scale happen around every 50 to 100 years, but larger ones with more sever global cooling effects happen every 1000 or so years. Every 50 000 years we can expect a mega-colossal super volcano. The Youngest Toba eruption over 70 kya caused a nuclear winter for over 5 years with an accompanying cooling which lasted possibly for another 1000 years.
Even though these events are natural and happen regularly, they are usually devastating for the life on earth, usually with several species going extinct as a result. There are theories that the Toba eruption almost wiped out all of the human races and created a “bottleneck” in our evolution.
So evidence suggests that a quick dimming event range from being insignificant to catastrophic for the life on earth. There is for sure a reason for caution here.
It also changes with snow cover. More snow means more reflection, meaning cooler temperatures. A reason the Earth spends such long periods in ice ages.
We are still coming out of the last one.
The net solar flux hasn't changed. What you are talking about is increased albedo in specific areas. This is lowering solar flux globally. How will this effect agriculture? Plant life? Ocean life in twilight zones?
This is radically dangerous, and is only being proposed because we refuse let extractive industries die or change our lifestyles even slightly.
> "This is radically dangerous, and is only being proposed because we refuse let extractive industries die or change our lifestyles even slightly."
So much exactly this… I hear people talk so much about how intelligent and adaptive humans are, and how we're sure to survive almost anything because of that adaptability and intelligence, but then comes time to change something small to actually adapt to a big deal situation (like climate change for one example among many) and nearly all of humanity bands together to fight against even the tiniest change in how we do things, because apparently "the way it's always been done" is by far the best (even when it's provably wrong or bad). I truly hate humanity at this point because of this (among many other quite valid reasons I won't go into here). The Universe will be a better place when we're all gone.
That seems on par with claiming global warming is no big deal because the earth has been warmer or cooler at some point in the past. Those billions of years are irrelevant.
RE "constant amount of sunlight", this is actually untrue. The suns energy output is increasing roughly 10% per billion years. So it's actually never been stronger. It also means that we have much less habitable time on earth than we thought
An annual sunlight increase of 0.00000001 % is close enough to "constant" to make no difference. And I didn't even bother with compounding, so the real number is even smaller. It's dwarfed by other solar cycles, and those are dwarfed by the near-doubling of CO2 in our atmosphere.
I'm not automatically against geo-engineering approaches, but we do need to consider them desperate moves compared to the reduction of the GHGs
Geoengineering in general is a high risk. But one aspect of this form of geoengineering, unlike pumping something into the atmosphere, is that it can be reversed quickly.
> unlike pumping something into the atmosphere, is that it can be reversed quickly
Isn't that a fundamental claim made by those who support pumping sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, however? That if you stop pumping, it quickly degrades and the atmosphere returns to baseline?
> NARRATOR: For 15 years Travis had been researching an apparently obscure topic, whether the vapour trails left by aircraft were having a significant effect on the climate. In the aftermath of 9/11 the entire US fleet was grounded, and Travis finally had a chance to find out.
> ...
> DR DAVID TRAVIS: We found that the change in temperature range during those three days was just over one degrees C. And you have to realise that from a layman's perspective that doesn't sound like much, but from a climate perspective that is huge.
> NARRATOR: One degree in just three days no one had ever seen such a big climatic change happen so fast. This was a new kind of climate change. Scientists call it Global Dimming. Two years ago most of them had never even heard of it, yet now they believe it may mean all their predictions about the future of our climate could be wrong. The trail that would lead to the discovery of Global Dimming began 40 years ago, in Israel with the work of a young English immigrant called Gerry Stanhill. A trained biologist, Gerry got a job helping to design irrigation schemes. His task was to measure how strongly the sun shone over Israel.
The thing with contrails (and we can turn it up by running rich) is that we have seen that we can turn this on (and off) relatively fast (days).
If it goes badly, reversing it makes it even worse.
And going badly is guaranteed, because CO2 would continue on up, and the ocean ecosystem would collapse. There are quite dramatic fossil records of such events.
But civilization would collapse first, so there is that.
It does assume we will be capable of popping these bubbles if we need to. We can not guarantee we will retain the capability to go into space. It would be better perhaps to engineer it so it naturally falls out of its location after some X years.
Seems like simulating a volcano eruption would be preferable to shooting stuff into space. It will naturally decay in a predictable amount of time, and you don't end up wasting energy on as many launch vehicles and creating space debris.
Even if we did somehow get the political will to fund a project of this magnitude, it could never work. The bubbles would get blamed for every single snowstorm, unseasonably cold day, and any other weather that happened after it was put in place.
I don't think it would last a year before it was taken down, regardless of whether or not it did what it was supposed to do or was responsible for any meteorological event.
I like this take. I think I agree with it, though I wonder if there is a limit. For example, if warming gets bad enough that there are obvious issues causing millions, would it be enough for folks to realize, "the negative consequences are worth it"?
