Could We Fight Global Warming With A Giant Umbrella in Outer Space? (seattletimes.com) 194
The New York Times reports on a potential fix for global warming being proiposed by "a small but growing number of astronomers and physicists... the equivalent of a giant beach umbrella, floating in outer space. "
The idea is to create a huge sunshade and send it to a far away point between the Earth and the sun to block a small but crucial amount of solar radiation, enough to counter global warming. Scientists have calculated that if just shy of 2% of the sun's radiation is blocked, that would be enough to cool the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 Fahrenheit, and keep Earth within manageable climate boundaries. The idea has been at the outer fringes of conversations about climate solutions for years. But as the climate crisis worsens, interest in sun shields has been gaining momentum, with more researchers offering up variations. There's even a foundation dedicated to promoting solar shields.
A recent study led by the University of Utah explored scattering dust deep into space, while a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is looking into creating a shield made of "space bubbles." Last summer, Istvan Szapudi, an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, published a paper that suggested tethering a big solar shield to a repurposed asteroid. Now scientists led by Yoram Rozen, a physics professor and the director of the Asher Space Research Institute at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, say they are ready to build a prototype shade to show that the idea will work.
To block the necessary amount of solar radiation, the shade would have to be about 1 million square miles, roughly the size of Argentina, Rozen said. A shade that big would weigh at least 2.5 million tons — too heavy to launch into space, he said. So, the project would have to involve a series of smaller shades. They would not completely block the sun's light but rather cast slightly diffused shade onto Earth, he said. Rozen said his team was ready to design a prototype shade of 100 square feet and is seeking between $10 million and $20 million to fund the demonstration. "We can show the world, 'Look, there is a working solution, take it, increase it to the necessary size," he said...
Rozen said the team was still in the predesign phase but could launch a prototype within three years after securing funds. He estimated that a full-size version would cost trillions (a tab "for the world to pick up, not a single country," he said) but reduce the Earth's temperature by 1.5 Celsius within two years. "We at the Technion are not going to save the planet," Rozen said. "But we're going to show that it can be done."
A recent study led by the University of Utah explored scattering dust deep into space, while a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is looking into creating a shield made of "space bubbles." Last summer, Istvan Szapudi, an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, published a paper that suggested tethering a big solar shield to a repurposed asteroid. Now scientists led by Yoram Rozen, a physics professor and the director of the Asher Space Research Institute at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, say they are ready to build a prototype shade to show that the idea will work.
To block the necessary amount of solar radiation, the shade would have to be about 1 million square miles, roughly the size of Argentina, Rozen said. A shade that big would weigh at least 2.5 million tons — too heavy to launch into space, he said. So, the project would have to involve a series of smaller shades. They would not completely block the sun's light but rather cast slightly diffused shade onto Earth, he said. Rozen said his team was ready to design a prototype shade of 100 square feet and is seeking between $10 million and $20 million to fund the demonstration. "We can show the world, 'Look, there is a working solution, take it, increase it to the necessary size," he said...
Rozen said the team was still in the predesign phase but could launch a prototype within three years after securing funds. He estimated that a full-size version would cost trillions (a tab "for the world to pick up, not a single country," he said) but reduce the Earth's temperature by 1.5 Celsius within two years. "We at the Technion are not going to save the planet," Rozen said. "But we're going to show that it can be done."
Any solution will do... (Score:5, Insightful)
except cutting back on emissions.
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except cutting back on emissions.
While we must do that, it's too late for a lot of the damage. That CO2 in the atmosphere isn't going anywhere for a long time, and the so called CO2 removal proposals will almost certainly make things worse.
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So you're just going to reject all of them out of hand without even bothering to examine them?
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Currently the main use of CO2 capture seems to be "Hehe see we don't need to do anything, other people later on can pay to fix it."
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Where did you get the idea I rejected them out of hand?
