White House is pushing ahead research to cool Earth by reflecting back sunlight

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/what-is-solar-geoengineering-sunlight-reflection-risks-and-benefits.html

by paulkrush • 4 years ago

282 602 4 years ago

paulkrush5• 4 years ago

OMG, I did not see this coming so quickly. This is Neal Stephenson: Termination Shock happening in real life. I love the fact that he wrote a book, but setup the sequel in the name of the book. What is the math? 100 grams of sulfur removes the effects of 100 tons of CO2?

GrifMD• 4 years ago

The Ministry of the Future also addressed the same type of heat reduction technology, albeit as a much smaller part of the book.

I'd highly recommend it, though the opening is very hard to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future

paulkrush5• 4 years ago

I bought it as you were typing! Boy that's funny.

paulkrush5• 4 years ago

Did the oil industry global warming flippening just happen?: When the oil companies 100% side with environmentalists, completely accept global warming, and endorse geoengineering to fix it.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

Because one of the solutions seems to be "burn more sulfur-containing fuels"?

eloff2• 4 years ago

They love active solutions that distract from the fact that the only permanent solution means there can be no more oil, gas, or coal companies.

ggm• 4 years ago

I'm going to make an out there prediction. It works, but its expensive and demands a lot of technology which people like santos, bechtel, schlumberger are absolute EXPERTS at supplying in a cost+ government project with no penalty clauses.

I'm going to make a second prediction. It wont work as well as moving out of the industrial processes into newer ones which don't exacerbate the problem, it's just that the money flows won't help the people who have the ear of the WH on this.

And a third one. it will have serious downsides. things which we didn't think of which are exceptionally hard to remediate at scale once we've put the material up there in volume.

This isn't really predictive. Its actually not that far removed from what the other commentors say Neal Stephenson said anyway.

smeagull• 4 years ago

I don't think this needs to be tremendously expensive, and there are side benefits to this.

More reflective footpath and road surfaces (think paler in colour rather than mirror like) are cooler - urban heat will be a problem that also needs solving and that solves both. Solar panels are also somewhat reflective.

I think it's a mistake to think 'large mirror' than to think about what we can change about the massive surfaces that we are already covering with man-made structures.

zardo• 4 years ago

Those aren't the rapid climate interventions this seems to be about. This about injecting massive amounts of material into the atmosphere and/or ocean.

paulkrush5• 4 years ago

Solar panels heat the earth: https://www.greenbiz.com/article/giant-desert-solar-farms-mi...

Schroedingersat5• 4 years ago

And a third one. it will have serious downsides. things which we didn't think of which are exceptionally hard to remediate at scale once we've put the material up there in volume.

I disagree with this. The downsides will be things the same 15% of the population that always points these things out will point out. They'll then be soundly ignored.

h2odragon2• 4 years ago

Launch giant rolls of toilet paper. Spread them out in low orbit. They will reflect light; ablate incoming space junk, and sequester carbon as well as stimulating the forestry industry. If we want to we could subsidize newspapers by having them print ads on them before launch.

Of course they won't last long, even low orbits are harsh. This will be an ongoing opportunity for several industries capable of making important campaign donations.

nomel• 4 years ago

What's the math for this? How much CO2 per gram into low orbit, these days?

My naive assumption is that the amount of CO2 released to put them into orbit would be a net negative, since they'll eventually fall away, revealing the the now increased CO2 to the sun.

zdragnar2• 4 years ago

Strangely, I think I would be more okay with this than a longer lasting chemical- TP is predominantly lignin, of which the atmosphere already has the constituent elements. Only worry is stray chlorine, lead and other heavy metal contaminants absorbed into the source material from trees as they grew- but presumably the TP would offset whatever shenanigans those get up to.

Since it would break down and burn up upon reentry (or maybe just float down?) there might not be that much interaction anyway.

Compare that with the unknowns of longer-lasting particulates of sulfur and other nasties, the back-of-the-napkin math really doesn't sound that bad.

h2odragon2• 4 years ago

Think flash paper. It could be engineered fairly finely, I bet; possibly using electrical properties to encourage clumping or dispersal as required.

paulkrush5• 4 years ago

The deadline was last month to submit a paper to the white house on this: https://mailchi.mp/ff8ed2a3ed98/save-the-date-usgcrp-interna...

TheRealPomax• 4 years ago

Glad to see the white house pulling a classic "too little, way too late". How about we pour that money into actual solutions. Crazy idea, I know. We already have them, the US just needs to actually grow a spine and commit to them.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

This reminds me that it was mentioned how the decrease in global shipping during the pandemic and the fact that the bulk of those ships burn high-sulfur fuels may have had an observable effect on warming.

denkmoon• 4 years ago

Really is the sun not the root cause of our warming problem? We should simply blow it up.

PM_me_your_math2• 4 years ago

I agree. We need to get the sun before it gets us.

tkanarsky• 4 years ago

We should just fly over there at night and put a blanket over it

swayvil• 4 years ago

Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun.

kkielhofner3• 4 years ago

BLOCK IT OUT!

For those that don’t get the reference:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Shot_Mr._Burns%3F

wavefunction• 4 years ago

HackerNews tries to discourage the sort of pop culture references that are so prevalent across the Internet in the hopes of fostering real substantial communication and dialog. I don't speak on their behalf but as a member of their audience and this has been the culture of this site for a long while, which is why I downvoted your post, the post you replied to, and the other posts that reference this same Simpsons quote which I hope will illustrate that references like this are not very creative either.

vgeek• 4 years ago

I wonder what Montgomery Burns is charging for his consultation.

warning26• 4 years ago

"Since the dawn of civilization mankind has yearned to destroy the sun!"

chatterhead• 4 years ago

How about a way to reflect HID headlights on 3'6" high front end trucks?

babblingfish• 4 years ago

I feel like stratospheric aerosol injection would have some crazy unintended side effects. The size and complexity of the atmosphere is mind blowing. A mistake here could literally ruin the atmosphere for the entire globe.

Reduction of Carbon Emissions is and always will be the best strategy to slow down global warming. These moon shot initiatives are necessary but should not be taken too seriously given their low probability of success.

thomascgalvin• 4 years ago

I feel like stratospheric aerosol injection would have some crazy unintended side effects.

Yeah, but the alternative is lower profits for entrenched corporate powers, so ...

In all seriousness, though, I'm glad someone is considering all options, because the political reality of this planet is that the common-sense approach may very well be off the table, meaning a moonshot is all we'll have left.

faangiq• 4 years ago

Yeah, but the alternative is lower profits for entrenched corporate powers, so ...

Can’t we just pay these people enough to go away?

darth_avocado• 4 years ago

How about everyone in the world consume as less per capita as some of the poorest countries on the planet instead of poisoning everyone?

Any negative consequences, if any, will automatically put more burden on the poorer countries that don’t have the resources to fix things when they go wrong. All options should not be considered imho.

dilap• 4 years ago

It's hard for me to see a scenario where we reduce carbon emissions by any meaningful amount, TBH.

That said, I'd rather just take my chances with the warming than engage in some mad-scientist cooling plans...

Tangential, but I really enjoyed this podcast with a climate modeler:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYCrDuxal6k

autoexec3• 4 years ago

I'd rather just take my chances with the warming

At a certain point humanity's chances with the warming are zero. Just depends on how many dominoes start to fall and how fast. We could conceivably wipe out just about all life on the planet. If our only hope is to buy ourselves a few more years by geoengineering I'm all for it, but I do wish we'd start with things that didn't involve poisoning our atmosphere or risking upsetting our already screwed up weather system. It seems like we've done basically nothing so far so jumping straight to the most extreme potential solutions (none of which have a ton of evidence supporting their effectiveness) feels premature.

I guess if I were in the fossil fuel industry and wanted to continue making money hand over fist by destroying the planet these kinds of options must seem pretty tempting though. They certainly wouldn't lose any sleep poisoning the sky if it means they can continue doing business as usual.

paulcole• 4 years ago

I'd rather just take my chances with the warming rather than engage in some mad-scientist cooling plans

You (and I) are likely fairly wealthy relative to the rest of the world and will be dead within 60 years at the outside.

What we’d rather do doesn’t matter at all. Any decision from here on out is to mitigate the coming climate hell of 100-200 years from now.

Every year for the rest of our lives will be worse climate-wise. Some people are rich enough to avoid it bothering them too much. The rest of us will just have to deal with it.

xigency• 4 years ago

Reduction of Carbon Emissions is and always will be the best strategy to slow down global warming.