Given that we've already crossed the point-of-no-return, I think some form of geo-engineering is the only way to prevent rising sea-levels, inhabitable conditions and human extinction. But I hope there's a way to do some sort of controlled experimentation first before committing to a "solution" and statements like this aren't very comforting: "Once those aerosols were released, though, we wouldn’t have a straightforward way to recapture them if the plan didn’t work or had unforeseen negative consequences."
I always said climate change would not do us in as the 'Geo-engineering' zealots would beat it to the punch for the price of a few publications and a fistful of VC spin-out capital.
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson covers this topic well via some insightful sci-fi story telling. I think his concept of a sulfur cannon(s) is more realistic and likely to be implemented in near future.
Reminder that the problem isn't just "too much GHG", but crossing most planetary boundaries[1] at the same time.
I get why MIT has done the research, but this publicity is poised to create yet another distraction and delay necessary actions. We have to stop focusing on the symptoms and have the courage to go after the root causes.
> this publicity is poised to create yet another distraction and delay necessary actions.
More knowledge and options are always better. It's up to the people we've chosen to lead us to actually choose an option and follow through, and I don't think one more option there is really what's preventing that.
Preventing more options from being presented is just a way to attempt to control the populace by restricting information. Necessary action won't be taken unless there's strong leadership willing to make it a priority, and there's already enough options on the table that whether none or 100 new ones pop up, it makes no functional difference to getting started seriously, but it does possibly allow for a better option to be chosen when we do.
That's not even true in theory. Given a simple problem A, when adding more options, at some point, choosing among the options requires more effort than solving the simple problem, if only by brute force. There's a reason why RDBMS sometimes skip indexes.
And in practice, GP is right: with humans, too many options eventually only distract from the problem.
> Given a simple problem A, when adding more options, at some point, choosing among the options requires more effort than solving the simple problem, if only by brute force.
But you are considering an increase only in options without the increase in knowledge to better evaluate options parent is suggesting, and you are putting the constraint that only single option at time may be adopted while in reality multiple may work in parallel/together just fine.
> Given a simple problem A, when adding more options, at some point, choosing among the options requires more effort than solving the simple problem
Only if you require that every option must be assessed. You can always choose a random subset, or the first X entries, as use those as the solution space. Additional solutions provide for additional strategies in choosing a solution, but at any time you can ignore additional solutions and treat them as if they don't exist.
> And in practice, GP is right: with humans, too many options eventually only distract from the problem.
The whole point of government is to provide a structure such that decisions like this can be made be reducing the set of people that needs to reach consensus to a manageable about. Those people can choose to accept or ignore any solution presented, and call on whatever expertise they need to make that decision.
The whole idea of there being too many solutions only makes sense when you you apply it towards the general public and people whose job isn't to make such a decision or be domain experts. Since those people aren't the ones actually making the decision, providing too many solutions to the problem to them is a non-issue, and for the actual decision makers and domain experts they have on call, additional solutions are beneficial.
Whether you or I are getting overwhelmed with the possible solutions is irrelevant. We aren't ultimately the ones that will decide what action to take (at least directly), and we aren't the domain experts advising those that will decide the plans (or present the ultimately small set of options that are valid). At least I don't think so, unless you're a domain expert, but even then, your role would just be to provide advice (or if you're a politician in charge of making this decision, but that's even less likely).
If you're choosing a random subset, then new worse options may crowd out existing better options, so it remains the case that more options isn't always better.
> Only if you require that every option must be assessed. You can always choose a random subset, or the first X entries, as use those as the solution space. Additional solutions provide for additional strategies in choosing a solution, but at any time you can ignore additional solutions and treat them as if they don't exist.
This presumes that options are of equal value, or at the least that there are more than N actual viable solutions, where N is sufficient to ensure whatever sample size you’re using includes one of the viable ones. “Ignoring additional solutions” presupposes that you know which solutions you should ignore and still requires some form of assessment of the solution space.
As for the rest - while indeed it is the job of government to structure these decisions, recent history suggests that the opinions of the broader public still play a role in those decisions, that decisions are rarely made based purely off their technical merits, and that snake-oil salesmen can still do measurable harm to decision-making in representative governments.
> This presumes that options are of equal value, or at the least that there are more than N actual viable solutions, where N is sufficient to ensure whatever sample size you’re using includes one of the viable ones.
That that presumes we're looking through ideas sequentially and thus are actually limited with the number of choices we're generally presented with, when really it's more akin to mapreduce when assessed at the level of leadership and domain experts. Between billions of people and thousands of domain experts, I don' think we're actually reaching any real limits, given the logarithmic nature of filtering good ideas in this way. What that means is that in effect there's a pool of solutions already filtered for viability and usefulness to choose from.
All we're doing by entertaining the idea that we should stop looking for and presenting solutions is giving people an excuse to prevent ideas they don't agree with from being spread to others. The whole idea of one person thinking that because they think an idea doesn't have merit that others shouldn't see it is itself harmful.
