I'm not sure that space bubbles at the L1 point are "irreversible" - simply move them out of that point, or cease the active stabilisation and they will cease to function (and will be out of our way, as they would be a few times further away than the moon: (1) )
Other than that, I agree, it would be way to easy to rely on this kind of measure. I'd like it to be a measure to give time to "draw down our unsustainable industries". But I don't think that human nature works like that. It would be taken as a mandate to continue.
In fact we might have the opposite problem: too easily reversible. What if we become dependant on it being there, and then it fails, as stuff in space easily does? What happens "when the levee breaks" ?
Every time I see someone say why don't we "just" do X to fix climate change, the thing they suggest we just do is either drastically inadequate, really hard, or too slow.
We're way behind at this point. Climate scientists used to say 400 ppm was the highest level that might be safe, but we're at 420ppm and still adding 36 billion tons of CO2 every year, plus a lot of methane.
We're at serious risk of positive feedback effects taking things out of our hands entirely. Higher temperatures bring things like melting ice caps and methane release from permafrost melt, which heat up the planet more. Solar radiation management is a chance to head those things off, and buy time for the changes you're talking about.
And none of the proposed SRM solutions are irreversible. Some of them reverse automatically, shortly after you stop maintaining them.
Based on the geological record, negative feedbacks are extremely long-term. What we see several times is a small initial temperature boost caused by orbital variations, followed by massive carbon release, then eventual drawdown after millions of years due to things like rock erosion.
Some people have tried to make a big deal out of higher CO2 making plants grow faster, but plant growth is limited by lots of other things like nutrient availability, disease, and drought. A lot of forests are not doing well these days.
I haven't seen it described in such severe terms but yeah that's another issue. I'm not sure how much it's from actually releasing CO2, or just not absorbing as much of our emissions as it used to.
> Why can't we just draw down our unsustainable industries and ramp up biological carbon sequestration?
Evidently not, or we would have done it already. Starting today, even if we adopted those strategies successfully, it would still be too late to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. In fact, the only thing that would prevent such a scenario is an aggressive and distasteful technological solution (maybe this, maybe something else). That's the situation we're in, like it or not.
When money is allocated to create the methodology to affect climate, will money also be set aside to quickly decomission the implementation should unintended negative consequences be realized? In other words, is a "self destruct" mechanism funded into the design from day 1? Who or what is going to be the bubble-popper and how quickly will they all be tracked down and destroyed?
> When money is allocated to create the methodology to affect climate, will money also be set aside to quickly decomission the implementation should unintended negative consequences be realized?
Asking what will happen when climate-change initiatives are funded seems to be considerably jumping the gun. Currently I think these are all fairly speculative, at least in the sense that there's no clear best method, so they're not even at the point where funding might be considered; but, even if there were one clear best way that was guaranteed to succeed, at least from my viewpoint in the US, it's far from clear to me that even that one best way would have a decent chance of securing funding in any form.
However, there's isn't much more. No paper that I can find. Not a new idea, better than sulfuric acid SRM in theory, I suppose, though at the cost of the L1 Lagrangian.
This is drawing parallels to Futurama’s giant ice cubes in the ocean… if we don’t stop the problem of climate change at the root, i.e. mass overconsumption and waste, we’ll simply be facing the same challenge in another 50 years when greenhouse gas emissions rise to meet their new ceiling.
It’s really people looking for excuses to NOT do the right thing. In order for us to consume less, we need to lower our population. Not a hard math problem. We need to cut world population by at least 1/2.
The problem of climate change is not one of generic 'overconsumption and waste' but of bringing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero. Most of the electricity, transport and industry currently dependent on fossil fuels can be greened. There are important exceptions, like aviation, and in those cases reducing consumption would be helpful. But for the most part it's a question of substitution, not reduction.
We are also living through an ecological crisis whose causes are far more entwined with over-consumption. But that's because it has causes additional to climate change.
I can imagine a Futurama episode where they put giant bubbles in space and they end up burning everything on the planet like ants under a magnifying glass.
