Should We Fight Climate Change by Releasing Sulfur Dioxide into the Stratosphere? (japantimes.co.jp) 288
A professor in the University of Chicago's department of geophysical sciences "believes that by intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, it would be possible to lower temperatures worldwide," reports the New York Times.
He's not the only one promoting the idea. "Harvard University has a solar geoengineering program that has received grants from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. It's being studied by the Environmental Defense Fund along with the World Climate Research Program.... But many scientists and environmentalists fear that it could result in unpredictable calamities." Because it would be used in the stratosphere and not limited to a particular area, solar geoengineering could affect the whole world, possibly scrambling natural systems, like creating rain in one arid region while drying out the monsoon season elsewhere. Opponents worry it would distract from the urgent work of transitioning away from fossil fuels. They object to intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide, a pollutant that would eventually move from the stratosphere to ground level, where it can irritate the skin, eyes, nose and throat and can cause respiratory problems. And they fear that once begun, a solar geoengineering program would be difficult to stop...
Keith, a professor in the University of Chicago's department of geophysical sciences, countered that the risks posed by solar geoengineering are well understood, not as severe as portrayed by critics and dwarfed by the potential benefits. If the technique slowed the warming of the planet by even just 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, over the next century, Keith said, it could help prevent millions of heat-related deaths each decade...
Opponents of solar geoengineering cite several main risks. They say it could create a "moral hazard," mistakenly giving people the impression that it is not necessary to rapidly reduce fossil fuel emissions. The second main concern has to do with unintended consequences. "This is a really dangerous path to go down," said Beatrice Rindevall, the chair of the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, which opposed the experiment. "It could shock the climate system, could alter hydrological cycles and could exacerbate extreme weather and climate instability." And once solar geoengineering began to cool the planet, stopping the effort abruptly could result in a sudden rise in temperatures, a phenomenon known as "termination shock." The planet could experience "potentially massive temperature rise in an unprepared world over a matter of five to 10 years, hitting the Earth's climate with something that it probably hasn't seen since the dinosaur-killing impactor," Pierrehumbert said. On top of all this, there are fears about rogue actors using solar geoengineering and concerns that the technology could be weaponized. Not to mention the fact that sulfur dioxide can harm human health.
Keith is adamant that those fears are overblown. And while there would be some additional air pollution, he claims the risk is negligible compared to the benefits.
The opposition is making it hard to even conduct tests, according to the article — like when Keith "wanted to release a few pounds of mineral dust at an altitude of roughly 20 kilometers and track how the dust behaved as it floated across the sky."
The experiment was called off after opposition from numerous groups — including Greta Thunberg and an organization representing Indigenous people who felt the experiment was disrespecting nature.
He's not the only one promoting the idea. "Harvard University has a solar geoengineering program that has received grants from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. It's being studied by the Environmental Defense Fund along with the World Climate Research Program.... But many scientists and environmentalists fear that it could result in unpredictable calamities." Because it would be used in the stratosphere and not limited to a particular area, solar geoengineering could affect the whole world, possibly scrambling natural systems, like creating rain in one arid region while drying out the monsoon season elsewhere. Opponents worry it would distract from the urgent work of transitioning away from fossil fuels. They object to intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide, a pollutant that would eventually move from the stratosphere to ground level, where it can irritate the skin, eyes, nose and throat and can cause respiratory problems. And they fear that once begun, a solar geoengineering program would be difficult to stop...
Keith, a professor in the University of Chicago's department of geophysical sciences, countered that the risks posed by solar geoengineering are well understood, not as severe as portrayed by critics and dwarfed by the potential benefits. If the technique slowed the warming of the planet by even just 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, over the next century, Keith said, it could help prevent millions of heat-related deaths each decade...
Opponents of solar geoengineering cite several main risks. They say it could create a "moral hazard," mistakenly giving people the impression that it is not necessary to rapidly reduce fossil fuel emissions. The second main concern has to do with unintended consequences. "This is a really dangerous path to go down," said Beatrice Rindevall, the chair of the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, which opposed the experiment. "It could shock the climate system, could alter hydrological cycles and could exacerbate extreme weather and climate instability." And once solar geoengineering began to cool the planet, stopping the effort abruptly could result in a sudden rise in temperatures, a phenomenon known as "termination shock." The planet could experience "potentially massive temperature rise in an unprepared world over a matter of five to 10 years, hitting the Earth's climate with something that it probably hasn't seen since the dinosaur-killing impactor," Pierrehumbert said. On top of all this, there are fears about rogue actors using solar geoengineering and concerns that the technology could be weaponized. Not to mention the fact that sulfur dioxide can harm human health.