> while indeed it is the job of government to structure these decisions, recent history suggests that the opinions of the broader public still play a role in those decisions, that decisions are rarely made based purely off their technical merits, and that snake-oil salesmen can still do measurable harm to decision-making in representative governments.
There are many possible reasons why we don't see progress from our leaders on certain issues. I'm not convinced that there being 1000 possible solutions is any worse than there being 10. I suspect that the same forces that prevent progress work the same in both cases, and if we're talking about less than 10 possible solutions, then I think we haven't examined the problem well enough. In any case, I don't think the problem of there being too many solutions and too much information is as obviously the problem as others are presenting it, and would want to see a real argument presented and defended before I would accept it at face value. That's not because I'm trying to be overly argumentative, just that as I noted, I just don't think it's as obvious a conclusion as others seem to.
Only if you require that every option must be assessed.
The point is putting a given option into the public eye results in the assessment process being activated.
...but at any time you can ignore additional solutions and treat them as if they don't exist
Scientists in the lab can do this, should do this and not publish half-baked solutions. Randos reading these ideas can't do this given they don't have technical knowledge to sort them.
The whole idea of there being too many solutions only makes sense when you you apply it towards the general public and people whose job isn't to make such a decision or be domain experts.
We live in a democratic society. If you can bs to some number of average people, they may elect people who go with the bs and force bs decisions. Especially when doing nothing, despite disastrous consequences, serves the interests of powerful. This is happening, this is the mess we're in. It's frustrating people putting forward a delusional idea of the decision process around these event. That also doesn't help. IE, no, the decisions haven't been and won't be made by unbiased, non-partisan actors but rather they have been made by political forces in a highly partisan and self-interested fashion. That's why we're facing catastrophe (that there's a large fire burning a bit North West of me doesn't help my mood here).
> Only if you require that every option must be assessed. You can always choose a random subset, or the first X entries, as use those as the solution space.
Choosing a random subset is a solution, but it clearly is not an always better solution as you claimed.
> Additional solutions provide for additional strategies in choosing a solution, but at any time you can ignore additional solutions and treat them as if they don't exist.
You're literally using "ignore additional solutions" as a counterargument to the assertion that more solutions create "yet another distraction".
Unhappy with solution X? Propose a couple other solutions {N}, until people get lost thinking about something in {N} and ignore X. Which is what the GP comment complained about.
More options is too simple. I hope you agree there is a difference between "Humans cause climate change, we need to get rid of humans" and "Humans cause climate change, we need to reduce human impact to the planet". Presenting the first one is an option that wastes everyone's time.
Just for the sake of contradicting you, we (all the Humans) could move outside of the biosphere, e.g. on the Moon or Mars. That would completely remove our influence on the biosphere, the atmosphere, the oceans...
However that would request so much Earth resources to launch everybody and everything (and thus would definitively destroy the biosphere in the process), that it is just not feasible.
Yes, but there may be a benefit to launch a part of the Human world outside of the biosphere, e.g. the most polluting industries.
It is worth thinking whether it is a good thing or not that a very risky industry (for which an accident could be really disastrous) can take place on the Moon.
We can also launch a bare minimum, and then let automated builder robots unroll the industry from local resources (e.g. lunar silicates, other metals,...).
This can be how huge photovoltaic grids could be built on the Moon, for example.
Of course we cannot rely on that, because photovoltaic facilities built by builder robots would take too much time to be of any relevance for the current crisis.
If it is launched now we may be able to use it a few decades later.
You are reasoning like if not 100% of engineers but "only" 99.999% work on the priority projects then those priority projects will fail. That's not the case.
Moreover, there is always the need to continue to explore and diversify research and development. It allows to spread the risks (even if modestly, given that most resources go to the priority projects) and discover the necessary paths to go ahead (which is required even for the critical paths for the priority projects).
I don't think anyone will dispute that some options are not useful, but I don't accept that you, or anyone else, should be the arbiter of what is useful and decide that more options aren't, and therefore we should stop.
For the same reason that the next option presented could be the worst possible option, it could also be the best possible option. I reject the attempt of others to tell me that we should stop entertaining any more options at all.
That said, I think you've simplified the options presented for discussion to the point of being not very useful for said discussion.
> It's up to the people we've chosen to lead us to actually choose an option and follow through
So far this strategy has consistently lead to complete and resounding inaction. The stronger the leadership the more likely we are in actually going in the opposite direction (see e.g. Businaro in Brazil or Trump in the USA).
More options have also shown to be a major distraction at best and actively damaging at worst. Take carbon offsets as an example of an option which actively hinders climate action.
What climate justice activists have consistently been calling for since at least COP 15 in Copenhagen 2009 is International agreements, carbon tax, and green infrastructure. There has always been fierce resistance from polluters in any of these three items, and so far the political class has consistently cited with the polluters. Then they use distraction policies with questionable results (like cap-and-trade, carbon offsets or magic bubbles) as an excuse not to enact proven policies.
