Diamond Dust Could Cool the Planet At a Cost of Mere Trillions (science.org) 96
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: From dumping iron into the ocean to launching mirrors into space, proposals to cool the planet through 'geoengineering' tend to be controversial -- and sometimes fantastical. A new idea isn't any less far-out, but it may avoid some of the usual pitfalls of strategies to fill the atmosphere with tiny, reflective particles. In a modeling study published this month in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists report that shooting 5 million tons of diamond dust into the stratosphere each year could cool the planet by 1.6C -- enough to stave off the worst consequences of global warming. The scheme wouldn't be cheap, however: experts estimate it would cost nearly $200 trillion over the remainder of this century -- far more than traditional proposals to use sulfur particles. [...]
The researchers modeled the effects of seven compounds, including sulfur dioxide, as well as particles of diamond, aluminum, and calcite, the primary ingredient in limestone. They evaluated the effects of each particle across 45 years in the model, where each trial took more than a week in real-time on a supercomputer. The results showed diamond particles were best at reflecting radiation while also staying aloft and avoiding clumping. Diamond is also thought to be chemically inert, meaning it would not react to form acid rain, like sulfur. To achieve 1.6C of cooling, 5 million tons of diamond particles would need to be injected into the stratosphere each year. Such a large quantity would require a huge ramp up in synthetic diamond production before high-altitude aircraft could sprinkle the ground-up gems across the stratosphere. At roughly $500,000 per ton, synthetic diamond dust would be 2,400 times more expensive than sulfur and cost $175 trillion if deployed from 2035 to 2100, one study estimates.
The researchers modeled the effects of seven compounds, including sulfur dioxide, as well as particles of diamond, aluminum, and calcite, the primary ingredient in limestone. They evaluated the effects of each particle across 45 years in the model, where each trial took more than a week in real-time on a supercomputer. The results showed diamond particles were best at reflecting radiation while also staying aloft and avoiding clumping. Diamond is also thought to be chemically inert, meaning it would not react to form acid rain, like sulfur. To achieve 1.6C of cooling, 5 million tons of diamond particles would need to be injected into the stratosphere each year. Such a large quantity would require a huge ramp up in synthetic diamond production before high-altitude aircraft could sprinkle the ground-up gems across the stratosphere. At roughly $500,000 per ton, synthetic diamond dust would be 2,400 times more expensive than sulfur and cost $175 trillion if deployed from 2035 to 2100, one study estimates.
Greater Restoration? (Score:5, Funny)
So basically, they want to cast Greater Restoration on the planet?
Re:Greater Restoration? (Score:4, Funny)
No, This is Science (Score:2)
Re:theory that very small rocks float. (Score:1)
Only flat ones float, not the round ones. Flat-Earthers have been telling us this for decades. A round Earth would be pulled into the Galaxy's central black hole.
Snowball Earth (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] is what they're aiming for.
What about the power requirements? (Score:5, Insightful)
The best numbers I've seen involve about 28 kWh to produce a single karat of synthetic diamond. There are 4,535,923.7 karats in a ton. 5 million tons is 22,679,618,500,000 karats. Multiply that times 28 kWh, and you have 635,029,318,000,000 kWh of power. At a U.S. average of 0.86 pounds of CO2 per kWh, that's 273,062,606,740 *tons* of CO2 emitted to produce those synthetic diamonds. And that's not counting the emissions from any mining required to create the raw materials.
So we would emit the equivalent of more than 7 *years* of annual CO2 emissions every year. Does their model account for the 700% increase in CO2 emissions required to do it? More to the point, sure, it *might* still cool the atmosphere (or not), but will it *stay* cool after all that extra CO2 is added to it, once the diamond dust settles out of suspension, or will we end up with a series of rebound heating waves that get worse and worse until we can't produce enough diamond dust to fix the problem, and the entire human race is wiped out by our own recklessness and hubris?
I'm not saying this can't work, because I haven't done the math, but any time you're talking about a triple-digit percentage increase in world CO2 emissions to solve a problem, the amount of energy involved is so enormous that it raises serious red flags, and if we can find a way to produce that much energy without adding CO2 to the atmosphere, then we've already likely solved the problem without blowing diamond powder into the air.