Keith is adamant that those fears are overblown. And while there would be some additional air pollution, he claims the risk is negligible compared to the benefits.
The opposition is making it hard to even conduct tests, according to the article — like when Keith "wanted to release a few pounds of mineral dust at an altitude of roughly 20 kilometers and track how the dust behaved as it floated across the sky."
The experiment was called off after opposition from numerous groups — including Greta Thunberg and an organization representing Indigenous people who felt the experiment was disrespecting nature.
Sounds like the first chapter in a long winter (Score:2, Interesting)
"Just as they were finally exiting the most recent ice age, they engineered a return to a deeper and more permanent one."
Written by any survivors.
Re: Sounds like the first chapter in a long winter (Score:2)
Acid rain killing the vegetation.
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That might be around chapter what? Chapter 3? Further in? :D
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Acid rain killing the vegetation.
Seriously true. It will kill animals as well. There will be extinctions, and acquatic life will be hit hard. Buildings will dissolve. And it will need to continue until the present day CO2 and methane drop to whatever level we consider "correct."
We went through a mini version of this in the 1960's and 70's in PA from Ohio Power station emissions. People asking for a global return to acid rain have a memory problem, or are so afraid, so terrified, so panicked, over AGW, they they are demanding to try a "
Re: Sounds like the first chapter in a long winter (Score:4, Informative)
Opponents worry it would distract from the urgent work of transitioning away from fossil fuels
Our goal is NOT transitioning away from fossil fuels, it is stabilizing the climate around acceptable temperatures. Lowering CO2 is one method but not the only method. There's more than one way to skin a cat. And I say this as someone with 15 solar panels on my roof.
Re: Sounds like the first chapter in a long winter (Score:5, Informative)
Our goal is NOT transitioning away from fossil fuels
That's not the goal, but it's one of the most reasonable ways to reach the goal. It's always harder to put the genie back.
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Opponents worry it would distract from the urgent work of transitioning away from fossil fuels
Our goal is NOT transitioning away from fossil fuels, it is stabilizing the climate around acceptable temperatures. Lowering CO2 is one method but not the only method. There's more than one way to skin a cat. And I say this as someone with 15 solar panels on my roof.
Yes, if the one and only metric, the only goal for Earth is to lower the temperatures, acidifying the atmosphere, and accepting the extinction of many species, the deforestation, and infrastructure destruction and a likely shortening of human lifespan. Then pump that Sulfur into the atmosphere for a thousand years or more until the earth is "cured".
We might look kind of like Mars by that point.
Sulfur aerosols do not remove CO2, they counteract it. And when the aerosols attach themselves to water vapo
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Sulfur aerosols do not remove CO2, they counteract it.
Meanwhile we sit around waiting for the planet to turn into Venus. This is not a black and white problem. A better idea is that rather than waiting around for a perfect solution, utilize what we know works for now and simultaneously work out a better way.
An example of the perils of waiting: Everglades NP has a massive problem with pythons today because the Daniel Beard Center spent years studying the pythons rather than just going out and killing them en mass. Now Everglades NP has some studies about pytho
Re: Sounds like the first chapter in a long winter (Score:5, Insightful)
Sulfur aerosols do not remove CO2, they counteract it.
Meanwhile we sit around waiting for the planet to turn into Venus. This is not a black and white problem. A better idea is that rather than waiting around for a perfect solution, utilize what we know works for now and simultaneously work out a better way.
What exactly is the better way?
An example of the perils of waiting: Everglades NP has a massive problem with pythons today because the Daniel Beard Center spent years studying the pythons rather than just going out and killing them en mass.
That few years of study sounds interesting. Another fix for AGW is en mass killing of most of humanity, just like the snakes. I'm not certain that would fly very well. It does show the unintended consequences though.
Having studied and lived through Acid rain, you and I have a different outlook. You find literally dissolving the surface of the earth, large scale deforestation (which BTW, will release an incredible amount of carbon) and widespread extinction and physical harm to humans and other animals, completely changing the pH of the ocean, which will probably extinct the animals that have carbonate shells, and acid rain snow and fog - you find that acceptable, or more likely didn't study the effects of this so called cure. You are inadvertantly demanding daily events such as the 1952 Great smog of London, just on a daily basis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
As the acid rain enters the riverine environment, it will leach aluminum out of the water, which kills life in the rivers. It will be a race between what kills the wildlife, as when pH reaches a certain point, fish stop reproducing, and if it gets low enough, it will kill them outright. Google or DDG acid rain effects, and look at the images. This is what you are asking for, only much larger and more intense.