If the cause of climate change is heat gain from the sun being higher than cooling via radiation to space, then GHG reduction works by changing the second part, and partially blocking insolation works by changing the first.
Whether or not crossing planetary boundaries is a problem is a matter of debate, not a settled fact. If we can treat the side-effects of human disruption on the planet, then why is that not sufficient?
What if you think that collective human courage is not even feasible? I’d venture to say it’s naive to even believe we’re able to restrict ourselves to the magnitude required. Even if one country found a solution, they’d have no control to exert it on other countries and it would almost certainly come with massive switching costs or limitations. Humans have too many tribal motives and politics to support a single cause like this.
yes restraint against structures is impossible, but if you change the structures to be still beneficial for humans and sustainable, thus not requiring restraint, youre good
379 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadIf the James Webb telescope gives a reasonable indication for the amount of stuff floating around these Lagrange points, it would be popped around once per month [1]!
1. Four hits after 5 months: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/06/james-we...
What the bubbles do address immediately is the manufacture of something in space with a high planar surface area compared to the volume and density (for getting it into space).
There are plenty of inflatable space-based structures that have been proposed and some number of them tested (large inflatable antennas, inflatable elements to increase drag and bring space debris in, inflatable space habitats).
Granted, nothing is even within a few orders of magnitude of what they are proposing building so there are certainly still technical challenges.
Edit: Another technical challenge is the L1 lagrange point is not a stable point, so the bubbles will require some sort of control system (i.e. thrusters) to perform small orbit adjustments and remain in that spot.
But L1 doesn't mean it won't get hit. James Webb has already been hit at its point in space.
At a cost of $1,000-$10,000 per kg it seems possible to get this to space with a total cost on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.
You could do a estimate of the graphene itself but I think the cost would be similar.
Civilization collapse is cheapest of all, but has perhaps undesired side effects.
Every bit of money and attention spent on this or any other "shade the earth" scheme just brings collapse nearer.
That said, I would bet there’s better economies of scale / ability to innovate lower cost zero-carbon energy sources with direct air capture rather than a giant space project.
Any device located there must actively maintain its location , using calculated thruster firings, generally on the order of months, or it will drift out of position in less than a year.
So we're safe from that scenario. If the satellite loses power, it will just drift out of our line of site of the sun. No intervention required.
Other active spacecraft located at L1: NOAA's DSCOVR climate observatory, and NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer
Edited to add a visualization of the ACE spacecraft L1 orbit: https://izw1.caltech.edu/ACE/ASC/DATA/browse-html/gse_color....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
https://www.vesta.earth/
During the Permian extinction CO2 was 3000 ppm - weathering rocks is how it was fixed back then. We just need to accelerate that natural process.
The main physics problem I see is that Langrange points are naturally unstable [1], so the bubbles would need to be constantly correcting their orbit. This problem would be compounded by solar radiation "blowing" the bubbles back to Earth. There are clever ways to mitigate this for other designs which are addressed in the video, but I don't see it addressed in the article.
Edit: it looks like it is addressed somewhat in the source article linked in another comment, by placing the bubbles a bit further towards the sun than the L1 point to compensate for solar winds. Also, If a bubble does eventually become unstable, they may be cheap enough to destroy it and send another one up.
However, the primary problem I see with this approach is that we are simply not politically ready as a species to attempt a global-scale engineering project like that. Some countries may find that climate change actually benefits them [2], or may even impact a geopolitical rival even worse. These countries may be inclined to send a few missiles toward L1 if thats the case.
Edit: Additionally, even if this does succeed, countries may see this as an excuse to keep burning stuff despite the additional negative consequences of carbon emissions [3]
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lissajous_orbit#:~:text=In%20p...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/16/magazine/russ...
[3]: https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-co....
What's the point of bringing this up? Are you saying that their research is futile and that they shouldn't bother? That we should be funding something else?
There are separate groups of people working on the social aspects. Let MIT and other research institutions deal with coming up with solutions, and let politicians and activists deal with getting the world ready.
From everything I've seen, it'll take a global-scale engineering project of some sort to solve this problem. Might as well have the group of solutions ready for when/if the world is ready.
Not at all! We should absolutely be researching and developing this type of solution. I fully believe that eventually every populated planet will have some form of solar mitigation strategy like this, but our political structures would have to evolve as well.
I sincerely hope we're able to politically and societally support such a project this century, but I'm not optimistic on that timescale.
The primary problem is that even attempting it would bring on global catastrophe just that much faster.
At a big enough scale, GHG may start to reduce globally. That is the disease. Without that won't be any solution, just fragile mitigations in our way to the end of civilization as we know it. No matter how expensive or damaging it looks, the alternative will be always worse.
If, besides doing that, you want to add some mitigation to the warming, and that don't slow down nor stop GHG reduction, be may guest. But applying nail polish instead of stopping an hemorrhage is somewhat shortsighted, priorities should be clear.