So I'm not convinced that this is a very good idea. In fact, if my rough math above is not off by at least two or three orders of magnitude, I think it might very well go down as one of the worst ideas in all of human history, right alongside nuclear weapons and pineapple on pizza. Just saying.
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Those are good points. Did you calculate the net change in CO2 if the carbon for the diamonds comes from CO2 in the atmosphere in the first place? I'm sure it's still going to be a net increase in CO2, unless all the power comes from renewables. Even then, it would clearly make more sense to completely replace all fossil fuel usage with that power first, rather than try crazy plans to geo-engineer the Earth.
Of course, just like all these plans to cool the Earth to counteract global warming, there's no exami
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I you can extract enough carbon to make the diamonds, perhaps you'd be better off extracting it and turning it into simple carbon black and burying it rather than making diamonds with it.
Exactly why I considered, but didn't mention that possibility. That said, I'll do the math and see what happens.
CO2 is 27.27% carbon by volume, so 5 million tons of carbon would take 18.34 million tons of CO2. Mind you, we produce 37.4 *billion* tons, but if you can build enough extraction to pull out 18.34 million tons in year one, you can probably build 10x that many extraction plants by year five, 100x by year 10, and 1000x by the end of those 45 years, and now you've wiped out world CO2 emissions.
And
Re:What about the power requirements? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's irrelevant whether it works or not because, as you point out, the energy to accomplish it is going to render it moot. As with all solutions that aren't significant reductions in emissions, such as carbon sequestration, thermodynamics is going to balance the books on the wrong side of the ledger. We keep trying to find these "get out of jail free" cards that will allow us to continue the behaviors that got us into this mess, and they all amount to one form of perpetual motion machine or another... in other words scams. The only solution is to drastically reduce GHG emissions. That's it, the only thing that's going to work, and we've almost certainly reached a point where even if we do so in the next decade or two, it's not likely to be soon enough to reduce the more significant impacts. We'd basically be doing it for our great great children... at best.
Re: What about the power requirements? (Score:4, Interesting)
People have been saying the same thing for 30 years. I think we've already used up our free decades. A paper a few days ago shows a 50% chance of AMOC collapse by 2050 as is. Another presentation I saw a few weeks ago shows basically all emissions and temperatures following the RC 8.5 track, which argues that Hansen's more recent papers are likely correct - we've underestimated CO2 sensitivity.
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A paper a few days ago shows a 50% chance of AMOC collapse by 2050 as is
Climate models aren't currently good enough to predict AMOC two decades out.
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Unfortunately, we're now in a position where simply cutting emission isn't enough. We need to BOTH cut emissions, and extract CO2 from the system. And all the plans to do the second half are fakes, designed to promote continued consumption of fossil fuels. Either that, or impossible to scale up sufficiently. (E.g. planting trees is a good idea, but you can't scale it up sufficiently. And even then you've got to allow for "infant mortality". Most tree planting projects don't care for the trees they've
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You're not going to solve this through some big vast carbon sequestration process. To make a meaningful dent would require huge amounts of energy, far beyond what spare electricity of any kind is going to solve. Carbon sequestration is a scam, a 21st century perpetual motion machine.
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As with all solutions that aren't significant reductions in emissions.
An instant one would be Culling the human population the problem we have at the moment is the only growing populations really don't give a crap and many that say they do are just that all talk and hide the fact they are actually making it worse. Before someone says Thanos or some other fictional evil character It doesn't have to done that way. Some countries will depopulate and already are as people no longer see children as a retirement plan. And I am certain you could eliminate drug dealers and pedophiles
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Do you have a serious proposal, one that doesn't involve genocide and killing off all the bad people that constitute some infinitesimal proportion of the population?
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Something is being done. Population growth is flattening out. The demographic problem is solving itself, and it's yet another problem developed economies have not prepared themselves for. Japan may be at the extreme end of population decline, but the developed world in general is shrinking, and the developing world, outside of a few outliers, is also flattening growth.
That problem is taking care of itself. And yet, just to demonstrate how there's only a weak correlation between population size and emissions
Re: What about the power requirements? (Score:1)
KWh is energy, not power.