There is no "natural balance" in the climate. It has always changed and always will and there is no foreseeable scenario where we would be able to predict all the consequences of say attempting to bring the climate to stabilize so that Manhattan would always be above water. Or prevent Europe from being covered in ice again (which it likely will be at one point).
We need to start thinking about how we can adapt to various scenarios, rather than imagine that we are omnipotent here (we are not and will most likely never be unless some miraculous breakthrough in predictive powers occurs).
Adapting and making sure that our footprint going forward is as minimal as possible is the only reasonable strategy, ASAP.
An inevitable step in human progress is to seize control of the planet's climate for ourselves.
We should not accept that the world will change around us, we should make the world fit our interests. On a time scale at which the world changes, time scales which humans are not involved with (eg: global warming), we should be able to fix the problem before it happens.
Seriously? We're many decades out on fusion, many less decades early on climate disruption, as well as fossil energy depletion. We're looking at one big gap that we knew precisely about since the 1970's, and still you have some faith left in what I'd call the cult of Progress? May I propose you notice the imagined world of spaceman futures matches fairly when with previous religious iterations of heavenly ideals?
1. Whether it's physically possible to accomplish this. The natural course of the Earth is to enter into another ice age at some time in the future. Is there a way for us to prevent this from happening, without compromise or sacrifice? Without side effects? I don't have the needed knowledge to disqualify that possibility, but I lack the confidence that it is an achievable outcome. I imagine the closest comparison points we have for such efforts is our attempts to introduce non-native species to impact local flora and fauna. And that hasn't typically gone well in the past.
2. Whether having such control is at all possible. If we develop the means to control the climate to such an extent, I can only imagine what that would lead to in terms of global politics. It has to be something that the entire planet is cooperative about, and hope that no personal agendas try to push for misuse of the technology.
We knew about fossil ressource depletion in the 70s and about the effect on Co2 on temperature in the 19th century (the earliest article i've found is from 1912, but the science was available earlier).
We could have invested in better infrastructure and better housing since at least the 90s, and pushed the research towards material science and fission/fusion after the 80s. Pushed to create more public researcher jobs would've been nice too (most innovation is built on top of public research, and forming researchers is nice for the industry too)
Instead we built more stuff for cheaper (by outsourcing the production and crippling the productive apparel of small third-world countries).
>An inevitable step is human progress it to realize that there is no controlling the planet's climate.
That’s an odd thing to say, we’re controlling it right now. We’re about half way through pushing up global temperatures by several degrees over a hundred years or so. We didn’t set out to do that, but we’re doing it nonetheless.
It’s not a question of whether we can significantly change the climate, we know we can, the question is how we should choose to do that going forwards.
We're affecting it, yes. But we aren't controlling it. There are no intended effects and outcomes that satisfy those intentions. Quite the opposite, actually: We're trying to affect it less and finding it very difficult to do so.
> It’s not a question of whether we can significantly change the climate, we know we can, the question is how we should choose to do that going forwards
This I agree with. What the GP and I are trying to say is that, in our opinions at least, we should choose to do it by adopting practices that minimize how much we affect the climate.
Ok, so it's a position opposed to active measures? I can certainly see the argument, there could very well be negative unintended consequences. Ultimately I suppose it's a matter of balancing the risks. If controlling emissions proves unrealistic, or if a feedback effect kicks in like melting oceanic methane or tundra melting, then active measures may be the only option left.
Does it look like we have the climate under control? No, quite the opposite.
We're not controlling the climate, we're the climate equivalent of toddlers who just set the house on fire.
We know what effect emitting CO2 has, we have a choice how much we emit, and we're choosing to emit a lot of it. OK, we've decided we have other objectives that take priority, and to an extent that makes some sense, but we have choices in this. We can't just throw our hands up and say we have no control over this, and therefore no responsibility. Yes we do have choices we can make, and yes we do have responsibility for the consequences.
No control doesn't mean no responsibility. Though we're definitely behaving irresponsibly, which seems to be a universal trait of large groups of people.
You could argue that theoretically we can control it, but in reality that would require humans to not behave like humans for once.