What's wrong with that ? That's the issue many have and fortunately, you tell it like it is. People don't want to change.
Public transportation, changing the "dream of traveling" into another one, having electronic that lasts for 10 years instead of 5, better insulation, and the list goes on. Yes, one can change the global standard of living into other not lesser global standard.
Or you think it's already too late and then, well, it's effectively too late.
Ambitious (and probably also clueless/disbelieving) ideologues will spin junk food narratives that move the masses.
And you will have war everywhere.
So it makes sense to roll the dice on remediation and hope slow social change takes. The only alternative is a horrible age for humanity, one way or another.
Distracting people with things that will not end up working brings catastrophe nearer.
[1] Geothermal is an exception. Gas is also technically a constrained resource, but not on a timescale relevant to this century.
Of course very little storage is built yet, because it would be beyond stupid to build storage that there is not renewable capacity, yet, to charge up. Money is overwhelmingly better spent on generation capacity, first. Storage cost is falling faster than solar. When we build it, it will be very cheap.
It's not a vote winner.
I should think that was fairly obvious. People do not like to be "dramatically" poorer, or even just a little.
Civilization not collapsing immediately, maybe moreso.
Many people have faith that as-yet-unknown technological innovations will save us. Other people have faith that Jesus will return from heaven and save them. Faith sure must be comforting!
Given the knowledge we actually have, and the tools which are actually available, there appears to be a choice between working our way down to a lower standard of living now, gradually, as we transition to renewable energy, or dealing with an abrupt shock later, coping with the sudden chaotic arrival at a lower standard of living involuntarily, after the wheels have come off the fossil-fuel party all at once.
Given the ~40 years it will take to reach net-zero CO2 emissions, we will certainly miss a good number of climatic tipping points, and the environmental changes which result will add even more pressure to our existing risks. It is only sensible to buy ourselves as much time as possible by reducing energy demand. How do we do that? Well... that was my original remark.
Anything that interferes with building out renewables as absolutely fast as they can be brings global catastrophe nearer.
Global civilization collapse would be hard on people.
There is only one way that works. All others mean disaster.
People who like looking ahead when investing should be thinking the same about all coastal and low lying regions. Resale value will be nil.
By the time a 30 year mortgage is over, the next buyer will be looking to the end of their own 30 year mortgage, and what they see won’t look good.
So there will be no buyers.
People don’t want to leave worthless property to their children, so the smart people who foresee this chain of events will get out now.
If we keep warming to 3 degrees, do you think the sea works will not be enough?
Collapsing civilization is bad for property values. And for the concept of property as such.
There is a reason scientists are concerned.
On the positive side for the Netherlands, their expertise will be coveted worldwide as hapless nations futilely seek to forestall the inevitable stage by stage.
Attempting any sort of "quick fix" guarantees quicker failure.
Civilization collapsing would anyway slow CO2 rise, but at substantial... cost. Probably mass extinction would happen either way.
And, addressing symptoms does not actually put off catastrophe.
Unfortunately we past the point of just needing to address the causes. This patient is in the hospital and needs all the medical intervention we can provide.
We have an antibiotic that would work. We just need to use it. Each second's delay administering the antibiotic increases odds of death.
Diverting resources to capture would steal from displacing CO2 emitters. There is no way you can capture more than is being emitted until the amount emitted is driven way, way down. Only after you cannot displace much output anymore are other methods of any use.
You get overwhelmingly more benefit from each dollar by displacing output.
When you buy candy, are you diverting resources away from cutting CO2 emissions? When you buy a movie ticket? Every month when you pay your Netflix subscription?
We can do both. In fact we MUST do both.
Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gk415yke8shtb84/AADfZbzC8xISX-lTm...
Press release: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gk415yke8shtb84/AAAaHVK7WNKCUN2rl...
PDF with more information: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gk415yke8shtb84/AABLA5kYXUrrZfidU...
---
They don't give more information about the size than "brazil", they do state the density as ~1.5g/m^2. Just multiplying that by the area of brazil we get 1.3×10^13 grams or 13 million metric tons.
That's a ton (heh) of mass, but within the realms of what SpaceX is claiming they want to make possible (at least if they launch it over a decade or two): https://wccftech.com/spacex-aims-to-haul-more-than-a-million...
Is it possible to talk about space faring without mentioning spaceX theories? Why not talk about companies that have been sending stuff up there for decades?
No one else has suggested that they are anywhere close to lifting this amount of mass, or even have any future plans that might change that. For reference, all time total mass to orbit so far is < 20k tons.
We could try to lift that much silicon from earth's gravity well, or try to build a refinery and launch system on the moon, with ~1/6th the gravity of earth.
"Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."
Or of what bearing such public opinion has on the truth valance of beliefs or states of the universe.