Do you really support all of that, that the planet dissolving future and it's extinctions deforestation and poor health outcomes is somehow better than a warmer earth?
That the earth is warming is certainly inconvenient and will continue to be a big problem. But the purposeful pollution fix is every bit as bad, and likely worse. People and animals will die, many become extinct, and the second we stop - and we will, either from exhausting the supply of high sulfur fuels, or that future generations will lose the ability to keep up because the equipment is dissolving - then the additional carbon we put in the atmosphere will create a real whipsaw of sudden heating and instability as the sulfur aerosol washes out of the air via the water cycle.
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Opponents worry it would distract from the urgent work of transitioning away from fossil fuels
Our goal is NOT transitioning away from fossil fuels, it is stabilizing the climate around acceptable temperatures. Lowering CO2 is one method but not the only method. There's more than one way to skin a cat. And I say this as someone with 15 solar panels on my roof.
Heretic!! ;)
CO2 is cumulative [Re: Sounds like the first c...] (Score:2)
Opponents worry it would distract from the urgent work of transitioning away from fossil fuels
Our goal is NOT transitioning away from fossil fuels, it is stabilizing the climate around acceptable temperatures. Lowering CO2 is one method but not the only method.
Since the effect of CO2 is cumulative over a period of centuries, lowering CO2 emissions is pretty much the clear and obvious method. Putting sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere, on the other hand, is not cumulative-- you have to keep putting more in on a time frame that can vary from weeks to a year or so, depending mostly on altitude.
There's more than one way to skin a cat.
Well, good ways and stupid ways.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines [Re:Sounds like] (Score:2)
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The irony is that we just cleaned up cargo ships exhaust which was using bunker oil with sulfur in it. That's credited with some of the record warming we've seen in the past year.
Yup, and a bit of a demonstration as to why doing that on purpose is a cure that might be worse than the problem.
One of the best ways to achieve this global acidification project is to mine as much coal, burn as much of the highest sulfur fuel as possible, and to eliminate all air pollution standards. Then after the fossil fuels containing high sulfur are exhausted, mine sulfur and turn it into an aerosol directly.
It will indeed have a cooling effect. But since it will also inject more CO2 into the atm
It would be easier to build new nuclear power! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree, nuclear would be an ideal solution if it were not for one little problem the industry has: corruption.
Re: It would be easier to build new nuclear power! (Score:4, Insightful)
And waste. Everyone forgets about nuclear waste.
Re: It would be easier to build new nuclear power! (Score:5, Informative)
No one forgets about the waste. It's just not real problem.
I wonder if you know how many people have been harmed due to used fuel? Used fuel is the waste from a nuclear power plant. Well it’s zero.
Did you know if we took all of the used fuel we could fit it in a building the size of a single Walmart?
Did you know that cask storage is perfectly adequate? They can survive a cruise missile.
Did you know that used fuel is solid so it can never leak? Leaking indicates something is either a liquid or a gas. Solids can't leak!
Did you know that used fuel decays exponentially? Meaning all of those dangerous for thousands of years claims are lies. To be highly radioactive an isotope has to have a short half life. Like iodine 131 with a half life of 8 days.
Did you know that we can recycle our used fuel? Some estimates say we could power our civilization with just our current used fuel for 10,000 years.
Used fuel is not an intractable problem. Please stop acting like it is. That’s just weird.
Re: It would be easier to build new nuclear power! (Score:5, Funny)
Did you know if we took all of the used fuel we could fit it in a building the size of a single Walmart?
Yeah, but then some shoplifter would end up spreading it all over town!
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No one forgets about the waste. It's just not real problem.
I wonder if you know how many people have been harmed due to used fuel? Used fuel is the waste from a nuclear power plant. Well it’s zero.
Did you know if we took all of the used fuel we could fit it in a building the size of a single Walmart?
Did you know that cask storage is perfectly adequate? They can survive a cruise missile.
Did you know that used fuel is solid so it can never leak? Leaking indicates something is either a liquid or a gas. Solids can't leak!
Did you know that used fuel decays exponentially? Meaning all of those dangerous for thousands of years claims are lies. To be highly radioactive an isotope has to have a short half life. Like iodine 131 with a half life of 8 days.