This isn’t sufficient on its own. Reduction of emissions, carbon recapture and carbon sequestration are all needed.

BurningFrog2• 4 years ago

What the side effects are, and how you can reverse various techniques if they doesn't work as intended seems like good topics for this proposed research to focus on.

DennisP11• 4 years ago

Since volcanoes do the same thing, we know from observation that the aerosols fall out of the atmosphere in a year or two.

throwawaylinux• 4 years ago

How could aerosols ruin the atmosphere?

And how do you calculate the probability of success here? And the probability of success of reducing carbon emissions?

halfjoking• 4 years ago

Telling nations to abstain from carbon emissions is like asking teenagers to be celibate.

The natural way to remove carbon is weathering rocks over millions of years, and it's not hard to accelerate that process so it only takes decades: https://vesta.earth

Why wouldn't that be the best strategy? Just like contraception is the best strategy for teenagers, I think natural methods of geoengineering are the best strategy for climate change. (I'm not saying aerosols are natural, that one is a horrible idea)

matthewdgreen2• 4 years ago

Many advanced nations have already seen pretty significant emissions declines, and this is robust even when you factor in offshoring manufacturing. Many of the huge declines in renewable energy production prices haven’t kicked in yet, so we’re likely to see lots more. Getting to net zero isn’t impossible. The problem is that we may get there when it’s too late.

phs318u• 4 years ago

According to Vesta's own website, even at their projections of "global scale" i.e. 100's of millions of tons CO2 captured, that's still around 1% of the annual fossil fuel driven emissions (tens of billions of tons).

DoingIsLearning• 4 years ago

Telling nations to abstain from carbon emissions is like asking teenagers to be celibate.

Not all nations are born alike. There are plenty of examples of wealthy nations in Europe and Asia with fractional carbon emissions footprint.

Before anyway throws the "they export their pollution" argument at me, you need to look at the stats on global GHG per capita.

Basically the US, Canada, Australia, and the Gulf Countries are disproportionately wasteful per capita.

This is largely due to how much people buy non-essential goods in those countries and how much energy is generated from Coal/Gas. Both of these can be changed without falling into medieval lifestyles.

To assume that nothing can be done about it is learned helplessness which absolutely plays into the interest of the hydrocarbon industry lobby.

edit: Gulf not Golf!

kortilla3• 4 years ago

Reduction of Carbon Emissions is and always will be the best strategy to slow down global warming.

A strategy that has consistently failed across multiple countries for the last 30 years is not a good strategy.

RugnirViking• 4 years ago

incorrect. https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/total-greenhouse-gas-emission-... The entire EU which consists of multiple countries, has reduced in emissions consistently since about 1970.

Even the US has been going down in absolute numbers since 2005, and per capita for longer.

It would be okay if this trend would be true across the world, but the issue is china primary and India secondly are growing in emissions exponentially, and their increase is more than the decrease in developed nations.

tgflynn2• 4 years ago

Stuff has been injected into the atmosphere by both humans and non-human processes since the beginning. I don't think this is likely to cause irreparable damage. What man has broken man can fix.

The anti-human ideology of environmentalism needs to end or mankind probably will.

The massive carbon reductions being called for won't happen once people realize the massive toll in human suffering they would cause. A pre-industrial Earth couldn't support anywhere near 8 billion humans.

soulofmischief4• 4 years ago

What man has broken man can fix.

Citation needed, please.

boringg• 4 years ago

"What man has broken man can fix."

No evidence to support such a bold and frankly uninformed claim. If we could have fixed this we would have - but right now we have so many complex systems which we only think we have some semblance of control.

"The massive carbon reductions being called for won't happen once people realize the massive toll in human suffering they would cause. A pre-industrial Earth couldn't support anywhere near 8 billion humans." << -- More troll lunacy.

chernofool• 4 years ago

What man has broken man can fix.

Counterpoint: Nuclear disasters like Chernobyl.

Some things just need to fix themselves over a long timescale. If we screw up badly enough, humanity won't be around to see the eventual recovery.

willnonya2• 4 years ago

Perhaps, until we have practical solutions or the will to embrace the existing solutions lowering carbon solutions is itself a "moon shot" with the potential for unintended consequences of its own along with many known but serious consequences we choose to ignore.

vital_beach• 4 years ago

I don't know how the science side of it works out in the real world, but the Snowpiercer take on this is pretty terrifying

simonbarker87• 4 years ago

But it made for a pretty great TV show and a not bad film though!

Joking aside this is a really fascinating, it’s just a shame we have to experiment in it with an N of 1

blitzar4• 4 years ago

This is the sort of thing you are meant to learn at school...

Introducing an exotic species for pest control can work, but sometimes it just makes everything much, much worse.

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2018/05/top-10-inv...

EdwardDiego2• 4 years ago

Disappointed that the article didn't mention the sad litany of New Zealand.

1) Hey, let's introduce rabbits for hunting!

2) Shit, they're eating all the grass that we want our sheep to eat

3) Let's introduce ferrets, stoats, and weasels, to eat all the rabbits!

4) Shit, they're just eating all the endemic birds

5) Uh....

We're still wrestling with Step #6 - our native beech forests (not Northern Hemisphere beech, as their Latin name makes clear - Nothofagus "false beech") will have a mass seeding event (a "mast") every few years. And when that happens, rodent populations explode, and then so too do the stoat and weasel populations.

But when the mustelids run out of rats and mice, then they move onto the birds. So, we have to poison, like crazy, as well as trap, to try to protect the birds most vulnerable to them.

throwaway4aday5• 4 years ago

That's a very simplified argument as well. Technological interventions are also often good. Medicine intervenes with the natural course of disease and deformity and more often than not produces better outcomes than if we let nature take its course. Agriculture is technology applied to the growth of plants and animals and has eliminated famine in the West for over a century and is quickly eliminating it around the world. You can't just say that human intervention = bad.

nakedrobot2• 4 years ago

no more than a volcanic eruption.

and like a volcanic eruption, the dust goes away in a few years.

stop the hysteria.

pif3• 4 years ago

Reduction of Carbon Emissions is also a sure way to show down the economy. And slowing down the economy is not acceptable: people want to get rid of global warming in order to live better; if the price to pay is to live worse, it's not worth it.

eloff2• 4 years ago

I think there are some ideas here that are low risk and low cost. I only know a little about the topic, but it seems doable and much better than the alternative of doing nothing and just taking our medicine.

A very interesting discussion on freezing the poles using aerosols (e.g. sulfur compounds): https://youtu.be/DQbwSI_MI7I

That is far cheaper than dealing with just the effects of rising sea levels, nevermind everything else. It's relatively low risk because the effects don't last long, and they stay trapped by the polar vortex, and nobody lives there. If it doesn't work, or has sufficient undesirable effects, you cancel the experiment.

krapp• 4 years ago

Oh god the chemtrail people are gonna go nuts.

whycombinetor4• 4 years ago

We've had cloudseeding deployed in the wild for a long while.

chemtrailz2• 4 years ago

Why? They are going to be the least surprised, although perhaps a bit miffed no one listened.

Their main points were all the patents, whitepapers, and testing which indicated the government had a secret program to inject the stratosphere with various substances to partially block the sun. They literally used the terminology "stratospheric aersolized injections", because that's what all the documents called it as well.

Why do you think they would go nuts? Because the government is now openly admitting they are going to do the literal exact thing they accused them of doing the past 15+ years?

I would think the people completely oblivious to the entire concept and body of research would go more nuts.

lettergram• 4 years ago

1. We are currently in an ice age (defined as both poles covered in ice)

2. A few degrees the wrong direction and the whole globe turns to ice.

3. A warmer earth with more carbon increases crop yields and actually has positive effects. The downside might be people need to move inland.

4. Much more concerning is the chemicals we are releasing into the atmosphere — I’d be seriously concerned here.

zopa2• 4 years ago

The downside might be people need to move inland.

There's a lot of human suffering underneath that anodyne phrase. Deadly storms and refugee camps and all the rest.

The trouble isn't the final temperature, it's the speed of the change. Given tens of thousands of years ecosystems can adapt. Change the climate in a few decades, though, and many species will just die. We aren't going to know all the consequences of that biodiversity loss until it's too late to fix.