Normal people aren't giving up their 70 degree indoor air conditioning in the middle of Florida, Texas, or California summers of 100+ degrees, either. You know what else us normal people aren't going to give up? Going to the store and getting a ribeye steak.
Technology is going to have to come up with solutions that we can live with, and we're going to have to accept some of the negatives of climate change. Period, end of story. Rich people aren't going to voluntarily suffer. And most of the Western world is "rich".
Or
Just blast sulfur, calcium carbonate, or some other particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight. Elon Musk could do this by himself. Single digit billions with technology we've perfected decades ago.
Waiting patiently for a a majority of people to realize it's the only realistic path to buy us enough time to transition to renewables.
We know what works: cut CO2 emission. Nothing else does.
The only point is to buy us time, not permanently change anything.
Meanwhile, global warming will outright benefit some nations, such as Russia. The idea of global cooperation is comically naive
Also, please don't give Elon any ideas, he already has enough futile showboats.
Ignoring this reality will just guarantee our collapse. Geoengineering gives us a plausible way out.
The alternative is people continuing to clamor for global cooperation, a comically naive goal that has gained near to zero traction in 40 years.
We don't need to achieve "global cooperation". We just need to each act in our own self interest, as quickly as we can. It is the only strategy that can work. It still might not work. But directing resources elsewhere makes it happen slower. Too slow is the same as failure.
This truly is horrible reductionism ala "it will be fine, NOTHING will go wrong, TRUST me".
Your reaction is why I mentioned that I will patiently wait for others to give up on this absurd idea of saving the planet with renewables. We need more time. Geoengineering is the only way to buy us that time.
Cheers to waiting for more to come to this realization. Let’s talk again in 2030.
>One of the most serious potential risks of solar geoengineering is termination shock. If we were to use solar geoengineering to suppress global temperatures, but we didn't do anything about CO2 emissions, and if for some reason you were to stop suddenly, all of the solar geoengineering, then those temperatures would suddenly spike back up. And that would mean that human and natural systems had less time to adapt to the new conditions.
So if it works for awhile, and then for some reason stops working, we end up shocking every system on earth. I appreciate that the scientists are hammering "we need more research" but I don't think we are capable of identifying all of the catastrophic failure modes.
Source: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092021/global-warming-j...
Arguably we are currently experiencing a "termination shock" given the move away from coal and other fossil fuels to clean energy. But honestly I don't even understand what "termination shock" really means. Does it matter if removing aerosols happens over the course of a decade or a century when the rise itself is the issue, not the speed of which it happens. 10 years or 100 years is too soon for any ecosystem or species.
The only winning move is to shut down every attempt at such distraction. We know what we must do. The only thing remaining is to do that.
As CO2 continues to build up, ocean pH decreases, reflecting increasing acidification. As pH decreases, the base of the ocean food chain begins to collapse. When the ocean food chain collapses, the main protein source for much of humanity vanishes. Global war follows, and civilization collapse. Slightly lower temperature is unnoticed.
So all the experts who talk about the 2 degree celsius goal did set the goal on the wrong measure? Please be more convincing than just restating your previous hypothesis.
As far as I understand the situation, the increased average temperature is the problem. Not because every day would be exactly n degrees warmer/hotter, but because it leads to way more variance in the atmosphere, i.e. storms, hot and cold extreme wheather etc. The CO2 itself might also induce problems. But they do not dominate the situation.
Civilization would also collapse as a consequence of extreme temperature.
Temperature increase is easier to limit, but redirecting resources to limiting temperature accelerates CO2 increase, thus collapse from that.
Directing resources to reducing CO2 also limits temperature rise.
Each dollar directed to intervention A is a dollar not directed to intervention B.
Extreme fever can kill the patient. Plunging the patient in ice water cuts fever, but fails to save the patient. Antibiotics may take longer to reduce fever, but offers the possibility of saving the patient.
We still need the energy transition though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Volcanoes of the same scale happen around every 50 to 100 years, but larger ones with more sever global cooling effects happen every 1000 or so years. Every 50 000 years we can expect a mega-colossal super volcano. The Youngest Toba eruption over 70 kya caused a nuclear winter for over 5 years with an accompanying cooling which lasted possibly for another 1000 years.
Even though these events are natural and happen regularly, they are usually devastating for the life on earth, usually with several species going extinct as a result. There are theories that the Toba eruption almost wiped out all of the human races and created a “bottleneck” in our evolution.
So evidence suggests that a quick dimming event range from being insignificant to catastrophic for the life on earth. There is for sure a reason for caution here.
This is radically dangerous, and is only being proposed because we refuse let extractive industries die or change our lifestyles even slightly.
So much exactly this… I hear people talk so much about how intelligent and adaptive humans are, and how we're sure to survive almost anything because of that adaptability and intelligence, but then comes time to change something small to actually adapt to a big deal situation (like climate change for one example among many) and nearly all of humanity bands together to fight against even the tiniest change in how we do things, because apparently "the way it's always been done" is by far the best (even when it's provably wrong or bad). I truly hate humanity at this point because of this (among many other quite valid reasons I won't go into here). The Universe will be a better place when we're all gone.