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I meant power in the colloquial sense, as a synonym for electricity, not in the Watts sense.
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But as I said, if you have managed to produce roughly an order of magnitude more electricity than the entire world uses using low-carbon sources, then you can basically reduce the world's emissions to zero or very nearly so, and still have enough energy left over to trivially build giant artificial lightning arc machines to separate carbon from air by electrolysis in vast quantities without caring about the exorbitant energy costs.
In other words, by solving the utterly absurd electrical requirements for thi
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At a U.S. average of 0.86 pounds of CO2 per kWh
In France, where two thirds of electricity production comes from nuclear plants, the carbon intensity is 10 times lower: 39 gram CO2eq/kWh. I'm not saying that this makes diamond dust a feasible idea, but using the US number is probably not the best choice in this calculation. To get an idea of the varying carbon intensity of electricity production around the world, see electricitymaps.com.
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At a U.S. average of 0.86 pounds of CO2 per kWh
In France, where two thirds of electricity production comes from nuclear plants, the carbon intensity is 10 times lower: 39 gram CO2eq/kWh. I'm not saying that this makes diamond dust a feasible idea, but using the US number is probably not the best choice in this calculation.
There's a lot hidden in France's numbers, starting with the cost of increasing the electrical generating capacity of the entire world by well over an order of magnitude. 635,000 terawatt hours per year is 26 times the entire *world's* electrical energy consumption. You are *not* going to be able to produce that much electricity with clean sources, realistically speaking.
442 million terawatt hours of energy strike the entire land area of the planet Earth each year. Assuming a realistic 25% solar panel eff
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The paper actually tests a number of different substances, with diamond being the best. What we need is to find something with similar optical properties but which requires less energy to produce.
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The paper actually tests a number of different substances, with diamond being the best. What we need is to find something with similar optical properties but which requires less energy to produce.
Aluminum foil/dust. It would reflect 88% of light. You don't even need it to be permanent. When it falls to earth, launch more. The cost of making it is relatively low, because you just have to mine it and melt it, rather than put it under crazy amounts of heat and pressure over a long period of time.
We make 68 million metric tons of aluminum foil every year. 6 million tons of aluminum dust would not be even slightly difficult to manufacture with current technology.
Getting it into orbit, however, would
Well yeah, but if it can save us from ourselves... (Score:2)
Well yeah, but if it can save us from ourselves...
Or at least the children. Let us think about the children for once!
Not convinced. (Score:2)
The energy needed to produce diamond dust is very high, and if you add more heat than you remove, you've achieved nothing.
A large array of movable modular solar collectors which you can move would seem better. Collect the energy over a very large area and beam it to somewhere useful. Earth might be good.
Because you can move them, you can control the level and location of shade. By beaming the energy to Earth, you reduce the need to generate energy on Earth. And solar cells in space should collect far more e
What ?!! (Score:1)
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The problem with solar power collection in space is getting the power down to Earth. Fans of the idea (and I am one, but with reservations) often simply hand wave the part where the power has to reach Earth by assuming they can microwave it to Earth. If you've ever tried to work out what kind of microwave transmitter/receiver array you would need for that though, it doesn't come out looking very attractive compared to solar cells on the ground. Using orbital mirrors to increase sunlight to solar arrays on t
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Yes, but the consequences would need to be carefully considered.
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Uh, don't the thermodynamic limits argue against that sort of idea being able to make a difference? We need to reflect energy back into space, not absorb it into the surface where it will, ultimately, once again become heat.
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Why would solar panels or other energy collectors in space generate heat on Earth? The thermodynamics of that seem odd to me.
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You suggested sending the energy down to the surface. There, during its use to power things, it will eventually become heat, which is currently the enemy.
We want less energy from the sun to reach the surface. Turning the solar photons that would otherwise have hit the earth's surface and heat it up into, e.g., microwave photons that you're proposing to beam to the surface ... well, that still ultimately heats up the surface.
Lung problems? (Score:4, Interesting)
Doesn't "sharp" dust create lung problems? Those who work with stone-based furniture grinding machines often form medical problems.
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Don't worry, rich people have a natural tolerance.