Did you know that we can recycle our used fuel? Some estimates say we could power our civilization with just our current used fuel for 10,000 years.
Used fuel is not an intractable problem. Please stop acting like it is. That’s just weird.
Sure, but I also know that the LCOE for nuclear plants is at least three times that of renewables. I know that France, which is often wheeled out by nuclear groupies as the poster child for unsubsidised nuclear energy, actually subsidises nuclear, has done so for decades now wants to enshrine the right to subsidise nuclear energy into EU law. I know that no product (including nuclear energy) which is that much more expensive than the cheapest viable and widely deployable alternative (read: renewables) is go
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LCOE. That's a dishonest metric that is calculated dishonestly and used dishonestly. For example when calculating the lifetime leveled cost of electricity for nuclear they fail to include nuclear power plants actual life time. The number will be much cheaper. It doesn't take into account systems costs. And it certainly fail to take into account intermittency. Building a nuclear baseload will be cheaper than overcoming intermittency. It will also be faster and have less environmental impact.
How many c
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LCOE. That's a dishonest metric that is calculated dishonestly and used dishonestly. For example when calculating the lifetime leveled cost of electricity for nuclear they fail to include nuclear power plants actual life time. The number will be much cheaper. It doesn't take into account systems costs. And it certainly fail to take into account intermittency. Building a nuclear baseload will be cheaper than overcoming intermittency. It will also be faster and have less environmental impact.
How many countries have deep decarbonized with just solar and wind? Hint the answer is 0.
What's wrong with subsidies? Solar is subsidized. Wind is subsidized. Fossil fuels are subsidized. You only have a problem with nuclear being subsidized.
Oh give me a break, literally everything that does not fit into the pro-nuclear narrative is dishonest and unfair according to the nuclear groupies and LCOE was not created for the sole purpose of victimising nuclear energy. If nuclear is really the cheapest available option why is it hugely subsidised? The unsubsidised LCOE of wind energy has been steadily going down, the unsubsidised LCOE of solar energy has literally fallen off a cliff. Meanwhile the unsubsidised LCOE of nuclear is going up: https://en. [wikipedia.org]
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If you don't use the actual lifetime of a nuclear power plant when calculating the lifetime LCOE you are being dishonest. If you only look at a single build, Vogtle 3(it was a first of a kind project and 2/3 of the cost is interest on loans), and ignore every other nuclear project you are being dishonest. If you ignore systems costs associated with solar and wind you are being dishonest. If you ignore the cost of electrical storage you are being dishonest. And of course the entire antinuclear movement i
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Read up on the Loi Nome, and the ARENH. Some say it was a German ploy to destroy French Nuclear.
It works by fixing the top price of nuclear kWh ridiculously low. (No limit on the low price though)
Hopefully the reform of the electricity market next year will make a bit more sense than the current nonsense.
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Re: It would be easier to build new nuclear power (Score:3)
There are at least two other problems with waste. One, there's waste besides spent fuel, from everything else that got enough neutron radiation to become radioactive. Two, spent fuel contains plutonium. If spent fuel gets misplaced, a bad actor could extract plutonium without much difficulty and make a nuclear bomb.
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First low level waste is even easier to deal with than used fuel. Second extracting plutonium from used fuel is actually really hard. There are easier ways to produce weapons grade plutonium. That's why no one obtains their plutonium from used fuel.
All plutonium comes from reactors; that's how it's made: uranium-238 captures a neutron, and the way you get neutrons in industrial quantities is with a nuclear reactor. Governments making bombs optimize the reactors to maximize plutonium production rather than power production, but essentially, it's all just chemically extracting the plutonium isotope from used fuel.
"There are easier ways to produce weapons grade plutonium."
Yes, if you're a government, and can run your own nuclear reactor. No, if you're
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In the USA, there is no where to put it because no one wants it near them.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-is-piling-up-does-the-u-s-have-a-plan/ [scientificamerican.com]
There is no such thing as exponential decay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay [wikipedia.org]
Literal report from 2017 no where does it talk about exponential decay.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2017/11/f46/Peter%20Swift%20PRACoP%202017%20final.pdf [energy.gov]
Here they ask is it reusable, but its still a large de
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Have you read about Fukushima? Or Chernobyl? Those news items would seem to contradict a lot of your claims above. In both cases, there are large regions surrounding a failed nuclear power plant that are considered uninhabitable now.