You really just have to follow the trend of human energy use, eventually we're going to get to a point that planetary scale changes are within our reach, and eventually they'll be easy.
Technically we're already changing the planet today, it shows that it is very much inside of our grasp, it just requires the cooperation of every human on the planet and right now we just have that cooperation both incidentally and in a bad way.
We just need to get to a point where it does not require such mass cooperation, and as our energy scale increases that will become more and more possible with time.
That is assuming we don't collapse or regress or stagnate, which is possible, but I would hope that doesn't happen.
It is not a binary, of course we make the world fit our interest to some degree. That idea that we can make the world fit our interest in every aspect, even on planetary scale is hubris and as such will likely always bite us in the ass if pursued.
The goal is not to maintain an ideal temperature and stop the world from changing, but having the climate changing too rapidly, because many animals and plants do not have the time to adapt. This is why a 2~3 degrees changes over a century is way more dangerous than an ice age that took various thousands of years to happen.
> there is no foreseeable scenario where we would be able to [...] prevent Europe from being covered in ice again
Considering we've accidentally caused startling global warming in just 200 years, I'm confident we can solve the next ice age in the 50,000 years before it comes.
Tldr: solar engineering by blocking sun at L1 with big bubbles.
This doesn’t reverse anything. It slows warming, but doesn’t de-acidify the oceans or decrease the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Solar engineering is a radical, risky Hail Mary that should only be considered as a stopgap emergency measure provided emissions are being managed. Without that the problem is not solved and if the mitigation (sulfur, bubbles, whatever) is removed the snap back will be extreme.
We need to stop putting CO2 and methane in the air and start removing what’s there, period
That idea is so silly and simplistic I have a hard time believing people at MIT came up with it, let alone spread the word on the web.
We haven't been on the moon a second time yet and you want us to believe that we are capable of deploying a mega-structure the size of Brazil in space?
Just because you can do napkin calculations of something does not make it relevant.
>deploying a mega-structure the size of Brazil in space
We’ll, the Great Wall of China was four times as long as the longest axis of Brazil. It would be a huge undertaking, but I wouldn’t completely discount it.
This sounded like a weird comparison to me. I got curious so did some math.
Brazil area = 3300000 sq mi = 9.2e13 sqft. A film 1mm thick of this area would be 9.2e13 sqft x 0.003 ft = 2.76e11 cuft.
Great wall of China, average of 33 ft tall and 20 feet wide, with a length of 13,170 mi (69,537,600 ft) is a volume of 4.6e10 cuft.
According to this a 1mm film the size of brazil would be an order of magnitude more volume than the great wall of china.
Using silicon’s density of 2.32 g/cm3, at a volume of 2.76e11 cuft (7.82e15 cm3) gives us 1.8e16 g, or 1.98e10 tons.
The falcon heavy launch capacity to geostationary transfer orbit is 26.7 tons. However, L1 is much further altitude (1.5 million km) than GTO (42,164 km @ apogee). (But we’ll just use GTO capacity since the only other listed capacity for the falcon heavy is for mars transfer orbit and I couldn’t find an altitude for that from earth.) 1.98e10 tons would require almost three quarters of a billion falcon heavy launches. If we did 100 launches per day, this would take 20,000 years.
Maybe there’s some solid silicon asteroid out there, but even if that were the case, we’d have to lift up the machinery and fuel to move it in space. Vesta, one of the largest known asteroids with a mean diameter of 326 mi, if a sphere would have a volume of 1.8e7 cumi = 2.65e18 cuft. So by volume we could flatten that out with enough to spare, but you’re dealing with maybe a lot of undesirable content.
I’m bored now so Ill let someone else calculate how much fuel it would require to move Vesta the required distance, or guess at how much of it is useful and what it would take to convert it to the necessary structure.
But my guess is that in any case, “huge undertaking” is underselling it. Sounds like pure fantasy to me. Actually sounds remarkably similar to the scale of the problem humanity is faced with in The Three Body Problem trilogy. (I’m half way through The Dark Forest now, guess I should go back to that!)