Aerosol injection will create acid rain, which doing it on a global scale with kill and likely extinct many land animals, destroy buildings and forests, and make for really negative health effects on the rest of humanity. When the rivers drop their acid load into the ocean, it will alter the ecosystem starting with the littorals, eventually sulfurizing the oceans, and will make many shellfish extinct, have a strong effect on Krill and the species th
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except cutting back on emissions.
I agree with your sentiment. That said, even if we got greenhouse gas emissions down to zero by tomorrow morning, we'd still need some serious mitigation strategies. Reducing incoming IR radiation would be a good tool to have - along with carbon sequestration, if that ever becomes practical at scale.
That said, a million square miles worth of space-based parasols sounds horrendously impractical, even if you discount the possible conflicts with various other space activities.
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This is particularly insightful since another /. post mentions 2% of US electricity generation goes to freakin' bitcoin mining. And I'm guessing that power isn't being generated by a tokamak or solar or any other 'nice' method.
First principles. CO2 is generated as a result of human activities. Reduce the rate of human population growth and the problem . No, not talking about James Bond + Moonraker stuff. Just boring ideas like incentive based birth control. China proved it could be done, and aside f
Not a solution (Score:3)
You'd see boundless rage if this were proposed as a solution, ie actually paying for it to be done. This one is akin to "Just you wait, the developing nations will get richer and then have less children, all you have to do is let us burn all this coal without worrying about it, the solution to both global poverty and global warming is simply waiting."
Hehe we could solve global warming like this, we of course won't it costs too much and worst case we can pay a few people to rile up the environmentalists to k
Re:Any solution will do... (Score:5, Insightful)
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs.
Ha, yeah. Tell the Ukrainians that there are no Russians and see how far that gets you.
I'm sure what you wrote sounds very nice in your head but nations, ethnicities, money, etc. are all very real.
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I'm also sure that Israel and Palestine are currently in perfect agreement that there are no Arabs and no Jews, just humans.
"Everyone is equal and friendly" is a nice ideology but it doesn't really reflect how the vast, vast majority of people view reality.
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I find your ideas fascinating and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
What book did you paste that rant from?
and we need Nuclear power to make up for the loss (Score:4, Informative)
and we need Nuclear power to make up for the loss of solar power
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Para sol [Re:and we need Nuclear power to make...] (Score:2)
yep.
Para Sol means against the sun.
Umbra-ella means shadow (diminutive).
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It's all fun and games until we realize we find that we made a miscalculation and the globe freezes over. Go check out the July article on science.org where they talked about how cleaning up ship emissions has resulted in a decrease in cloud trails over the ocean, which is in turn raising global temperatures. Oops. What miscalculation on the impact on foam on the SS Columbia caused it to disintegrate on re-entry? Oops. What miscalculation will we make with the space umbrella? If you're too lazy to look for the link yourself, then I guess you just don't care.
Yes, we proved that AGW (and even cooling) is a real thing. But it doesn't follow that a fix for it is to pollute more. Bunker fuel is pretty nasty stuff, and a hellava pollutant. I don't think you were trying to say that, but in case...
Yes, you speak of the unintended consequences of doing things. That's a real thing. I doubt that it will make the earth freeze over, but if it actually worked to cool things, it damn well will cause really unstable weather.
And we've had enough of that already. Here it
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I don't know where you live, but here in Southeast Colorado, it's snowing like Hell froze over.
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No snow on the ground except for a remnant of the couple inches that we got a few weeks back. I don't know where you live, but here in Southeast Colorado, it's snowing like Hell froze over.
Yup. The instability of present day weather is making for some weird Polar Vortex activity - and guess where Colorado is ending up.
It's been looping up and down instead of building up and then shooting a really strong blast, which usually happens in the northeast. PA is just in one of the portions that is getting air from down south. It would be a nightmare if all of the rain we got this winter was snow.
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Time scales [Re:and we need Nuclear power to...] (Score:4, Insightful)
Historically, climate isn't stable.
Historically, climate varies on a time scale much longer than the current warming.