No, it won't.
So it's about 0.000029% more since humans have evolved?
I'm not automatically against geo-engineering approaches, but we do need to consider them desperate moves compared to the reduction of the GHGs
Isn't that a fundamental claim made by those who support pumping sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, however? That if you stop pumping, it quickly degrades and the atmosphere returns to baseline?
https://globalnews.ca/news/2934513/empty-skies-after-911-set...
https://www.wired.com/2002/05/hot-on-the-contrails-of-weathe...
https://edition.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.cl...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dimming_...
> NARRATOR: For 15 years Travis had been researching an apparently obscure topic, whether the vapour trails left by aircraft were having a significant effect on the climate. In the aftermath of 9/11 the entire US fleet was grounded, and Travis finally had a chance to find out.
> ...
> DR DAVID TRAVIS: We found that the change in temperature range during those three days was just over one degrees C. And you have to realise that from a layman's perspective that doesn't sound like much, but from a climate perspective that is huge.
> NARRATOR: One degree in just three days no one had ever seen such a big climatic change happen so fast. This was a new kind of climate change. Scientists call it Global Dimming. Two years ago most of them had never even heard of it, yet now they believe it may mean all their predictions about the future of our climate could be wrong. The trail that would lead to the discovery of Global Dimming began 40 years ago, in Israel with the work of a young English immigrant called Gerry Stanhill. A trained biologist, Gerry got a job helping to design irrigation schemes. His task was to measure how strongly the sun shone over Israel.
The thing with contrails (and we can turn it up by running rich) is that we have seen that we can turn this on (and off) relatively fast (days).
--
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
And going badly is guaranteed, because CO2 would continue on up, and the ocean ecosystem would collapse. There are quite dramatic fossil records of such events.
But civilization would collapse first, so there is that.
I wish this solution won't be implemented
Fortunately, it would collapse and blow away before long. Unfortunately, that would make things even worse, for a while.
I don't think it would last a year before it was taken down, regardless of whether or not it did what it was supposed to do or was responsible for any meteorological event.
I truly don't know.
That has happened before, immediately before massive global extinction events. It would be a mistake not to avoid that.
For those who think this is absurd, this is a "what if, emergency solution" as it explains.
And, the moment you stop, things get much worse much faster.
I get why MIT has done the research, but this publicity is poised to create yet another distraction and delay necessary actions. We have to stop focusing on the symptoms and have the courage to go after the root causes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries
More knowledge and options are always better. It's up to the people we've chosen to lead us to actually choose an option and follow through, and I don't think one more option there is really what's preventing that.
Preventing more options from being presented is just a way to attempt to control the populace by restricting information. Necessary action won't be taken unless there's strong leadership willing to make it a priority, and there's already enough options on the table that whether none or 100 new ones pop up, it makes no functional difference to getting started seriously, but it does possibly allow for a better option to be chosen when we do.
That's not even true in theory. Given a simple problem A, when adding more options, at some point, choosing among the options requires more effort than solving the simple problem, if only by brute force. There's a reason why RDBMS sometimes skip indexes.
And in practice, GP is right: with humans, too many options eventually only distract from the problem.
Hick's Law, more or less: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick%27s_law
Only if you require that every option must be assessed. You can always choose a random subset, or the first X entries, as use those as the solution space. Additional solutions provide for additional strategies in choosing a solution, but at any time you can ignore additional solutions and treat them as if they don't exist.
> And in practice, GP is right: with humans, too many options eventually only distract from the problem.
The whole point of government is to provide a structure such that decisions like this can be made be reducing the set of people that needs to reach consensus to a manageable about. Those people can choose to accept or ignore any solution presented, and call on whatever expertise they need to make that decision.
The whole idea of there being too many solutions only makes sense when you you apply it towards the general public and people whose job isn't to make such a decision or be domain experts. Since those people aren't the ones actually making the decision, providing too many solutions to the problem to them is a non-issue, and for the actual decision makers and domain experts they have on call, additional solutions are beneficial.
Whether you or I are getting overwhelmed with the possible solutions is irrelevant. We aren't ultimately the ones that will decide what action to take (at least directly), and we aren't the domain experts advising those that will decide the plans (or present the ultimately small set of options that are valid). At least I don't think so, unless you're a domain expert, but even then, your role would just be to provide advice (or if you're a politician in charge of making this decision, but that's even less likely).
This presumes that options are of equal value, or at the least that there are more than N actual viable solutions, where N is sufficient to ensure whatever sample size you’re using includes one of the viable ones. “Ignoring additional solutions” presupposes that you know which solutions you should ignore and still requires some form of assessment of the solution space.