We'd use something more like Starship which itself is about an order of magnitude more efficient that FH, but even more advanced. Nudging Earth grazing asteroids to the L1 point would take relatively little energy. We could probably use ion engines or hall effect thrusters. Something the size of Brazil is a stretch, sure, but we could probably have a meaningful effect with a lot less than that, and in combination with other measures it might make sense. Not definitely, but might.
SRM isn't difficult to reverse. Sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere would fall out in a year or two; we've directly observed that with emissions from volcanoes, which are of similar scale. Another idea, to seed low-lying clouds with seawater, would reverse in about a week after we stopped doing it.
They'd act like a solar sail. Putting them in L1 would not keep them positioned. It would be possible to design an orbital scheme that would keep them in place, but it wouldn't be simple. As other people have mentioned, this idea seems impractical and secondary effects haven't really been considered. Glad to hear someone's thinking creatively though.
Here's a simpler plan:
1) Crack down on the deliberate and aggressive misinformation pretending climate change isn't real. We allow this under the guise of free speech, but it's obvious it's being perpetrated to deliberately push a known falsehood. We know who's doing it, we know why. We know where the funding originates and where it goes. There's no ethical dilemma, no slippery slope. Just one lie that's killing the planet.
2) Shift all subsidies from carbon intensive energy to renewables and make it permanent. (This accelerates decarbonization and costs literally nothing).
3) Create a replacement for the Paris agreement but this time focused around collaboration, technology sharing, and a stack-ranked collaborative plan. (Develop and share technology around methane reduction, grid stabilization, electrification etc)
That's it. 3 step plan, net zero cost. Guaranteed to work. Won't ever happen if we don't address the public opinion campaign turning us against each other. But it is way easier than space bubbles.
The problem is not intractable. It's quite solvable. The one blocker is that we're working against ourselves. Let's stop working against ourselves and actually work together to save the livability of our planet.
The US will never be a leader in climate change reduction till we address tiny the minority that inexplicably wishes to profit from the destruction of the only place in the universe that is perfect for us. This is the literal garden of eden, we are willfully destroying it.
No plan can succeed if we don't address the cause of resistance to the plan. That's deliberate deception and manipulation of public opinion by a handful of billionaire oil barons.
68 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadSpace bubbles, atmospheric flak, or other irreversible, completely untestable and entirely unprecedented interventions terrify the shit out of me.
Especially when we are trying to modify something complex as our climate.
Its about time we analyzed our actions and changed the way we modify for the better
Other than that, I agree, it would be way to easy to rely on this kind of measure. I'd like it to be a measure to give time to "draw down our unsustainable industries". But I don't think that human nature works like that. It would be taken as a mandate to continue.
In fact we might have the opposite problem: too easily reversible. What if we become dependant on it being there, and then it fails, as stuff in space easily does? What happens "when the levee breaks" ?
1) https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/L1_the...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point#L1_point
Every time I see someone say why don't we "just" do X to fix climate change, the thing they suggest we just do is either drastically inadequate, really hard, or too slow.
We're way behind at this point. Climate scientists used to say 400 ppm was the highest level that might be safe, but we're at 420ppm and still adding 36 billion tons of CO2 every year, plus a lot of methane.
We're at serious risk of positive feedback effects taking things out of our hands entirely. Higher temperatures bring things like melting ice caps and methane release from permafrost melt, which heat up the planet more. Solar radiation management is a chance to head those things off, and buy time for the changes you're talking about.
And none of the proposed SRM solutions are irreversible. Some of them reverse automatically, shortly after you stop maintaining them.
Some people have tried to make a big deal out of higher CO2 making plants grow faster, but plant growth is limited by lots of other things like nutrient availability, disease, and drought. A lot of forests are not doing well these days.
Evidently not, or we would have done it already. Starting today, even if we adopted those strategies successfully, it would still be too late to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. In fact, the only thing that would prevent such a scenario is an aggressive and distasteful technological solution (maybe this, maybe something else). That's the situation we're in, like it or not.