Re:Lung problems? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. Every air breathing animal on earth would end up with white lung disease. If white lung is taken it'll be glittering lung disease. Symptoms will likely be similar to silicosis.
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Just another attempt to justify continue polluting (Score:2)
Rich assholes must get richer! Cannot have the human race actually do something effective about the upcoming (near-) extinction event. So here is some nice fantasy to keep the masses convinced we are not utterly and completely screwed already.
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solving the wrong problem (Score:2)
Putting a band-aid on it won't solve the underlying problem. Too much CO2 in the atmosphere. We neeed to remoove it
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Putting a band-aid on it won't solve the underlying problem. Too much CO2 in the atmosphere. We neeed to remoove it
If we reduce how much we produce, we won't have to remove it.
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CO2 is PLANT FOOD. Plants take CO2 out of the atmosphere and produce oxygen. We have barely ENOUGH CO2 in the atmosphere to keep the plants alive, and far BELOW long-term historical levels of CO2.
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CO2 is PLANT FOOD. Plants take CO2 out of the atmosphere and produce oxygen. We have barely ENOUGH CO2 in the atmosphere to keep the plants alive, and far BELOW long-term historical levels of CO2.
That depends on what you mean by "historical." CO2 levels were low for much of humanity's history (and well before then) and only recently have risen to levels comparable to those in periods of tens to hundreds of millions of years ago.
https://earth.org/data_visuali... [earth.org]
TL/DR: CO2 levels were historically low during the rise of humanity but they have been historically high since the 1950s.
So no, we don't have "barely enough" CO2 to keep plants alive. Plants did fine on low levels for hundreds of thousands of
It would be easier (Score:2)
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Darkener is the exact opposite of the right answer. This answer looks unworkable, but it might cool the planet if it were done. A darkening agent would increase absorption of energy. It would also increase radiation at night, but radiation is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, and this stuff would be low in the stratosphere (and sink down) where the temperatures are very cold. (I don't think it could stay up in the upper stratosphere or the ionosphere, where the temperatures rise again.)
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Practice your terraforming on Mars first (Score:2)
Look, if you're into terraforming, go practice on an uninhabited planet first. The atmosphere on Mars is 95% CO2 and the average temperature is -80 F. If we're gonna put a million people there, somebody needs to fix up the place, first.
Is one of the researchers... (Score:2)
P.S. I'm very surprised that nobody beat me to this reference!
Really brilliant /s (Score:4, Insightful)
We barely understand the most basic things about climate, and people want to deliberately muck with it on a planetary scale?
What could go wrong?
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We've been mucking with the climate since the first rice paddy was built. We've been doing it on an increasingly large scale since the industrial revolution.
FWIW, without the CO2 we'd probably be entering an Ice Age, but we've overdone it to the point where we need to make a correction. Otherwise we might end up living on Dune. (Ok, that's an exaggeration. How much of one I'm not sure, but the oceans aren't likely to go away.)
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What could go wrong?
This "argument" is the worst excuse for doing nothing. Instead, let's try all geoengineering approaches that can't run away, whether it's aerosols that settle with time or ocean blooms taht require a nutrient. Start small, check for side effects, and scale up.
Cools Earth but heats Mars? (Score:2)
But doing the same thing here except with diamond would apparently cool the Earth instead?
Re:Cools Earth but heats Mars? (Score:4, Funny)
Nice sales tactic :) (Score:1)
-- far more than traditional proposals to use sulfur particles.
The $10 laundry detergent doesn't look so bad now, does it, sitting next to the $18 laundry detergent! :)
Shading concepts are most efficient at poles. (Score:2)
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Yeah, but how do you propose to do that? None of the proposals I've encountered would do it. E.g. a solar shade at the Lagrange point would mainly cool the tropics. (Causing the jet stream to slow even more. Ugh!)
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Instead of curbing consumption (Score:1)
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Even it we do it, it better not be instead of curbing CO2 generation, or it would be almost a waste of effort.
I give up (Score:2)
Burn baby, burn. If it gets too hot, get a gasoline generator and plug an AC unit into it. Why the fuck not?
We obviously do not (collectively) care to deal with the actual problem.