If you can convince the public that that didn't really happen, or that it did happen but it wasn't really a problem, or that it was really a problem but will never ever happen again, then maybe you can get the public to trust nuclear power. But I think that will be a tall or
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Meanwhile, some studies find fossil fuel pollution kills 5 million people every year. Even if that's off by orders of magnitude, that's still far more than have ever been killed by nuclear power production. So if you're really concerned about safety, you should be in favor of getting both nuclear and renewables accelerated as much as possible as quickly as possible, because fossil fuels are the real killer.
https://bmjgroup.com/air-pollu... [bmjgroup.com]
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Your idea about nuclear waste - which is not the same as used fuel - is utter nonsense.
Without used fuel reprocessing-- which we do not currently do and have no plans to do-- the largest part of nuclear waste is used fuel.
If we are to make nuclear power contribute a major portion of our energy supply, we must start reprocessing fuel (with the concomitant problems). Among other things, without reprocessing fuel (to recover and use the un-burned uranium), we run out of uranium.
With that said: it is a solvable problem.
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Wow your dumb!
"you're"
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oh noes we have poisioned the planet they still have to live on - lets fix by leaving new problems for 100, of genarations, fuckin boomer logic,
Boomer's are mostly retired now - but it is fun to blame everything on them.
Re:It would be easier to build new nuclear power! (Score:4, Interesting)
Nuclear is terrible by literally every metric except one. Baseload CO2 free power.
Literally every other metric. It's too costly, it's slow to build, it's far more dangerous than anything else. "But it's the safest!" expressly because it's so wildly expensive and over engineered, because it absolutely can not fail.
All that said, we absolutely need it for the next couple decades while renewable and storage ramp up. But there's just no other reason for it.
More energy hits the earth in a single *hour* than the entire human race uses, in all forms, in an entire year. 8000 to 1 surplus. And that's *just* solar. Sure we can't collect 'all' of that but at 8000:1 there's a whole whole lot of system inefficiency to absorb without even blinking. And hey, the fuel is literally free and doesn't sterilize your nuts.
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Literally every other metric. It's too costly, it's slow to build, it's far more dangerous than anything else. "But it's the safest!" expressly because it's so wildly expensive and over engineered, because it absolutely can not fail.
All that said, we absolutely need it for the next couple decades while renewable and storage ramp up. But there's just no other reason for it.
For an intermediate technology, it is "too costly, it's slow to build, it's far more dangerous than anything else."
When you finally manage to scale up Nuclear enough, Renewables will be abundant enough to offset all carbon dioxide emitting plants. Nuclear will probably be too little, too late to fulfill its role.
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It exists today, right now. I'm not a fan of 'new' plants, but we might need some. I think there's decent odds the existing fleet can provide enough, but that's not definitely not a sure bet.
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The U.S. would have to bring 200 nuclear power plants online to match wind power right now. As I said: Nuclear power will be too little, too late.
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Literally every other metric. It's too costly, it's slow to build, it's far more dangerous than anything else. "But it's the safest!" expressly because it's so wildly expensive and over engineered, because it absolutely can not fail.
All that said, we absolutely need it for the next couple decades while renewable and storage ramp up. But there's just no other reason for it.
For an intermediate technology, it is "too costly, it's slow to build, it's far more dangerous than anything else."
When you finally manage to scale up Nuclear enough, Renewables will be abundant enough to offset all carbon dioxide emitting plants. Nuclear will probably be too little, too late to fulfill its role.
I believe it is too late already. We are building out a new system, and to be perfectly serious, the technology is already here. We just implement it over time. The solar ecosystem is starting to see storage placed at the end of each array, or on the back of panels. https://solmix.pl/en/blog-en/w... [solmix.pl] or even with other projects like rooftop plants in Manhattan https://www.canarymedia.com/ar... [canarymedia.com].
My guesstimate is that existing power plants will run to EOL, and then the renewables will be plugged in for go
Cheapest Carbon-free Baseload, All Energy Solar (Score:3)
Literally every other metric. It's too costly...
Not compared to other baseload CO2-free power solutions - it is much cheaper than renewables plus batteries. That may change eventually but the cost of batteries would need to come down by about an order of magnitude to make it happen. That's the reason why we need nuclear: it's actually the cheapest way to get carbon-free baseload even if it is expensive. You can build as much solar as you like but that will not keep the heat and lights on at night.
As for your comment on "just solar", all the forms of
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dude. 'just solar' is literally just the 'sunlight' hitting the earth. the 'wind' that it causes is *additional* renewable energy we can capture. So significantly *more* than 8000:1.