You're absolutely right however that there's a narrow band of temperatures consistent with a habitable Earth. Which is why research into tools we might need to stay in that range is a good thing.

fritztastic3• 4 years ago

It's not just about temp change and ocean levels- it's the shifts in climate affecting ecosystems (for example, speeding up desertification in some places and bringing extreme weather to others). Sure, people can move inland, but moving inland isn't going to help the ecosystems. Humans are very adaptable, we have technology and skills to handle rapidly changing parameters- other organisms can't. Changes of salinity in water, drier soil, excessive rain, first/last frost, etc. are happening too fast and causing widespread destruction to and collapse of ecosystems worldwide- the affected flora/fauna aren't like us- they simply won't survive.

inkblotuniverse3• 4 years ago

Good; natural ecosystems re a moral hazard, anyway- a giant, self-perpetuating torture dungeon. If somebody created predator species, or botflies, or ringworms, you'd have them executed for crimes against nervous systems. I vote, then, to execute natural selection. It's our duty to save all living things capable of pain from their fates.

thinkling2• 4 years ago

People have proposed approaches to increasing the earth's albedo (and thus reflecting more sunlight) without launching material into the atmosphere.

Best known is probably the idea of painting roads and rooftops white.

Another interesting approach: setting up very light-weight (thin plastic?) mirrors in large quantities in farmer's fields. Farmers have incentive to do this in areas that are getting hotter and where crops may already grow better with some partial shade than in full sun. Spacing mirrors on posts in fields can provide this.

This is being proposed by Ye Tao, an MIT Chemistry PhD who has pivoted to this project. Discussed on Dave Robert's Volts podcast [0].

[0] https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-dr-ye-tao-on-a-grand#d...

PM_me_your_math2• 4 years ago

White roads sounds like a recipe for glare-induced accidents, especially in sunny locations.

loonster• 4 years ago

Cement roads?

stubish• 4 years ago

If only we had some sort of glare reducing technology that can be strapped to our faces.

jabl3• 4 years ago

I think this came up at a recent panel discussion https://www.climateresolve.org/reflecting-sunlight/

tl;dr: Not an issue. We're not talking about painting roads bright white, it's more like a change from dark asphalt to light gray asphalt (similar to cement sidewalks).

roflyear• 4 years ago

I like the idea of launching mirrors into space as well. Preferably we stop adding things to the atmosphere we can't breathe but that seems to be a hard ask for us...

DennisP11• 4 years ago

Painting roofs white seems like a good idea, and I remember seeing a study once saying it could have decently significant effect.

But it does have one disadvantage: if you don't like the effects, you have to paint all those roofs again. With stratospheric aerosols, if you don't like the results you just stop doing it, and they'll fall out of the atmosphere in a year or two.

jabl3• 4 years ago

If the lifetime of a roof is ~20-30 years, in that time we won't have 'solved' climate change, so exceedingly unlikely that you'll need to repaint it for climate reasons at least.

rthomas6• 4 years ago

We could also use large white rafts in unused parts of the ocean.

thinkling2• 4 years ago

Is this something that's been studied seriously? A quick google attempt doesn't find anything.

FpUser• 4 years ago

Something tells me it may not be welcomed by other countries and playing with climate can have lots of unintended and disastrous consequences.

On the other hand we may reach a point where we would not have much choice.

zopa2• 4 years ago

Keep in mind that what's being done here is research, not a US-only geoengineering campaign starting tomorrow. The interventions themselves wouldn't happen without some pretty serious diplomacy first. And of course we're already playing with the climate, with disastrous unintended consequences. Leaving the climate alone is no longer one of the options.

kelseyfrog4• 4 years ago

It's easier to geo-engineer the atmosphere than to stop polluting it? I'm not sure I understand what's going on in the world anymore.

BurningFrog2• 4 years ago

One organization, the US government, could do this alone.

Stopping a billion separate entities polluting the atmosphere is organizationally infinitely harder.

birdyrooster• 4 years ago

So we just keep reflecting more and more light and heat while we made the planet more and more smoggy and barren. What are the second and third order effects?

ericd2• 4 years ago

No, because the people of the US absolutely do not want to decrease their living standards to the extent it would require. The government would most likely be promptly fired if it went the austerity route.

NegativeLatency• 4 years ago

It's potentially more profitable (in the short term, and for the people proposing it) to geo-engineer the atmosphere.

Late stage capitalism and globalization would be my guess.

I've heard it said that the US is good at coming up with technical solutions to social problems and this seems like the perfect example of that. (Analogous to our terrible highway/stroad system in most cities, that moves a lot of vehicles and kills a lot of people)

ryan93• 4 years ago

Is the US good at shutting down Indian and Chinese coal plants?

sigstoat• 4 years ago

It's easier to geo-engineer the atmosphere than to stop polluting it?

coordination problems are tough, and there's no reason to believe that the largest one ever encountered should be easier than one organization deciding to engage in a large scale engineering project.

awillen• 4 years ago

The problem is even if we stop polluting it on any reasonably possible timeline, we'll still see continued heating of the planet (and even if we didn't, it's already hot enough to be seriously affecting natural disasters like hurricane Ian).

We need short term solutions like this, medium term solutions like reducing carbon emissions and longer term solutions like carbon capture. It's a complicated problem and the world is a complicated place.

bee_rider• 4 years ago

The temperament of humanity is just that we can't solve a problem by producing and consuming less. We're not going to stop fighting this planet, and if that means we have to kick weather in the nuts, we'll do that too.

hnaccount_rng• 4 years ago

Yes it absolutely is. The pollution is the consequence of an organically grown, over 300 years no less, system, whose incentives we barely (if at all) understand and whose control knobs are extremely indirect (and equally poorly understood). And that ignores, that it may very well be, that the pure momentum of the system is too large for us to be "safe" even if we magic'd a complete solution stop _right now_.

We had a climate scientist make the statement in a colloquium over here, basically saying that he doesn't like humanity starting with geoengineering solution because we barely understand the system. He's of course correct with the latter part. We don't understand the earth's ecosystem. But he is _at least_ 300 years late with the first part. We are already doing geoengineering for quite some time, it just happens that the earth is a rather inert system and it takes a while to react.

concordDance5• 4 years ago

Why is this surprising? Let's say you're a factory that makes widgets but produces hydrochloric acid as a result. You're currently leaking it into the water table.

It's cheaper to just start bottling the acid than to stop producing widgets.

ianai3• 4 years ago

My preferred method of this is a filter/shade between the earth and sun. That’s second to actually pulling carbon out of the air/ocean.

imapeopleperson• 4 years ago

Agree. And I’d first float it permanently over the Atlantic where hurricanes seem to grow over warm water.

ianai3• 4 years ago

Sure if that somehow improves the drought conditions in the US southwest. (And it might considering the rain the southwest experienced this year.) Seems odd to prioritize hurricanes that don’t really seem to affect the South that much while the southwest has millions of people experiencing wildfires and in danger of running out of water. Run out of water and literal society fails. Too many more wildfires and we might start losing whole forests. NM looked to have come close this year.

riffic• 4 years ago

they know we're boned, and the only fix is geoengineering.

travisporter• 4 years ago

DOE chief under Obama Steven chu proposed painting roofs and roads white to improve earths albedo

andrewstuart• 4 years ago

The downside of "crazy schemes" is they take focus away from what really needs to be done, which is stop producing greenhouses gasses.

partiallypro3• 4 years ago

We're already doing that. The human race would have to literally go extinct to reverse global warming by only cutting carbon emissions.

User23• 4 years ago

"This computer model says the Earth might get 1 degree warmer over the next 100 years, let's blot out the sun!"

It's probably an unpopular opinion here, but these people sound like reckless lunatics to me. The fact is we don't have anywhere near enough of a mature climate science to allow any kind of responsible engineering. It's a good goal, and I applaud research in that direction. But I deplore the possibility of some idiot billionaires getting the numbers wrong by a few percent, creating a positive feedback loop, and causing a glaciation event. Lest we forget, we are still in the Quaternary Ice Age! This is just an interglacial period. All of the major geological factors to make a snowball Earth possible still obtain! And I guarantee you that humanity will better adapt to a hothouse than a snowball.

I know it's taboo to mention votes, but please, please, if you're thinking about downvoting me because I'm wrong, please at least offer the consolation of explaining why glaciation is nothing to worry about.

ravenstine2• 4 years ago

We already have the solutions. Use nuclear, use renewables, use carbon from the atmosphere and not the earth's crust. Really not that hard to figure out, but you'll notice no end to the supply of "wait but." They'll eat up science-y rubbish like reflecting sunlight because it sounds really clever, but then find any reason to ignore reality which, guess what, will always be more or less dirty. It's the siren song of the free lunch. Catch any one here on the street and ask them on the spot what they know about the carbon cycle and chances are they couldn't tell you anything about it, but they'll readily supply you an opinion on carbon emissions.

fsociety999• 4 years ago

I think it is quite possible that humans attempting to “fix” nature is what will ultimately lead to the extinction of the human race. It is pretty fitting too since we are the ones who helped accelerate the mess we are in.