The 100,000-year cycle of glacial advances and retreats during an ice age is indeed blindingly fast on a geological time scale, but it's very slow on a human scale, and far slower than the ~100 year time scale of the current warming.
We can't attribute the current warming to "historically, climate isn't stable."
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Historically, climate isn't stable. The last 10,000 years are unusually stable in the context of the earth's longer-term history.
Here's what I am talking about. Unless this wunderbrella covers the entire earth from pole to pole with zero gaps, it will be shading particular areas, making them colder than adjacent areas. This will cause instabilities, and instabilities between heat and cold will cause air circulation between cold and warm. In a natural setting, this will cause tornados accidentally. In a global setting, it will cause them on purpose.
Of course, that is unless we make a wunderbrella so huge that the entire earth is al
Models [Re:and we need Nuclear power to make...] (Score:2)
It's all fun and games until we realize we find that we made a miscalculation
This is an important point. Reducing the solar input is not identical in effect to decreasing the heat-trapping effect of greenhouse gases. If you are going to do this, you need to have very good confidence in the accuracy of your climate models.
Do you have confidence in the accuracy of your climate models?
You can cast doubt on the models, or you can say we can simply solve the problem with solar shading, but it's one or the other, not both.
(And, do keep in mind that the current error bars on climate sensit
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Remember to thank GreenWar, I mean GreenPeace, for the destruction of the nuclear power industry.
Did the coal industry fund GreenPeace?
GreenPeace and the coal companies didn't have to destroy the nuclear power companies, they destroyed themselves.
The nuclear power companies are so corrupt and incompetent it is trivially easy to portray them as the bad guys.
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
We still have to grow food, and for that we need them photons as plants expect them.
Re: No. (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't really need as much as you think. Plants grow fine with clouds overhead.
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You can discuss this with my tomatoes, who stubbornly insist on having sunlight in order to get red, ripe and tasty.
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Can your tomatoes really tell a 2% difference?
https://physics.stackexchange.... [stackexchange.com].
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The proposal isn't to cover the Earth in perpetual night like some dystopian fantasy novel. It's about very slightly lowering the amount of light that reaches the surface of the planet.
Can YOU tell the difference in luminosity between a 100 watt bulb and a 98 watt bulb, especially without having them side by side to compare?
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Feel free to tell us "I told you so" then
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Fortunately, I'm old enough that long before this gets approved by some knuckleheads, designed, built, put in orbit and fucks up,the planet I'll be long dead of old age. My teen daughter will be too. This'll never happen.
Re:No. (Score:5, Interesting)
We still have to grow food, and for that we need them photons as plants expect them.
Not to mention I love how these studies neglect the massive amounts of fuel that needs to be burned to place small nation sized objects in the path of the sun and maintain them. 2% of 67 million square miles is still 1.25 million square miles. Even at about 4 times thinner than a sheet of average paper we are talking about lifting 0.1 cubic miles, and at a density of average plastic talking 42 trillion grams or 420 million kg / 1 billion pounds. Throw in 25lbs per pound to geostationary orbit and it’s 25 billion pounds of fuel and it’s about 4 months of all road traffic fuel for the US and at a cost of $10k/lb it’s $10 trillion or the cost of half a year of the US economy. And that’s just the launch cost. Throw in testing, design, material, and maintenance and we can easily double those figures.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Like someone said upthread, anything but lowering the emissions.
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Yeah but "giant space umbrella" will solve all our problems. Rejoice!
No one is claiming that reducing insolation is a complete solution to the problem. It's a potential way to reduce the severity of the problem while we shift to technologies with lower carbon footprint.
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I love how these studies neglect the massive amounts of fuel that needs to be burned to place small nation sized objects in the path of the sun and maintain them
I don't think they are neglecting that fact. The fuel needn't be fossil in origin. They're not proposing to use non-fossil fuels for the tests, of course, but if the tests prove the idea feasible, the question of whether using fossil fuels to launch the rockets contributes more to warming than the shades reduce it would have to be considered, and using non-fossil fuels would be one of the options.