Asking what will happen when climate-change initiatives are funded seems to be considerably jumping the gun. Currently I think these are all fairly speculative, at least in the sense that there's no clear best method, so they're not even at the point where funding might be considered; but, even if there were one clear best way that was guaranteed to succeed, at least from my viewpoint in the US, it's far from clear to me that even that one best way would have a decent chance of securing funding in any form.
However, there's isn't much more. No paper that I can find. Not a new idea, better than sulfuric acid SRM in theory, I suppose, though at the cost of the L1 Lagrangian.
Wouldn't Whipple Shields be needed to avoid them popping?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield
I'd like to think that this could be used to buy us time to transition off carbon-intensive and fossil fuels, on to solar and other renewables.
But then, I don't think that human nature is that long-sighted. It would be a mandate to continue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_of_the_Hot
We are also living through an ecological crisis whose causes are far more entwined with over-consumption. But that's because it has causes additional to climate change.
We need to start thinking about how we can adapt to various scenarios, rather than imagine that we are omnipotent here (we are not and will most likely never be unless some miraculous breakthrough in predictive powers occurs).
Adapting and making sure that our footprint going forward is as minimal as possible is the only reasonable strategy, ASAP.
We should not accept that the world will change around us, we should make the world fit our interests. On a time scale at which the world changes, time scales which humans are not involved with (eg: global warming), we should be able to fix the problem before it happens.
An inevitable step is human progress it to realize that there is no controlling the planet's climate.
We might be at the top of the food chain, but we are still at the bottom of the interplanetary dust chain, and always will be.
1. Whether it's physically possible to accomplish this. The natural course of the Earth is to enter into another ice age at some time in the future. Is there a way for us to prevent this from happening, without compromise or sacrifice? Without side effects? I don't have the needed knowledge to disqualify that possibility, but I lack the confidence that it is an achievable outcome. I imagine the closest comparison points we have for such efforts is our attempts to introduce non-native species to impact local flora and fauna. And that hasn't typically gone well in the past.
2. Whether having such control is at all possible. If we develop the means to control the climate to such an extent, I can only imagine what that would lead to in terms of global politics. It has to be something that the entire planet is cooperative about, and hope that no personal agendas try to push for misuse of the technology.
We knew about fossil ressource depletion in the 70s and about the effect on Co2 on temperature in the 19th century (the earliest article i've found is from 1912, but the science was available earlier).
We could have invested in better infrastructure and better housing since at least the 90s, and pushed the research towards material science and fission/fusion after the 80s. Pushed to create more public researcher jobs would've been nice too (most innovation is built on top of public research, and forming researchers is nice for the industry too)
Instead we built more stuff for cheaper (by outsourcing the production and crippling the productive apparel of small third-world countries).
That’s an odd thing to say, we’re controlling it right now. We’re about half way through pushing up global temperatures by several degrees over a hundred years or so. We didn’t set out to do that, but we’re doing it nonetheless.
It’s not a question of whether we can significantly change the climate, we know we can, the question is how we should choose to do that going forwards.
> It’s not a question of whether we can significantly change the climate, we know we can, the question is how we should choose to do that going forwards
This I agree with. What the GP and I are trying to say is that, in our opinions at least, we should choose to do it by adopting practices that minimize how much we affect the climate.
Does it look like we have the climate under control? No, quite the opposite. We're not controlling the climate, we're the climate equivalent of toddlers who just set the house on fire.
They in total would need to be able to dim up to 2% of incoming solar radiation.
Technically we're already changing the planet today, it shows that it is very much inside of our grasp, it just requires the cooperation of every human on the planet and right now we just have that cooperation both incidentally and in a bad way.
We just need to get to a point where it does not require such mass cooperation, and as our energy scale increases that will become more and more possible with time.
That is assuming we don't collapse or regress or stagnate, which is possible, but I would hope that doesn't happen.
sounds pretty cool though. a techno solution just in time for every threat
It is not a binary, of course we make the world fit our interest to some degree. That idea that we can make the world fit our interest in every aspect, even on planetary scale is hubris and as such will likely always bite us in the ass if pursued.
Considering we've accidentally caused startling global warming in just 200 years, I'm confident we can solve the next ice age in the 50,000 years before it comes.