The article points out some of the problems here:

There are significant and well-known risks to some of these techniques — sulfur dioxide aerosol injection, in particular.
First, spraying sulfur into the atmosphere will “mess with the ozone chemistry in a way that might delay the recovery of the ozone layer,” Parson told CNBC.
The Montreal Protocol adopted in 1987 regulates and phases out the use of ozone depleting substances, such as hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) which were commonly used in refrigeration and air conditioners, but that healing process is still going on.
Also, sulfates injected into the atmosphere eventually come down as acid rain, which affects soil, water reservoirs, and local ecosystems.
Third, the sulfur in the atmosphere forms very fine particulates that can cause respiratory illness.

Who gets to make the call that these risks are okay and are not as bad as the negative impact(s) we may face from climate change? Who decides that it is an acceptable trade-off to wipe out entire species and ecosystems and potentially some percent of the human population?

The problem is when it comes to climate change impact, it is all hypothetical based on models we have limited understanding of whereas with this stuff there are concrete risks and side-effects now.

ncmncm5• 4 years ago

It would be disastrous if this went ahead.

Failing to draw down atmospheric CO2 ensures increasing ocean acidification, threatening the basis of the whole ocean ecosystem.

DennisP11• 4 years ago

Doing solar radiation management as a substitute for drawing down CO2 would be disastrous.

But we're starting to see various positive feedbacks kick in, where rising temperatures cause the planet to release CO2 and methane of its own. We see evidence of this in geologic history too, where a modest temperature increase due to an orbital variation causes greenhouse releases that tip the planet into a warming cycle.

If we cross that tipping point, reducing our emissions to zero won't keep the CO2 from increasing further. We might need SRM to keep that from happening. The tipping point could be as low as +1.5C, we're already over +1C, and we've made essentially zero reductions to our emissions so far.

gault81215• 4 years ago

The article failed to mention a really important idea - Sulfur Dioxide is not the only aerosol that can be injected, and there are other options that seem much more promising. For example, using Calcium Carbonate may actually help restore the Ozone layer while also reducing the temperature.

Source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/harvard-group...
"The chemists think the solution could be calcium carbonate — the stuff of chalk, limestone, marble, and seashells. It may be less harmful to the ozone, and it’s not a big health concern. The team is studying how the substance affects chlorine and nitrogen oxides, which also exist in the stratosphere — largely due to man-made emissions — and speed ozone destruction. The researchers think the calcium carbonate might help to lower levels of these gases."

woliveirajr• 4 years ago

And we might end up reducing atmosphere humidity and having torrential rain.

Ensorceled2• 4 years ago

I think it is quite possible that humans attempting to “fix” nature is what will ultimately lead to the extinction of the human race. It is pretty fitting too since we are the ones who helped accelerate the mess we are in.

I think what will kill the human race is the "climate engineering" humans fighting with the "no nuclear, no engineering" humans while the "fuck you, I got mine" humans deliberately egg them on. Nothing gets done and the bulk of humanity dies from runaway temperatures that make significant parts of the world unlivable, drought, and rising sea levels ravaging coastal cities.

prottog8• 4 years ago

I think the "fuck you, I already live in a part of the world that was developed on the back of cheap energy and it's really too bad that you will never be allowed to develop like I did" humans will kill more humans than the status quo ever will.

bmitc• 4 years ago

I have come to the conclusion that most or at least a significant amount of human engineering is to solve problems caused by other human engineering.

aliqot• 4 years ago

I really did miss hearing about acid rain in the 90s

nwiswell• 4 years ago

I think it is quite possible that humans attempting to “fix” nature is what will ultimately lead to the extinction of the human race.

Do you feel similarly about freezing CO2 out of the air in the interior of Antarctica and burying it as dry ice? The natural temperatures are within spitting distance of the freezing point already (supposedly there have been occasional natural CO2 snows, although this is dubious because of the low partial pressure). Seems like it would be much less intrusive overall, although it would undoubtedly cost trillions to accomplish at scale.

https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-12-0110.1

kelnos7• 4 years ago

Not the person you're replying to, but I think these two things are very different. I expect that the results of injecting substances into our upper atmosphere in large quantities are essentially impossible to model with high degrees of accuracy, and the consequences if things go wrong could be catastrophic. This freezing CO2 in Antarctica thing presumably does have some failure modes, but I imagine none of them are as comprehensibly terrible as if we were to screw up the atmosphere.

regnull• 4 years ago

There is a long way from “we don’t fully understand the side effects” to the “extinction of human race”.

tillinghast• 4 years ago

Sure depends upon the side effect we didn't understand, doesn't it?

chaostheory• 4 years ago

This reminds of factory farming and how it encourages the growth of bacteria that make both animals and humans sick. To solve this problem, instead drastically changing the way we grow livestock we just opted to abuse antibiotics to both enlarge the livestock and keep them from getting ill resulting in antibiotic resistant superbugs

KrishnaShripad• 4 years ago

Who gets to make the call that these risks are okay and are not as bad as the negative impact(s) we may face from climate change? Who decides that it is an acceptable trade-off to wipe out entire species and ecosystems and potentially some percent of the human population?

Well you have your answer already: the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. If anything, it was a grand scale experiment to see how well human beings can listen to and obey Orders. How well human beings can adhere to lockdowns and mask mandates and how well they will work. How well the Government and so called "Experts" will handle the grave situation. To weigh pros and cons of dying due to the virus vs dying due to starvation and poverty.

The result is that everyone fucked up. Big time. We are extremely lucky that the virus had a low fatality rate and was not like the black plague which wiped out 60% of Europe's population.

None of these "Executive Orders" were through Consensus or Vote. We were forced to "trust" the Government and the "Experts" to do the right thing. And how many of us know anything about viruses or developing vaccines to make any sort of reasonable judgement anyways? A tiny percentage of the entire populace. We had no choice really.

Irrespective of how bad they fucked up — from flip-flopping on mask mandates to imposing extremely harsh lockdowns that caused economic distress and induced the recession we are in now — not to discount the crazy Wars going on in the World especially after a devastating pandemic. We have proven ourselves to be the most inept "superficially intelligent" species which is due for another genetic evolution — the last one being the Neanderthal extinction some 40,000 years ago [1].

We let the elites and experts take decisions on our behalf and we saw how it fucked everything up. This is going to be no different. When push comes to shove, some old buffoons, holding desperately on to power, in their 70s, 80s or 90s, with little to no cognitive abilities, will be deciding the fate of approximately 8 billion people. To support these buffoons will be those greedy good-for-nothing companies that will be looking at how best to profit from the situation... all while being on the verge of extinction.

We are royally screwed. There is no denying that. If some highly evolved super-intelligent species of the future writes a history on Homo Sapiens, it would definitely be that we were the only species to have "fought amongst each other, stuttering and stammering our way to extinction, taking with us a perfectly habitable planet".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction

kelnos7• 4 years ago

The thing about a plan like this, though, is it doesn't require cooperation from the public. Getting everyone to stay home, wear masks, socially distance, and get vaccines is indeed a pretty hard problem.

But decreeing that a few hundreds or thousands of scientists and engineers are going to make a possibly-catastrophic change to our biosphere doesn't require getting regular citizens to do anything.

Having said that, I do expect public opinion to play a role in deciding what (if anything) gets done. Whether or not it'll be enough to stop something catastrophic from happening... probably not?

emporas• 4 years ago

Humans are pretty good at following economic orders however. Almost perfect at that, given some time of weeks or months. Economic actors respond to prices in the economy in a very predictable pattern.

One very good example, of following economic orders, is the shortage of masks, at the start of the covihoax. Less masks available, orders the price to go up, because more people are bidding up masks which are of short supply. One billion masks, roughly every week, only for the US, is an extraordinary amount, which would cause the price to go ballistic, 10x, 100x or maybe even 1000x. Masks are useless of course after just one use, so everyone who follows the science and wants to be safe, is obliged to buy a mask almost everyday. We didn't see anywhere mask prices to follow this pattern, so what happened? Maybe hundreds of millions of people were lying with their mouth, but not with their money, is one explanation that comes to mind.