CA already provides 40% of it's baseload for 24 hours on some days with renewables and storage.
Batteries aren't grid scale yet, most definitely. That's why nuclear has to be part of the plan for at least a decade, and maybe 2 or 3.
But 200MW battery facilities of literally iron/oxide are online today. 100/200 MW flow batt
Re: Cheapest Carbon-free Baseload, All Energy Sola (Score:2)
dude. 'just solar' is literally just the 'sunlight' hitting the earth. the 'wind' that it causes is *additional* renewable energy we can capture. So significantly *more* than 8000:1
Where do you think the energy comes from that moves air around? Wind energy IS solar energy. A negligible amount of warming occurs as a result of tidal flexing as we steal orbital energy from the Moon, and a small further amount comes from decay of radionuclides created when some much more ancient star went supernova, but essentially ALL the energy on this planet originates in the fusion reaction of our Sun.
Wind Energy is Ultimately Solar Energy (Score:2)
dude. 'just solar' is literally just the 'sunlight' hitting the earth. the 'wind' that it causes is *additional* renewable energy we can capture.
"Dude", learn some physics. Any solar energy you capture through solar pannels is no longer available to generate wind. Literally all of the energy sources we have are either directly or indirectly from the solar energy hitting earth. Sp while you protray it as "just solar" suggesting there are other forms of energy that's not really true although fossil fuels and nuclear are previously captured and stored stellar energy. The only energy we have beyond this is either solar energy that is not hitting Earth
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Fusion nuclear would be amazing, but as they say, just 20 years out. Whereas batteries are here today and growing rapidly.
In a strange twist of fate, if fusion power ever happens, there will be a need for many fission reactors to produce the tritium needed. If the ITER boondoggle ever goes to its experiments, it will use up pretty much all the tritium we have now.
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Also, it seems that our political & regulatory systems are getting more corrupt & corporations are getting away with more malpractice than ever. Who would you trust to build & run our nuclear power plants safely, under budget, & on time?
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absolute FUD, which isn't surprising from the nuke it all crowd. Solar power is about the literal cheapest thing out there bud. The current sticky wicket is storage, as that ramps, and it is significantly now, the 'intermittency' of renewable is flattened out into a nice fat baseload.
In fact, CA has days, this year, where renewables and storage provided 40% of it's baseload for 24 hours. Including of course 115% of daytime usage. Once that can be fully stored, solar/wind + batteries become far cheaper
Solar is cheap for the optimal applications (Score:3)
absolute FUD, which isn't surprising from the nuke it all crowd. Solar power is about the literal cheapest thing out there bud.
Although I hate to quibble with somebody making a point I essentially agree with, I need to point out that this statement needs a footnote: Solar power is about the literal cheapest thing out there for some locations and applications.
The cost of electricity from solar power varies by more than an order of magnitude depending on where you are using it (and what your power use profile is). The likely solution will be a mix of power sources, using the right sources depending on locations and different markets
Solar cell production doesn't produce toxic waste (Score:3)
Bud, the production of solar panels produces toxic waste and China really doesn't care much about that.
No, making solar cells doesn't have to produce toxic waste. This would be mostly solvents used in cleaning, which are recyclable. Some lesser amount of acid etchants, which can be easily neutralized (or recycled).
The misinformation that making solar panels produces toxic waste comes from the oil industry, which has a trillion dollar incentive to not move to renewable energy.
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Nuclear "fails" those metrics for the same reason the US Postal Service is "failing" its budget: It's been deliberately crippled by corrupt people with a vested interest in destroying it.
Meanwhile your beloved "renewables" actually ARE as catastrophically harmful for the environment at every stage of their lifecycle as people pretend Nuclear to be. If we ramp up "renewables" like you want the earth actually WILL wind up a giant ball of toxic waste. Those beloved solar panels of yours for example are catastrophic to the environment to manufacture, lead to bankruptingly expensive unreliable energy supplies when relied on for their pathetically short lifespan, and then turn into huge volumes of deathly toxic waste that will never decay after just a few years.
Most bodaciously cool story bro! If there is one thing we know for certain, the Nuclear power industry has never and will never have any problems - Did you know that the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents never happened? It was the Environazies planting fake news.
But it goes much much deeper than that. All of that bullshit containment structures is just a false flag to make people fear radiation. What they do not know is that radiation is good for you - people exposed to radiation are already over 200 ye
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Nuclear "fails" those metrics for the same reason the US Postal Service is "failing" its budget: It's been deliberately crippled by corrupt people with a vested interest in destroying it.