Tiny hard particles in the air that we breathe (Score:2)
(Yes, those particles won't stay in the stratosphere forever. Eventually they'll sink to lower altitudes where they might cause all sorts of issues)
Dust cloud at L1 (Score:2)
Dust and air travel? (Score:5, Informative)
I remember back when the volcano under EyjafjallajÃkull on Iceland erupted in 2010 and spewed dust high up in the atmosphere ...
That dust was abrasive for aircraft engines and windshields, and postponed all transatlantic flights for a week.
(I had a workmate whose overseas vacation got an unplanned extension.)
Well that's one way of reducing CO2 emissions, I suppose...
Which is what we should do anyway. Right now. Without being forced to.
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Just what we need. (Score:2)
sand blasting the ablative shielding of rockets on the way into orbit before corrosive clouds forming to sandblast the paint off planes flying through them and diamond rain falling to strip the land of anything made of material softer than diamonds.
Let's use the moon. (Score:1)
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It's a better idea, but not sufficient. But if you overbuild the power generation, you can use the excess power to extract CO2, and turn it into something non-gaseous. (Probably plastic.)
I would just be curious ... (Score:2)
what the amount of fossil fuel and consequently CO2 would be, required to distribute 5 million tons of diamond particles in the stratosphere.
Nope (Score:3)
Just no.
Why not try vaporized sodium? (Score:1)
easier to get started (Score:2)
This is for the environment and future of the planet. Shouldn't be too hard to convince ladies to donate their actual diamonds to the cause, dumping diamonds is cool. Make it free for divorced men to crush donated diamonds. win-win-win
Diamond dust and lungs? (Score:2)
A Foolish Expenditure (Score:2)
"Climate change" is a CYCLE, a thousand years long. Like winters and summers, the planet gets warmer and cools off in cycles that no human lifespan can encompass. This cycle is about at its peak, and it will begin to cool off "soon" - probably by 2050 or so. Doing some sort of IRREVERSABLE geo-engineering action would exacerbate the depths of the cooling cycle, and probably cause incalculable misery.
At the peak of the last cycle, Vikings grew barley and had dairy farms on Greenland. At the peak of the previ
Is breathing that stuff safe? (Score:2)
My point is I don't know, and who does? Please, let us not do stupid things that make everything worse, mmkay? 'Law of unintended consequences'.
Alternate solution. (Score:2)
Can't we just use (even) more Starlink satellites? The newer ones are suppose to be bigger. A generation or two more could block out the Sun. :-)
Give me a break (Score:2)
We're concerned about injesting microplastics...what happens when we breathe microscopic particles of the hardest, most durable substance in nature?
Think about what happens when we breath asbestos or silica particles.
Now increase the hardness of those particles to mohs 10.
sexytime (Score:1)
synthetic diamond dust in our lungs?! (Score:1)
We don't even yet know the health effects of breathing Silver Iodide! What do geoengineers think will happen to synthetic diamond dust in our lungs??
We don't know who struck first, us or them. (Score:1)
Summary fail (Score:2)
pneumonoultramicroscopic.... (Score:2)
Also: rise in pathology of cellular damage and cancerous growths around microscopic carbon crystals found in cells.
Also: ultramicroscopicadamentem-induced gastroenteritis and duodenitis, jejunitis, ilieitus, colitis, appendicitis and subsequent sepsis.
Also: ultramicroscopicadamentem-induced atopic dermatitis and cancer.
Basically: you're gonna have a rise in lung disease, stomach disease, intestinal disease, hernias, skin disea
Amazing what you can do... (Score:2)
When you ignore the input costs of the plan. Synthetic diamond production is one of the most energy intensive things humans have managed to do profitably in a commercial space and it is only profitable because of how expensive diamond is.
Then there is the comparably tiny cost to get all that dust up high enough into the atmosphere. Oh and lets not forget all the people dying from glistening white lung.
Now that we've dialed back some of the hype from most climate change we need to adjust how drastic the solu
Some other great ideas (Score:2)
Drop nukular bombs into Hurricanes (2)
Pump gold nano particles into the atmosphere (3)
free popcorn to anyone who can identify the sources of these truly great ideas
Calcium Oxide (Score:1)