SpaceX, for example, intends to shift to non-fossil methane at some point in the future of its Starship prog
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Even if we go ahead and do all of that, it is meaningless unless we ALSO significantly reduce emissions. Otherwise any benefit gained from the giant space umbrella will soon be lost as we continue to pump out more and more emissions.
In terms of global warming, this statement is incorrect. Assuming space umbrellas prove feasible, we could absolutely reduce insolation by whatever degree is necessary to offset greenhouse gas-induced warming.
We do still need to reduce emissions, though, because warming isn't the only negative effect of increased CO2. If we keep increasing CO2 levels, the CO2 will eventually become a direct threat to human life. We're already up to 400 ppm of CO2. Constant exposure to 600 ppm has shown to produce irritabi
Pointless prototype... (Score:3, Funny)
Rozen said his team was ready to design a prototype shade of 100 square feet and is seeking between $10 million and $20 million to fund the demonstration. "We can show the world, 'Look, there is a working solution, take it, increase it to the necessary size," he said...
Considering the whole issue with solar shields is being able to launch one of the necessary size into space, I'm not quite sure what the point of this prototype would be.
Anyway, if any investors are reading, I'll be happy to provide an 8.5 x 11" prototype shade for merely $5 million. I could possibly even settle for $2.5 million.
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Rozen said his team was ready to design a prototype shade of 100 square feet and is seeking between $10 million and $20 million to fund the demonstration. "We can show the world, 'Look, there is a working solution, take it, increase it to the necessary size," he said...
Considering the whole issue with solar shields is being able to launch one of the necessary size into space, I'm not quite sure what the point of this prototype would be.
Anyway, if any investors are reading, I'll be happy to provide an 8.5 x 11" prototype shade for merely $5 million. I could possibly even settle for $2.5 million.
You aren’t just throwing shade are you?
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I'll do a 17" x 22" for only $1 million. And only $500k each for another 7 of them if you pre-order now.
Sounds like a good idea (Score:3)
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What could possibly go wrong?
If it causes problems we can just get rid of it by breaking it up and have it burn up on a re-entry or bump it out into space. This is an incredibly low risk proposal.
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What possible scenario are you predicting? As far as I can see In terms of its effects on the planet this is no different than some extra cloud cover.
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Nice pessimism. Care to explain yourself?
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Here ya go!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Great sci-fi flick, absurd concern in this scenario. And I mean really, you're citing a movie whose solution to a freezing earth is a perpetually moving train. How does that make any sense?
As I said before, we can always remove the sun shield. Furthermore, the idea that such a limited shield could freeze the earth without us having a clue that it would happen ahead of time is crazy. We know a bit about how heat and energy work.
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Good lord.... I'm speechless at what you've produced.
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No. We can fight GW by talking about economics. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly the opposite of how we need it to work.
Nothing is going to get done until we talk economics.
Ocean acidification (Score:5, Informative)
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Good point, I wasnt thinking about that at all prior to reading your post.
Still though, it could be useful for mitigating at least some of the damage while we work on the issue. Because of third world economic growth as a planet we're still seeing global warming emissions increase. I'd bet money we'll continue to see a global increase for the next decade at the minimum which means it's going to be a hell of a long time before we see CO2 drop to pre industrial levels as that will only start when we stop addi
There's a little black spot on the sun today (Score:3)
The Police wrote about this back in 1983.
There's a little black spot on the sun today
It's the same old thing as yesterday
There's a black hat caught in a high tree top
There's a flag pole rag and the wind won't stop
So we're.. (Score:3)
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Please restrict yourself to the Standard Large Unit of Measurement (SLUM): the Library of Congress.
1-2-3-4-5 (Score:3)
A giant umbrella? A better idea would be a giant vacuum cleaner, which could be used to hoover up all the excess greenhouse gasses.