Meanwhile your beloved "renewables" actually ARE as catastrophically harmful for the environment at every stage of their lifecycle as people pretend Nuclear to be.
Point one is arguably true: nuclear power does not inherently have to be expensive.
Point two is inaccurate. Silicon solar arrays are not harmful to the environment. The main components are silicon, glass, and aluminum (and the amount of aluminum required is trivial compared to the amount we refine for other purposes.) None of these are particularly harmful.
There is a lot of misinformation being promulgated about how harmful solar arrays are; if you dig down, this is all ultimately originating from "think
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facts can indeed be weird.
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Fiction has to make sense, reality does not.
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Making nuclear is easy. Getting it deployed is a matter of convincing people it's safe (and hopefully they are convinced because it actually is safe).
Re: It would be easier to build new nuclear power! (Score:2)
Re: It would be easier to build new nuclear power (Score:2)
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My friends do a version of that when I return home from living in the middle east. Last time was Pork scratchings to snack on with a few pre-dinner drinks while dinner is getting finished, then pork belly for an appetiser and bbq pork ribs for a main, with a side of cabbage with bacon and baked potatoes topped with pulled pork cheese, followed by home-made bacon maple ice-cream.
Yeah it was a bit over the top but after 6 months without seeing pork it was awesome.
Re: (Score:2)
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Reducing our collective carbon footprint would be the optimal solution
Reducing the population would go a long way toward that goal. The childless cat ladies are on to something.
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Reducing our collective carbon footprint would be the optimal solution. If we want to remove fossil fuels from our grid we need to build new nuclear. Seems much more viable than geoenginering solutions.
In an objective and data-driven world, maybe.. I don't think we really know because the cost of nuclear is so distorted by politics and scorched-earth opposition we have little data on what nuclear ought to cost.
That said, it's not like geoengineering won't have the same political headwinds. Didn't an experiment in Alameda getting cancelled due to local opposition? And that project was just spraying seawater, not sulphur dioxide.
All that said, I think the opponents to geoengineering bring up some really goo
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The fact that we aren't building lots of nuclear (even if it is or was too costly and dangerous and slow) is highly suggestive that climate change (as taught to the public) is not real.
No, it really isn't suggestive of that at all. People are just bad at long term planning.
Maybe (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Maybe (Score:2)
Re:Maybe (Score:4, Funny)
it would easier to call the AC weird.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with initiatives likes these is they start out with good intentions but always lead to two outcomes: unintentional disastrous results or suppression of research that highlights the potential for disastrous results but the project moves on regardless. Lead in gasoline, DDT, the plastics industry and their BS recycling claims, oil company suppression of global warming research ... the list goes on. Finding alternatives to fossil fuels is the only way forward. Quick fixes do not exist.
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"always lead to two outcomes: unintentional disastrous results..."
So we can never do anything new?
They missed one of the major downsides. (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the major dowsides not mentioned in the summary is due to how this cools the planet. The greenhouse effect works through sunlight coming down to the surface and producing heat, which tries to leave the planet as IR, but greenhouse gases effectively trap the IR, leading to heating. This technique does not counter the greenhouse effect. It leaves the greenhouse effect just as strong, but it lets less sunlight in. This is a bad thing, because we use sunlight and are, in fact, dependent on it. If anything like this is implemented globally, how are we going to deal with the inevitable loss of sunlight for growing crops, solar power, etc.? A dimmer world means less food. Will farmers be compensated? Will more farmland be opened up to compensate for the loss?
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You should check out the fiction book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel) it addresses your questions.
Uncontrollable Risk is the Major Downside (Score:3)
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I'm not advocating for this approach, but one of the good things about this proposal is that it creates short-lived problems and is easy to stop doing. Also, you can do it regionally.
On the other hand, acid rain is not great.
Crack Cocaine for the Planet (Score:2)
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Once you start a program like this, you cannot ever stop. If the ongoing release of sulfur dioxide was ever interrupted for whatever reason, intentional or unintentional, the consequences would be worse than the, admittedly severe, problem it is intended to solve.
Er, if you stop taking the medicine, the symptoms come back? So we can't take the medicine? Okay ...
No (Score:4, Informative)
Instead of polluting the atmosphere even more, we can develop retro-reflective coatings and foils that can bounce back some of the sunlight.
With ever increasing temperatures, we will need to develop large scale shading, at least for cities. Trees do that very well, but for places where they are not feasible, we can have giant umbrellas with reflective coating that "look at the sun". They can fold during high winds or rain.