One other good example is the submerging of coastal lines to the sea. Here in Greece, i think we have the biggest coastline of every other nation in the world. Someone would expect coastline house prices to drop a lot, 10x easily. 2050 or something for the house to be submerged into the water, is a very short period of time, considering how long a good house can last. New housing located at coast lines, should drop almost to zero. Did we see any of these scenarios happen? Of course not! How come prices of the soon to be submerged houses are high as ever? Maybe one possibility is that billions of people lie only with their mouths, not with their sacred and hard earned money!

ornornor4• 4 years ago

"It is the year 8000. Humanity has joined a vast universal republic along with tens of thousands of alien worlds. All worlds agree on one thing: the search for intelligent life still continues."

ohiovr• 4 years ago

The US is a democracy. So after the planet is doomed we can vote in someone else to doom it even more.

klyrs2• 4 years ago

The US is a democracy, sure, but the atmosphere is much bigger than the US

kelnos7• 4 years ago

Who gets to make the call

An excellent question. I'd be just as skeptical as you are about all this. And this seems to be a US effort, not a multi-national one? I would hope the US government wouldn't unilaterally decide to do something like this without getting buy-in from... well... literally the entire world. But presumably that would be impossible to do, so it would never get done if they chose a consensus-building approach. Which... might not be a bad thing.

cmelbye• 4 years ago

That ship has sailed. Spraying chemicals into the atmosphere to modify the weather happens around the world already, including in the US.

upsidesinclude6• 4 years ago

Weather modification in the US has been underway for a long time.

Haven't asked yet

sazz• 4 years ago

Absolutely agree.

In fact, I think it is deeply ingrained colonialist thinking that nature would need guidance from humans.

Rather, it's the other way around: as long as we don't see ourselves as part of the ecosystem and take our assigned role instead of constantly trying to patronize everyone else in the ecosystem - we would actually have a chance of survival.

The best strategy is to adapt. We are part of something bigger - but just a part and not the CEO of it.

inkblotuniverse3• 4 years ago

Our natural place in the ecosystem involves being parasitized by a dozen kinds of horrific worms and predated on by lions. No, thank you.

rgrieselhuber• 4 years ago

Wasn’t this the plot of Highlander 2?

thepasswordis2• 4 years ago

This administration is so far off the rails at this point that I wish they'd just say screw it, print another trillion dollars EACH for everybody who wants to build nuclear reactors in the Nevada desert, and just call it a day. We're heading for a massive depression anyway, might as well get some nuclear reactors out of it.

Absolutely f off with this absurd nonsense. Look at what this idiotic climate engineering crap did by introducing asian carp.

The answer is in front of you. Nuclear power. FFS.

shadowgovt• 4 years ago

What's the answer?

thepasswordis2• 4 years ago

Well the first step would be to tell the NRC to stop blocking companies like OKLO from building their demonstration reactor.

m463• 4 years ago

I'm having a hard time believing this could work too.

I remember the federal government tried to stimulate internet growth, or help jumpstart solar companies or similar - they became giant cash grabs with little to show in the end.

I'd like to know ways the government could help stimulate really good solutions without giving money away or picking (unproven) winners.

icelancer• 4 years ago

Cash for Clunkers comes to mind as always.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System

itishappy3• 4 years ago

I think we all have a hard time believing this could work. These aren't new ideas, they're long shots and everyone knows it, but we're concerned enough that we're researching it. Dumping a few cargo jets of sulfur and chalk isn't going to fuck anything up more than we have already, and learning anything new about how the atmosphere works is a win in my book (even if it's: hey, don't do that). That being said, I hope we never consider deploying this at scale.

Personally, I think the answer is more of what we're doing right now: financial incentives for provable results. Taxes or fines for pollution, credits and subsidies for green energy. Subsidize the energy, not the equipment and you'll discourage bad actors.

saul_goodman• 4 years ago

When narratives collide. I hope someone does the math on how much this will degrade solar panels.

ParksNet• 4 years ago

We need to strip CO2 out of the atmosphere too. CO2 is a known cognitive retardant [1], ocean acidifier[2], and plant nutrition degrader[2].

Iron fertilization seems like a good option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200421090556.h....

[2] https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-co...

[3] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5....

flavius296634• 4 years ago

This is a hilarious take. You're saying that plant food (CO2) is bad for plant based nutrition because they grow too fast and therefore plants have less minerals? How about we just improve nutrition for people that rely on cheap calories likes rice, corn and wheat...we should do that regardless. Those plants don't provide a proper nutrition anyway.

whycombinetor4• 4 years ago

I'm sure poor countries would love to turn their rice fields into soccer fields and feed themselves with more nutritious food, but they need to farm cheap calories to feed themselves with the amount of money they have.

gault81215• 4 years ago

The article fails to mention a really important idea - Sulfur Dioxide is not the only aerosol that can be injected, and there are other options that seem much more promising. For example, using Calcium Carbonate may actually help restore the Ozone layer while also reducing the temperature.

Source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/harvard-group...
"The chemists think the solution could be calcium carbonate — the stuff of chalk, limestone, marble, and seashells. It may be less harmful to the ozone, and it’s not a big health concern. The team is studying how the substance affects chlorine and nitrogen oxides, which also exist in the stratosphere — largely due to man-made emissions — and speed ozone destruction. The researchers think the calcium carbonate might help to lower levels of these gases."

kortex3• 4 years ago

I love this idea. I would wager that calcium carbonate dust has a higher ballistic coefficient than SOx (ratio of mass to cross section, a measure of ability to stay aloft), meaning if we overdo it (unlikely but the most common concern), the decay rate would be faster.

Plus would also mitigate acid rain somewhat, and isn't noxious the way SOx is.

gault81215• 4 years ago

Yes, exactly - it's an interesting idea worth researching. Thanks for adding this idea!

mountaintimefrm2• 4 years ago

Too much calcium carbonate is really detrimental to a wide variety of plants, it causes a condition called iron chlorosis. Basically plants will readily absorb calcium instead of iron (they need iron to do their chemistry for photosynthesis), the result of which is yellowing leaves, poor production, plant death, etc. Spraying massive amounts of calcium carbonate in the atmosphere, if it makes it down to the plants on the ground, sounds like a great way to cause massive forest die offs. Much like sulfur creates acid rain, calcium in the atmosphere would create "basic rain" which is just as much of a problem if you're a plant that requires a fairly narrow range of soil pH.

gault81215• 4 years ago

So I am having trouble finding this source now, but I have perviously read from the main team researching Calcium Carbonate, SCoPEx (https://scopexac.com/), that the intention is to spray the calcium carbonate high enough in the atmosphere so that it does not float down to the ground but rather dissipates into space. There is a specific height in the atmosphere where it needs to be released, and yes, if it fell to earth, this wouldn't be a viable solution. I can't find where I read this, but this is one component of the current hypothesis.

Andrex2• 4 years ago

“So the leaders conceived of their most desperate strategy yet, a final solution - the destruction of the sky. Thus would man try to cut the Machines off from the sun, their main energy source. May there be mercy on man and machine for their sins.”

- The Second Renaissance, Part 2

JetAlone2• 4 years ago

You know what, we don't have the machines from the Matrix yet, maybe it's a blessing in disguise and we're just taking the initiative on this one.

Andrex2• 4 years ago

Agreed. Well, it's probably not far off. It's not 2090 yet.

Appreciate your choice of handle, by the way.

rainbringer2000• 4 years ago

I'm all here for the roll out of a more positive outlook towards the impending climate hell as we try to fix it before the storm is too big.

gatane• 4 years ago

This sounds like something straight from The Simpsons.

Euphorbium• 4 years ago

Seems like something fossil fuel industry would concoct against the solar panels.

Morpheus : We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky.

I was hoping to read they are pushing for reflection from space, from the lagrange point directly between earth and sun. That one at least possible to turn off, if something went wrong.

fritztastic3• 4 years ago

Bleak, but also hilarious the lengths the fossil fuel industry will be defended and coddled- almost as astounding as the people who refuse to understand how the greenhouse effect works despite encountering it on a regular basis. Scientists have been warning about the potential climate impacts since more than a century ago:

ejb9994• 4 years ago

>Scientists have been warning about the potential climate impacts since more than a century ago:

Cry wolf enough times and people stop listening altogether.