Re: 1-2-3-4-5 (Score:2)
No. (Score:4, Informative)
Next question.
The CO2 emissions required to launch 2.5 mtons... (Score:2, Troll)
The CO2 emissions required to launch 2.5 megatons of hardware into deep space will be enormous. I doubt that much fuel exists on Earth but let's think about the math.
Let's do a back of the envelope calculation...
The Falcon Heavy (FH) is probably the most efficient launch vehicle today. It can launch about 44,000 lb into a Mars transfer orbit. That's a fair approximation for a Lagrange point orbit.
At FH scales, launching 250 megatons into deep space would require 114 million FH launches, expending 772 TRILLI
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That's OK. Were we to seriously try this it would obviously need to be fabricated in space, probably from asteroidal materials. So you can scale back your launch requirements to something reasonable. OTOH, you've got to add in a lot of technical development and experimentation. The main benefit would be developing a space-based construction industry. (I'm NOT assuming that the project would work properly.)
It's regrettable to inform.. (Score:5, Funny)
But simpsons did it
Sulfur Dioxide in the upper atmosphere (Score:3)
Would be a much cheaper solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
For a proof of concept, look at warming temperatures from the 1940s to the 1950s when we were pumping tons of the stuff into the air through coal plants. The warming trend actually reversed itself for a while, until they found it caused acid rain, so they installed scrubbers on coal fired power plants, then the warming trend resumed. To avoid the acid rain bit, you release it into the upper atmosphere where it won't get into the clouds.
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Would be a much cheaper solution.
Possibly. But sulfate particulates rain out on a time scale of about a year, while a well-designed orbit should last for hundreds of years.
And the side effects of sulfur oxides being put in the atmosphere (and coming OUT of the atmosphere) by the megatons are very unknown.
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But sulfate particulates rain out on a time scale of about a year, while a well-designed orbit should last for hundreds of years.
And the side effects of sulfur oxides being put in the atmosphere (and coming OUT of the atmosphere) by the megatons are very unknown.
They rain out when released into the lower atmosphere. In the upper atmosphere/stratosphere, they can stay up for decades. This has been tracked when volcanoes launch this stuff that high. When it eventually makes it's way down, it raises the pH of rain slightly, depending on the concentrations. The effects of that are well known as it happens naturally with wildfires and volcanoes.
clouds (Score:2)
I suspect it is much cheaper and more practical to make clouds.
Any of these solutions is controversial:
https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
Any crazy ideas but nuclear fission (Re:clouds) (Score:2)
I suspect it is more affordable and more practical to build nuclear fission power plants than put a sun shade into orbit.
A sun shade may reduce global warming but nuclear power plants would reduce global warming while producing energy.
Anything that could impact sunlight or clouds directly could be weaponized. I guess nuclear power can be weaponized but then so could any energy source. Does anyone think power from wind or sun could not be used to make explosives, toxic gases, biological weapons, or any of
No. But it would be a nice weapon. (Score:2)
Hence if feasible, some really big assholes will get it funded and build.
I am really getting sick and tired (Score:2, Insightful)
Non-starter (Score:2)
It does not resolve the issue, it masks one of the symptoms.
CO2 increases make the oceans acidic and humans dumber. Seriously - elevated CO2 impairs human cognition, to a degree we should be able to notice within a few decades while indoors (human activity elevates CO2, in a closed environment that can only dilute with external air CO2 will always be higher than that external air source).
Fine, but how do we undo it? (Score:2)
While cutting down on the amount of sunlight will certainly slow the warming of the planet, it will also diminish the light going to photosynthesis that we (mostly) depend on for food and cleaning the crud out of the air. So I guess we can get what we need from the corner quickee mart and don't need to worry about the crops and forests. But what if we change our minds? Or there are unacceptable forms of collateral damage? Once all this stuff is put between us and the sun, how do we clean it up if it was a m
It has to be held in place somehow (Score:2)
Radiator in infrared absorption window (Score:2)
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Not completely transparent in that range, but pretty good.