This doesn’t reverse anything. It slows warming, but doesn’t de-acidify the oceans or decrease the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Solar engineering is a radical, risky Hail Mary that should only be considered as a stopgap emergency measure provided emissions are being managed. Without that the problem is not solved and if the mitigation (sulfur, bubbles, whatever) is removed the snap back will be extreme.
We need to stop putting CO2 and methane in the air and start removing what’s there, period
We haven't been on the moon a second time yet and you want us to believe that we are capable of deploying a mega-structure the size of Brazil in space?
Just because you can do napkin calculations of something does not make it relevant.
Yes we have, and in fact after Armstrong/Aldrin landed in the moon there were five more successful missions.
We’ll, the Great Wall of China was four times as long as the longest axis of Brazil. It would be a huge undertaking, but I wouldn’t completely discount it.
Brazil area = 3300000 sq mi = 9.2e13 sqft. A film 1mm thick of this area would be 9.2e13 sqft x 0.003 ft = 2.76e11 cuft.
Great wall of China, average of 33 ft tall and 20 feet wide, with a length of 13,170 mi (69,537,600 ft) is a volume of 4.6e10 cuft.
According to this a 1mm film the size of brazil would be an order of magnitude more volume than the great wall of china.
Using silicon’s density of 2.32 g/cm3, at a volume of 2.76e11 cuft (7.82e15 cm3) gives us 1.8e16 g, or 1.98e10 tons.
The falcon heavy launch capacity to geostationary transfer orbit is 26.7 tons. However, L1 is much further altitude (1.5 million km) than GTO (42,164 km @ apogee). (But we’ll just use GTO capacity since the only other listed capacity for the falcon heavy is for mars transfer orbit and I couldn’t find an altitude for that from earth.) 1.98e10 tons would require almost three quarters of a billion falcon heavy launches. If we did 100 launches per day, this would take 20,000 years.
Maybe there’s some solid silicon asteroid out there, but even if that were the case, we’d have to lift up the machinery and fuel to move it in space. Vesta, one of the largest known asteroids with a mean diameter of 326 mi, if a sphere would have a volume of 1.8e7 cumi = 2.65e18 cuft. So by volume we could flatten that out with enough to spare, but you’re dealing with maybe a lot of undesirable content.
I’m bored now so Ill let someone else calculate how much fuel it would require to move Vesta the required distance, or guess at how much of it is useful and what it would take to convert it to the necessary structure.
But my guess is that in any case, “huge undertaking” is underselling it. Sounds like pure fantasy to me. Actually sounds remarkably similar to the scale of the problem humanity is faced with in The Three Body Problem trilogy. (I’m half way through The Dark Forest now, guess I should go back to that!)
There were six successful Apollo crewed missions to the moon and many additional uncrewed missions.
Here's a simpler plan: 1) Crack down on the deliberate and aggressive misinformation pretending climate change isn't real. We allow this under the guise of free speech, but it's obvious it's being perpetrated to deliberately push a known falsehood. We know who's doing it, we know why. We know where the funding originates and where it goes. There's no ethical dilemma, no slippery slope. Just one lie that's killing the planet. 2) Shift all subsidies from carbon intensive energy to renewables and make it permanent. (This accelerates decarbonization and costs literally nothing). 3) Create a replacement for the Paris agreement but this time focused around collaboration, technology sharing, and a stack-ranked collaborative plan. (Develop and share technology around methane reduction, grid stabilization, electrification etc)
That's it. 3 step plan, net zero cost. Guaranteed to work. Won't ever happen if we don't address the public opinion campaign turning us against each other. But it is way easier than space bubbles.
The problem is not intractable. It's quite solvable. The one blocker is that we're working against ourselves. Let's stop working against ourselves and actually work together to save the livability of our planet.
The US will never be a leader in climate change reduction till we address tiny the minority that inexplicably wishes to profit from the destruction of the only place in the universe that is perfect for us. This is the literal garden of eden, we are willfully destroying it.
No plan can succeed if we don't address the cause of resistance to the plan. That's deliberate deception and manipulation of public opinion by a handful of billionaire oil barons.