No. (Score:4, Interesting)
We should fight it by finding ways to stop emitting and to remove accumulated CO2.
Inception (Score:3)
We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky.
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This is from the Matrix. nolan is complicated, not deep ;)
"We don't know who struck first, us or them... (Score:2)
... But we do know it was us that scorched the sky"
Acid rain (Score:3)
I'm really sceptical to this idea... considering that sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere is a known cause of acid rain.
This idea is just as stupid as "Let's make AI solve it, We'll just have to first wreck the planet with its massively energy-hungry data centres".
Yes, but how much acid rain? (Score:2)
We know that the ships used to burn fuel with high levels of sulphur, but have been banned from doing so recently. How much sulphur was that releasing into the atmosphere compared to the proposed amounts in this geoengineering project? The fact that a project has negative consequences doesn't mean it's not worthwhile; people drive cars despite the damage to the atmosphere and the occurrence of road traffic accidents.
Note the rise in temperatures caused by the banning of sulphur in ship fuels...
https://www.c [carbonbrief.org]
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Not to mention the insanely large amount of SO2 that would actuall need to be industrally created and released into the atmosphere to counteract global warming. Mount Pinatubo's eruption in 1991 released 17 MEGATONS OF SO2 into the atmosphere in just days, yet it cooled the planet by only 0.5C for just a measely three years.
Not to mention the harm acid rain causes. Acid rain from the smelters slowly killed off the forests around Sudbury Ontario and turned the landscape into a treeless moonscape by the 1
Just stop this nonsense (Score:2)
There seemingly still are people that think that they can fix pollution by mitigating the adverse effects of it. This idiot thinks it's a good idea to fix it by creating acid rain. We've seen the effects of that for decades now.
There is only one single solution for stopping pollution: stop polluting.
don't skip an important step (Score:2)
Getting the amount of CO2 that the world pumps out of the ground under control and drastically reduced is the step thst needs to happen first. From there we can see if more drastic measures are necessary.
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If by "drastically reduced" you mean "achieve net negative through green power generation and artificial sequestration", then I agree.
Nature sequesters carbon far too slowly for our needs, we're going to have to put it back in the ground ourselves or as far as anyone alive today is concerned, today's CO2 levels are the new normal for the rest of time. (Most likely longer than humans have had anything we'd recognize as 'civilization')
Talk less, read more (Score:3)
Of course, knowing such things would require reading rather than just talking, it seems our professor here is only even slightly talented at doing one of those things.
Stupid idea (Score:5, Informative)
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Stupid idea. First and foremost: messing with a global system that we don't really understand. Second, who remembers "acid rain" killing off forests ant waterways - caused primarily by sulfur dioxide released from coal-burning power plants?
I'm out of mod points, but I'm surprised that this is not the first comment.
Acid rain here we go (Score:2)
Since all those 80's pop-culture dystopias failed to come to fruition we will have to help them along...
Seems to me like a recipe for acid rain.
Bill Gates invested in SnowPiercer (Score:2)
Always bet on both sides if you have plenty of money after departing from your IT adventures.
Alternatively (Score:2)
We could just hope for a really big volcanic eruption or two. History has more than a few with well documented results. And might happen whether we want it or not.
"Opponents worry ..." (Score:3, Interesting)
Opponents worry it would distract from the urgent work of transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Well, you can't have it both ways.
If "transitioning away from fossil fuels" is going so well, then the daily reports of how awful and apocalyptic things are can't be true.
But if things actually are that bad, then we really do need to try something else, don't we?
risk (Score:2)
Our modern society does a poor job of teaching people about risk. When you've never learned to be comfortable handling risk then you see risk as something to avoid, something to fear. When you fear risk any unknown situation or aspect is scary. When fear rules we make no progress.
Acid rain (Score:2)
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Glad somebody noticed that there's a risk of CO2 levels being too low in the future. It may not solely be due to geoengineering though.
Re: Sulfur rich fuel oil... (Score:2)
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Climate change fanatics have a specious view of the earth's climate. People are saying the sky is falling, when it is not.
Which people? When did they say that?
the forest fires from Canada turned an otherwise clean rural area into a blanket of the thickest smog I've seen. It can be seen, smelt, even felt in the lungs. Articles even on this site showing that the pollution caused by these fires can cause disease. But we're supposed to focus on a set of issues that are human caused.
The extent of these fires is human-caused.