The history of 'scientists' making outlandish claims about what will or won't happen - and then being provably wrong - is a big part of the problem.

feoren5• 4 years ago

What a tremendously ignorant take. Do you get your science only from pop-sci articles 4 degrees removed from actual scientists? Can you point to any actual examples of this happening?

fritztastic3• 4 years ago

people who refuse to understand how the greenhouse effect works despite encountering it on a regular basis

Astounding.

karaterobot• 4 years ago

These threads always have people saying "hmm, I don't know about this, seems like there might be negative unintended consequences". I always want to say this, so I'll say it here:

Without some drastic step, global temperatures will rise by more than 2 degrees, causing widespread death, countless displaced people, extinct species, collapsed biomes, and so on. Second-order consequences like starvation, viral outbreaks, and wars are are harder to predict, but seem very likely.

The solution to this, if there is one, will not be to reduce, reuse, and recycle. It will not be driving cars less, or eating less meat, or getting more power from renewable resources. Those are not drastic solutions, those are sensible solutions we could have taken a hundred years ago, but didn't. The thing to realize is that the damage has already been done, and we are just waiting for the effects to propagate.

We're now in a situation where, distasteful and dangerous as they may be, technological solutions like this are the only possible solutions. Not necessarily this, but things like this, and as crazy (or crazier) than this sounds. Yes, unintended side effects. Yes, expensive. Yes, not guaranteed to work. That's what's on the table. From what I've seen, anything short of a novel technological solution at this point amounts to just waiting.

kelnos7• 4 years ago

Not sure that's really the case. Carbon capture and sequestration is a thing, and is something we know that we can do with current technology. This atmosphere modification plan is still entirely theoretical, and any scientist who believes they can actually model all potential consequences is a quack, at best.

Certainly carbon capture won't be enough; we do need to reduce emissions. We have the technology to do that, but often not the political will. I don't know how to fix that. Fortunately the move toward renewable sources of electricity does continue to march on, just a lot slower than it needs to be.

Yes, unintended side effects.

What if the unintended side effects are worse than the effects of climate change?

paganel2• 4 years ago

extinct species,

We've had extinct species for the last 200 years of Industrial Revolution, not sure a forced terraforming will change anything about that.

feoren5• 4 years ago

You stub your toe all the time! Stop complaining that I'm pulverizing your legs and arms with a baseball bat!

See how magnitude can matter?

pif3• 4 years ago

Yes, unintended side effects. Yes, expensive. Yes, not guaranteed to work. That's what's on the table.

I think I see your point, but you are missing the elephant in the room. And you are not alone in missing it, so don't panic about being blind.

Without some drastic step, global temperatures will rise by more than 2 degrees...

This, we know it for sure. Why not just accepting it (as the fact we know it is) and start to plan accordingly?

More and more land around the equator will become inhabitable, and people will be forced to emigrate en masse? Let's help them to start emigrate today!

Those tiny islands in the Indian Ocean that will be submerged by the rising water? Stop building there, and teach the children that their future will be somewhere else.

Widespread viruses? Learn from Covid 19, cooperate world-wide to have express vaccines and so on.

Sure, I'm talking about very, very sad scenarios, but so are you. But my proposals:

1- are based on what we know today;

2- we know that they can work;

3- we can estimate the amount of pain they will cause.

None of this point applies to any other proposal I've ever heard about concerning global warming.

feoren5• 4 years ago

I'm all good with helping people prepare for the effects of global warming, as long as that does nothing to detract from our efforts to prevent/reverse it. You said:

Why not just accepting it (as the fact we know it is) and start to plan accordingly?

And the problem I have is the word "just". No, we're not going to just accept it. We should fight like hell to prevent that from happening. We can still plan and prepare for if all our fighting fails, but taking drastic steps and trying some moonshots is absolutely not off the table.

mplewis• 4 years ago

This is learned helplessness. Nothing is set in stone about our world depending on power from burning oil.

nisegami• 4 years ago

We're now in a situation where, distasteful and dangerous as they may be, technological solutions like this are the only possible solutions.

What about degrowth?

robbrown4514• 4 years ago

I say cover all land and ocean surfaces with self-replicating robots with solar panels. Instead of the energy going into heat, it generates electricity, which powers the robots, which make more of themselves as well as do other valuable things like wash our dishes and fold our laundry.

I'm sure there is a problem with this idea but I'm not sure what it is.

socialismisok• 4 years ago

Anything to keep ignoring the problems fossil fuels bring us. Unbelievable that anyone is considering such an obviously goofy approach when there's an obvious and easy one.

jonstewart• 4 years ago

The only geoengineering approach I see discussed in the media is this sulfur dioxide aerosol method. Does anyone know why seeding iron filings in the Southern Ocean doesn't get more consideration? That's always seemed a more straightforward route to me, and one that could be pursued more cautiously.

For those that don't know, coccolithophores are single-celled phytoplankton that grow a calcium carbonate shell, of sorts. When they die, their shells sink to the ocean floor. It's posited that their population growth in the Southern Ocean is inhibited by the availability of iron in the water — the theory is that if you dumped some iron filings in the ocean, you'd get a coccolithophore bloom, sucking out carbon for their shells, and then sinking it permanently.

elihu• 4 years ago

An interesting bit from the article:

Ironically, as the world reduces coal burning to curb the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming, we’ll also be eliminating the sulfur dioxide emissions that mask some of that warming. > “Sulfur pollution that’s coming out of smokestacks right now is masking between a third and a half of the heating signal from the greenhouse gases humans have already emitted into the atmosphere,” Parson said.

That's not great.

zaroth2• 4 years ago

This is so dumb. The reflection of sunlight to reduce TSI should happen at the L1 Lagrange point using moon dust, not by further polluting our own atmosphere.

The benefit of L1 is that it’s not perfectly stable. Anything you throw up into that orbit will only stay there without course correction for about a decade.

planede• 4 years ago

Sounds like a cool sci-fi idea, but you would probably need to put a significant amount of material 1,500,000km away to put a shade over the Sun. Probably comparable to the mass of our atmosphere. And then repeat every decade.

zaroth2• 4 years ago

It would surely cost a few trillion to deploy the moon base and railguns capable of deploying that much material on target, but doesn’t require any physics-bending materials or processes.

It would be an ongoing process of refinement and launch, there are some papers that have done the napkin math on the launch rate and energy requirements and it’s all perfectly feasible in the context of preventing an earth-shattering calamity.

The only problem with having a human-controllable thermostat over the entire Earth is that no one will agree on how to set it.

siliconc0w• 4 years ago

I think this is pretty hard to stop and not necessarily a bad idea depending on your perception of how screwed we already are.

It'd be hard because many proposals are within the range of many nations or just billionaires and it's going to be really hard to stop a nation being hit hard by climate change from acting to protect themselves. So the sensible thing to do is to try to do it in the most understood and least harmful way because otherwise there are going to be less discerning and more desperate people doing it their own way.

fallingfrog• 4 years ago

Worth at least looking into. I would be profoundly surprised if this worked.

jlbbellefeuille• 4 years ago

“ Well, the Simpsons really called this one first. In Season 6, Episode 25, "Who Shot Mr. Burns," the evil Mr. Burns decides that he's going to block out the sun to cool Springfield so people have to rely on his energy company to heat their homes and power their lights.”

Read More: Simpsons Called It First: Bill Gates Wants To Block Out The Sun To Cool Earth | https://97x.com/simpsons-called-it-first-bill-gates-wants-to...

tomcam• 4 years ago

Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out that simply painting roofs white could have a significant impact.

djmips• 4 years ago

Interesting thought that going 100% solar energy might cause global warming, not as bad as fossil fuels but certainly changing your roof to a black solar panel is exactly opposite to this advice of reflecting it back.

waskip• 4 years ago

This reminds me of Neo encounter with Morpheus in the Matrix

Morpheus : We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power. It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.

pabs3• 4 years ago

I hope this doesn't end up like the plot of Snow Piercer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Piercer#Plot

leshenka• 4 years ago

Not gonna lie, the first thing I did when came to this webpage is ctrl+F "snow piercer"

rongopo• 4 years ago

As we know too little about how this will affect climate dynamics, be sure that suspicion, loaded infodemics and extreme events will trigger more than one climate-based conflict.

CM302• 4 years ago

Honestly, at this point tech is probably the only way climate change will be fixed. You won't get people to agree to make their life worse for the sake of the environment, no matter how much activists keep trying to push that. And so if drastic measures like this are what's needed, then those are what's needed. We can either argue about responsibilities and sustainability for years with little effect, or accept that technological methods are probably going to be the solution here.