As for the rest - while indeed it is the job of government to structure these decisions, recent history suggests that the opinions of the broader public still play a role in those decisions, that decisions are rarely made based purely off their technical merits, and that snake-oil salesmen can still do measurable harm to decision-making in representative governments.
That that presumes we're looking through ideas sequentially and thus are actually limited with the number of choices we're generally presented with, when really it's more akin to mapreduce when assessed at the level of leadership and domain experts. Between billions of people and thousands of domain experts, I don' think we're actually reaching any real limits, given the logarithmic nature of filtering good ideas in this way. What that means is that in effect there's a pool of solutions already filtered for viability and usefulness to choose from.
All we're doing by entertaining the idea that we should stop looking for and presenting solutions is giving people an excuse to prevent ideas they don't agree with from being spread to others. The whole idea of one person thinking that because they think an idea doesn't have merit that others shouldn't see it is itself harmful.
> while indeed it is the job of government to structure these decisions, recent history suggests that the opinions of the broader public still play a role in those decisions, that decisions are rarely made based purely off their technical merits, and that snake-oil salesmen can still do measurable harm to decision-making in representative governments.
There are many possible reasons why we don't see progress from our leaders on certain issues. I'm not convinced that there being 1000 possible solutions is any worse than there being 10. I suspect that the same forces that prevent progress work the same in both cases, and if we're talking about less than 10 possible solutions, then I think we haven't examined the problem well enough. In any case, I don't think the problem of there being too many solutions and too much information is as obviously the problem as others are presenting it, and would want to see a real argument presented and defended before I would accept it at face value. That's not because I'm trying to be overly argumentative, just that as I noted, I just don't think it's as obvious a conclusion as others seem to.
The point is putting a given option into the public eye results in the assessment process being activated.
...but at any time you can ignore additional solutions and treat them as if they don't exist
Scientists in the lab can do this, should do this and not publish half-baked solutions. Randos reading these ideas can't do this given they don't have technical knowledge to sort them.
The whole idea of there being too many solutions only makes sense when you you apply it towards the general public and people whose job isn't to make such a decision or be domain experts.
We live in a democratic society. If you can bs to some number of average people, they may elect people who go with the bs and force bs decisions. Especially when doing nothing, despite disastrous consequences, serves the interests of powerful. This is happening, this is the mess we're in. It's frustrating people putting forward a delusional idea of the decision process around these event. That also doesn't help. IE, no, the decisions haven't been and won't be made by unbiased, non-partisan actors but rather they have been made by political forces in a highly partisan and self-interested fashion. That's why we're facing catastrophe (that there's a large fire burning a bit North West of me doesn't help my mood here).
Choosing a random subset is a solution, but it clearly is not an always better solution as you claimed.
> Additional solutions provide for additional strategies in choosing a solution, but at any time you can ignore additional solutions and treat them as if they don't exist.
You're literally using "ignore additional solutions" as a counterargument to the assertion that more solutions create "yet another distraction".
Unhappy with solution X? Propose a couple other solutions {N}, until people get lost thinking about something in {N} and ignore X. Which is what the GP comment complained about.
However that would request so much Earth resources to launch everybody and everything (and thus would definitively destroy the biosphere in the process), that it is just not feasible.
It is worth thinking whether it is a good thing or not that a very risky industry (for which an accident could be really disastrous) can take place on the Moon.
We can also launch a bare minimum, and then let automated builder robots unroll the industry from local resources (e.g. lunar silicates, other metals,...).
This can be how huge photovoltaic grids could be built on the Moon, for example.
If it is launched now we may be able to use it a few decades later.
So it is not at all exclusive with being on schedule with the other, more important, projects.
But I agree we must spend the most of our time and resources building solar (and wind) capacity, and storage.
Moreover, there is always the need to continue to explore and diversify research and development. It allows to spread the risks (even if modestly, given that most resources go to the priority projects) and discover the necessary paths to go ahead (which is required even for the critical paths for the priority projects).
For the same reason that the next option presented could be the worst possible option, it could also be the best possible option. I reject the attempt of others to tell me that we should stop entertaining any more options at all.
That said, I think you've simplified the options presented for discussion to the point of being not very useful for said discussion.
So far this strategy has consistently lead to complete and resounding inaction. The stronger the leadership the more likely we are in actually going in the opposite direction (see e.g. Businaro in Brazil or Trump in the USA).
More options have also shown to be a major distraction at best and actively damaging at worst. Take carbon offsets as an example of an option which actively hinders climate action.
What climate justice activists have consistently been calling for since at least COP 15 in Copenhagen 2009 is International agreements, carbon tax, and green infrastructure. There has always been fierce resistance from polluters in any of these three items, and so far the political class has consistently cited with the polluters. Then they use distraction policies with questionable results (like cap-and-trade, carbon offsets or magic bubbles) as an excuse not to enact proven policies.
If the cause of climate change is heat gain from the sun being higher than cooling via radiation to space, then GHG reduction works by changing the second part, and partially blocking insolation works by changing the first.