But thermodynamics doesn't allow you to radiate waste heat at any higher rate than the Stefan-Boltzmann equation allows. The best you can do is to increase the emissivity toward unity. But most of the Earth's surface is water, and water already has an emissivity in that range of IR that's very near unity. (Yep, that's right. You think of water as transparent, but in the thermal infrared, it's black.)
Brawndo, it's got what plants crave (Score:2)
I mean, what kind of knuckle dragger still thinks plants need sunlight?
Unforeseen consequences... (Score:2)
No (Score:2)
The only solution is to throw soup at priceless works of art.
Easy peasy (Score:2)
Find a decent size rock orbiting the Sun, grab it, have your robot factory grind it to bits of a manageable size, and then compress/extrude them under pressure* to form thin sheets, blocking the light. It would endlessly poop out a ribbon of thin crushed rock/sand.
Easy peasy. We've already accomplished more difficult tasks as a species, this should be something that's achievable.
(Or we could just stop fucking up the planet, but a) it may be too late, and b) apparently we don't really want to do that or we w
Dunno (Score:2)
Russia, Canada, Greenland, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Mongolia etc might not be amused.
Too heavy, so ... (Score:2)
A shade that big would weigh at least 2.5 million tons — too heavy to launch into space, he said.
Obviously, just launch the weaving machine into orbit with the thread trailing down to the spools on the ground and make it in space. And yes, I realize that you'll also have to launch a sewing machine too at some point... Problem solved. :-)
Treat the fucking problem (Score:2)
The main problem with this solutions... (Score:2)
The main problem with this solutions is not the cost and is not the technical feasibility. It's the fact that from the moment it's implemented, every single blizzard, every cold wave, every hurricane even, will be YOUR fault. Every time somebody is freezing their feet, they will be thinking "And they have a frickin' giant umbrella giving us even LESS SUN!". So, nobody want to be that "they"
He'll be doing most of the work for us (Score:2)
We will need an area of 1 million square miles but this guy will handle the hard part by creating a prototype umbrella with an aera of 100 square feet. Then all we need to do is scale it up a bit
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I bet on both the "physics" part and the "carbon dioxide" part.
Re: Control Propaganda (Score:2)
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Climate change is real, despite a bunch of complete snob assholes also believing on it and trying to solve it with their annoying childish inefficient solutions.
The real solution for it is probably to just produce everything locally instead of shipping everything from china.
No transcontinental massive boats, no trucking across the entire country, no dirty unregulated oversea factories.
It also come with the nice bonus of having local jobs everywhere.
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"the systems we have" is just a dozen of massive global megacorporations that use the governments as tools to kill any sort of competition in legal and illegal ways.
Not quite capitalism at its peak or even something you can actually call capitalism for long.
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A space umbrella is a fantasy to pretend there are options other than emission cuts.
There are plenty of greenwashing schemes designed to take your money that do exist, without you having to worry about a space umbrella that won't ever be built.
The only thing being controlled by this umbrella proposition is the narrative. The more they keep the discussion focused on dead ends, the less focus is directed towards meaningful change.
Re:Isn't this a solar sail? (Score:5, Interesting)
It wouldn't necessarily work that way. There are orbits and positions that could, in principle, do the job. But the size required is a bit unreasonable, I think it would need to be in one piece and spinning (sufficiently to maintain tension, not particularly fast).
HOWEVER:
Global warming is warming the polar areas more than the equator. I can't see how this would address that problem. Also, an umbrella is the wrong image, a spinning net would be closer, as you want to let MOST of the light through. Then you need to worry about keeping the electric charge on the different parts of the net equalized. ETC.
A bad idea that is fortunately expensive enough that it won't be tried.
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It is indeed a solar sail.
But this is a feature, not a bug. You can use control of the sail's attitude as a propellant-free propulsion mechanism to do orbital maintenance.