Plus it's not like this would have to go on forever. Once all sources of energy are 'green' and carbon capture has removed enough of the CO2 from the atmosphere, then any means of reflecting back sunlight or reducing the amount that reaches Earth can be gradually scaled back.

rjzzleep• 4 years ago

I think it might get a bit more buy-in if there was some acknowledgement of the biggest producers of these problems. At this point a certain part of society gets to profit from these policies and it's worse for everyone else. It's always easy to get OTHERS to make sacrifices for you.

blitzar4• 4 years ago

Yes, but I have this circular from Big Polluter Inc. that makes it clear that they are not to blame and it is just the centerists/alt right/leftists/green/blm/nra/anti-gun/foreigners/locals/state/deep state/vested interests/think tanks/academics/regulators/lobbyists/dea/cartels that are behind it all.

So excuse me it I dont buy into the lies because I know the truth.

erpellan4• 4 years ago

The driving cost for solar pv is the structure and the land, the panels are now so cheap (and getting cheaper) that the economic recommendation is to install 3x the generation capacity of the inverter. Sizing for hitting capacity on the darkest days basically.

Living in a draft proof, highly insulated home with mechanical air filtration and heat recovery, driving an EV that’s powered by the roof of your house doesn’t sound like any kind of worse life to me.

Abundant, locally generated electricity is a game changer. You can even extract drinking water from the air inside your house in all but the driest of locations.

fullstackchris• 4 years ago

You can even extract drinking water from the air inside your house in all but the driest of locations.

That's some Fremen-level tech right there!

camillomiller2• 4 years ago

Mmm ok, so everyone lives in a house in an American suburb with American population density levels? Yeah, it sounds like you really don’t get how most of the world’s population lives.

throwaway4aday5• 4 years ago

Living in a draft proof, highly insulated home with mechanical air filtration and heat recovery, driving an EV that’s powered by the roof of your house doesn’t sound like any kind of worse life to me.

The problem is that even if everyone did that it wouldn't come close to reaching net zero. Personal transportation, electricity use and heating are a fraction of the total emissions. Transportation, electricity and heating for commercial and industrial sectors are much larger and then you need to add on top of that direct emissions by industry and agriculture. So a lot of what people are arguing for when they say they want to cut emissions is a reduction in industry, agriculture and commerce which would indeed make life much worse for everyone.

psychphysic3• 4 years ago

I'm not at all conspiratorial and I see the idea of trying to change the colour of clouds is not going to go down well.

Surely the close the blocking object is to the sun the better how close could we get a parasole?

tchaffee9• 4 years ago

As the costs and damage of flooding quickly rise into the trillions per year, changing the color of clouds will look more and more attractive.

wcoenen• 4 years ago

Surely the close the blocking object is to the sun the better how close could we get a parasole?

Moving an object closer to the sun will enlarge its penumbra, but this does not mean that it will block more light. Because its apparent size relative to the sun will also get smaller.

For example, mercury and the moon are roughtly the same size. Yet a Mercury transit will not block much light; it looks like a small dot moving across the sun[1]. While a solar eclipse caused by the moon will block a lot of light.[2]

That doesn't mean that a space sunshade is completely infeasible. But you do need something very large, e.g. a 1000km diameter object (or cloud of smaller objects) placed at the L1 Lagrange point. It would probably cost at least trillions of dollars[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Mercury

[2] https://i.stack.imgur.com/5E5fZ.png

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457652...

jstummbillig• 4 years ago

You won't get people to agree to make their life worse.

Agreed.

Honestly, at this point tech is probably the only way climate change will be fixed.

Disagreed. I think it would be a really bad idea to ignore the power legislation has. People don't exactly agree on taxes. They just don't disagree enough to want to suffer the consequences (direct and societal)

Legislate things that people don't disagree with too much.

YetAnotherNick• 4 years ago

Legislation doesn't work on global level, unless you are ready to go to war. And I think world war 3 will kill more people than climate change could. At the very least Russia and China will flat out deny to follow any legislation related to this, with even US not very keen to legislate themselves.

CM302• 4 years ago

The problem with that is that anything that most things that have the biggest effect here (not eating meat, not travelling a ton, etc) are also things that no government in the world would have support for limiting, and if they tried to regulate them, would probably get destroyed in the next election.

Could you regulate some stuff? Sure, but anything that's remotely unpopular feels like a recipe for the opposing party to win by a landslide just by promising to remove said regulation. Or for someone who doesn't give a toss/is basically anti environmentalist to get elected, ala Bolsonaro in Brazil.

KennyBlanken• 4 years ago

You won't get people to agree to make their life worse for the sake of the environment, no matter how much activists keep trying to push that

You left out a word: wealthy people.

The lower 50% of the world's people income-wise are responsible for 15% of global CO2 emissions, and the top 10% for 34% of total emissions.

It won't matter how many people are riding around on e-bikes instead of cars if we have rich assholes flying half-way around the world 3-4x a year for vacation.

snthd• 4 years ago

Exactly.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/nov/17/people-caus...

Frequent-flying “‘super emitters” who represent just 1% of the world’s population caused half of aviation’s carbon emissions in 2018, according to a study.
Airlines produced a billion tonnes of CO2 and benefited from a $100bn (£75bn) subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, the researchers estimated.

pif3• 4 years ago

You won't get people to agree to make their life worse for the sake of the environment,

This. The sooner we understand this, the sooner it will be possible to have useful propositions.

no matter how much activists keep trying to push that.

A huge part of the problem are the (usually) most vocal among the activists, who spit utter idiocies like: "It's too late: run!"

No! If it is too late, there's no point in running. If global warming is irreversible, there's no point in freaking up the whole word economy. Propose something that works and we will discuss the benefit-cost ratio. Going around howling nonsense only creates noise and lessen the credibility of the great people who are trying, with their heart, to solve the biggest problem humanity has ever had to deal with.

karlkloss• 4 years ago

A white house already reflects sunlight, so they're way ahead.

pyuser583• 4 years ago

This made me laugh out loud!

unglaublich• 4 years ago

As usual, when humans try to solve a subtle ecological issue, they will fix one thing and create 20 new problems... because we just don't understand everything. Just stop digging up tons of CO2 per day from underground reserves, and start capturing the CO2 that we released and put it back where we got it from.

feoren5• 4 years ago

Just

stereolambda5• 4 years ago

It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility. As mentioned in the article, dust in the atmosphere is literally a natural occurrence also. Sure, the exact impact should be researched and understood, but people are already jumping to the fashionable conclusion that human technology bad, gods and wood spirits will punish us for trying to escape from the primordial toil.

Myself, I think that both this type of things and emission controls should be going on to get the situation under control. Simply because we cannot know exactly how much any of this will accomplish and the needs are big.

The climate question's credibility is hurt by limiting solutions to an ideologically approved list and treating it as a vehicle for one's favorite causes. People can suspect that if the activists are so choosy about the methods, this cannot be that serious and this is not how truly desperate people act.

seydor• 4 years ago

we are quite primed to believe anything anthropogenic is bad, anthropogenic heating is bad, so antrhopogenic cooling is bad

DharmaPolice2• 4 years ago

I think people are understandably cautious about large scale interventions in complex systems. It's not like we've got a test Earth ready to do a dummy run on. We're making changes directly to production here.

(I do think we'll ultimately need to do something like this simply because the cost of not doing it is too high but I understand why people are scared by it, and it's not just down to belief in wood spirits).

beowulfey• 4 years ago

Yes, definitely this is part of it for me. The other reason I’m concerned (although, agree it’s probably necessary) is that I’m wary of any solution that we can’t undo if it goes awry.

schnitzelstoat3• 4 years ago

Also it means we won't actually solve the core problem that is greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead we'll just continually pump up some aerosols to ensure the heating doesn't get too bad. And if we ever fail to do so then we'll face incredible heating.

chiefalchemist• 4 years ago

We'd be wise to ask, "What could go wrong?"

It's the question we didn't ask about burning fossil fuels. We got our answer the hard way. Have we learned from that?

The cost of not doing might be high. The cost of trying to further manipulate the atmospheric "market" might be worse. Then what?

cgeier2• 4 years ago

Which makes sense, but we are already doing very large scale interventions with releasing a lot of greenhouse gases (and also other stuff).

BeefWellington• 4 years ago

Further to your point, our history is littered with examples of, to steal the Jurassic Park bit, being "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should". Things like moving horrible invasive ecologically devastating species around to "solve a problem" or "it looks pretty" (Cane Toads, Rabbits, and Kudzu, for example) have had dire results.

Cloud seeding is definitely a well practiced thing by now, but it's unclear what the short and long term effects are if we do it at a significant (continent or hemispheric) scale.

I'd love for it to work out and for humanity to actually deflect the looming impacts of climate change.

bhargav7• 4 years ago

The scientific community has a track record for bringing a lot of good in the world but also for being wrong quite a lot. Just think about your typical food pyramids. There’s now research that says cholesterol isn’t dictated by the food you eat.

Around climate change as well, there are now talks about some of the changes we are observing being part of the natural cycle of the earth based on core samples. No doubt we’ve made things worse but maybe not as bad as we think.

Isn’t Florida supposed to be under water now?

Also kind of funny top of Reddits environment Reddit had two top threads recently where one was saying we are losing water around some land mass due to climate change and another saying complete opposite. They were right beside another on the feed.

Scientific communities aren’t in consensus about global warming and climate change. I frankly now (being a hardcore believer in the past) am now on the fence about some aspects of it.

I really don’t think we’re as advance a species as some of our ambitions might lead us to think.

You can’t really test stuff like this in a small scale and it could have drastic impact on us as a single planet species. People would be right to be dubious.

Finally don’t be fooled. Scientific community, just like the Engineering field, does shit for their gain. They all fudge the numbers. They all change the lenses to shed light on what they want. This is why we’ve seen some scientific inaccuracies. For example Sugar studies being quashed in the past… I guess also with the vaccines recently lol

It’s condescending to think that a reasonable amount of dubiousism means people think the “wood spirits” will punish us.

martindbp• 4 years ago

the changes we are observing being part of the natural cycle

I really doubt that is true, but in the end it doesn't matter. We need to climate control the Earth to keep things as static as possible. Even if we discount the doomsday scenarios, the economic and human costs to climate change are staggering.

dontlaugh3• 4 years ago

It's remarkable how well the fossil-funded propaganda has worked.

arcticfox2• 4 years ago

I guess also with the vaccines recently lol

The only mass fraud uncovered was supporting therapeutics, not vaccines, which work exactly as well as they are claimed to. (Go ahead, link the BMJ report about Pfizer, where shoddy practices were reported at a company operating 3/153 test sites).

I really don’t think we’re as advance a species as some of our ambitions might lead us to think.

Well…

oifjsidjf• 4 years ago

> It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility.

It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflexively ignore the potential unknown side effects that can occour when messing with a complex system.

Have you ever thought that perhaps it's people like you who have it wrong? Are you capable of predicting ALL the side effects of such an extreme intervention?

Are you capable of reversing unwanted side effects like a global winter due to this intervation?

How can you know if you even can reverse it IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE UNWANTED SIDE EFFECTS WILL EVENT BE?

FredPret5• 4 years ago

We are intervening with the complex system by injecting gases into it already.

When stopping the gas injections proved nearly inposs, trying a counter-intervention seems only logical.

stereolambda5• 4 years ago

"People like me" want research into the methods and don't call for not reducing the emissions. Both of this I explicitly said and both are largely ignored by people who are responding.

As to the main point, as sibling has said, at this point regardless of what we do the climate will be anthropogenic (unless you believe people who say we don't influence it much). There is no return to being naive and innocent about it. The notion that there is some privileged way to act "in harmony with nature" is fictitious and purely human cultural psychology. The current mainstream solutions are also based on thinking that we understand some things and can predict what would happen if we do X or Y.

If I wanted to be cheeky I would say we know very well now how to heat the atmosphere if need be, but actually I defer to climatology research and modeling to resolve any of this.

hackerlight8• 4 years ago

Because you can implement a solution gradually and measure the gradient. The gradient strongly informs the final outcome.

It's not foolproof, but it's better than what you're implying.

datadata• 4 years ago

Literally this is about research to figure out more about how to control these things. It isn't a plan to ignorantly execute the actual idea. If you are correct, the research should enable us to be informed and NOT build this out. You should be against not doing research.

DennisP11• 4 years ago

We're already making massive interventions to a complex system. It's way too late to get all precious about not messing with it; now we have to muddle through and make our best guess about what set of interventions will do the least harm.

benburleson• 4 years ago

It reminds me of people that end up on a long list of prescriptions. Each next drug counteracts the negative side effects of the ones before. We all know this is not the best course.

timmg• 4 years ago

Well, I mean, I'd hope you wouldn't recommend they just take no drugs at all.

I don't think anyone thinks geo-engineering is the preferred solution (in the abstract). The question is what is a practical solution to the problem?

Germany, to me, is a cautionary tale. The shut down nukes and subsidized renewables. But here they are depending on a despot for energy -- with likely severe consequences this winter. And they are increasing coal energy production.

FredPret5• 4 years ago

We need a new religion that worships civilization and condemns degrowth as a sin.

Avicebron• 4 years ago

Catch me at the alter of neo-liberal globalism next Sunday /s.

johnchristopher• 4 years ago

People can suspect that if the activists are so choosy about the methods, this cannot be that serious and this is not how truly desperate people act.

That's quite the jump you are making there.

BiteCode_dev• 4 years ago

You'll note it's ironic we want to replace the natural albedo from the ice we are melting instead of trying not to destroy it in the first place. Espacially since said system has been proven to work and be life sustaining for millions of years.

To me it's like startups creating robot bees: finding an inferior expensive potentially dangerous solution to a problem that was already solved for free since forever.

But you can't make money with preserving the health of the patient. Better have it sick and sell him pills.

stereolambda5• 4 years ago

It would be nicer in many ways if we could just use the natural ice sheet, but AFAIK by now we cannot rely on it, even if we magically removed all the political problems and suddenly started doing the right thing. Based on available information it's possible, or plausible, that irreversible processes are already under way.

I'd say the priority should be against the threats to the existence of people. Consequences for the main guilty parties is an important but separate issue. I do hope that this whole crisis could contribute to curbing corporate power (by gaining widespread popularity and push for this, among young people especially). But the priority is keeping the patient alive, because without this the question of also making them a good person is moot.

edit: I also think based on the descriptions that some of the ideas could be straightforward enough to just be executed by government services (akin to firefighters or coastal guard) without any contractors, but this more of a question of how the governments function, possible corruption etc.

adamckay• 4 years ago

But you can't make money with preserving the health of the patient.

Have you not seen the cost of a gym membership?

There's money to be made everywhere. And in our society, it will be made regardless of the cost.

techdragon• 4 years ago

The making robot bees analogy is good but I think you might be overlooking an important angle on the problem.

This is like inventing robot bee replacements, if bees were going extinct (which some people were worried about for a while, and some still are) … and while Bee populations may be collapsing but they don’t seem destined for extinction, just massive population losses that can in time recover like humans did from the Black Death… and it’s not even universally bad among all bee species.

However unlike Bees, of one species or another, which have a very clear path to repopulation and recovery overall if we don’t keep dumping pesticides on them (or at least keep looking for ones that don’t hurt them as much which has absolutely been an active area of research) … the climate may not be able to return to normal.

We’re not even sure that if we had a magic wand, and could change all human experience and industry across the whole planet so it was net carbon neutral (so neutral across co2, methane and all the other greenhouse gasses combined) starting right this very second. We might still have passed the tipping point and just be waiting for the current warmer climate based on current co2 levels to melt enough permafrost that we expose unaccounted for clathrates or deeply buried rotting bogs that will start putting out methane and continue the slide into all the predicted outcomes of uncontrolled climate change.

This system is so big and complex that we’re frantically trying to analyse it while simultaneously trying to frantically map the scope of the known unknowns meanwhile there are all the unknown unknowns that exist across the planet and every single major study acknowledges whenever they talk about the uncertainty in their measurements or their models or their survey data.

It’s one thing to invent something useless. It’s another thing to not have a plan B. Inventing robot bees is a plan B to help prevent mass starvation if bees were to go extinct, not very likely and even if they did not all crops need bees, plenty of other insects pollinate plants as well, which is why the robot bees is a little silly in practice but not in principle.

Studying geo-engineering is the Plan B for if we can’t turn back the clock due to either collective failure to change our ways enough, or fast enough, or soon enough… and when soon enough may have been yesterday and we may not even know it was yesterday until years from now when something else happens we didn’t fully understand or predict… it’s just stupid to not have been researching some plans B, C, and D. We shouldn’t necessarily give any of these more money than the current effort to actually fix the problem at its root cause but we should still be starting the research now before it’s too late for any possible plan to help. As to how much money, that’s a political issue thats too complicated for a simple HN comment that’s already getting quite long.

throwaway4aday5• 4 years ago

has been proven to work and be life sustaining for millions of years

This statement is wrong for a few reasons. Firstly, this is a system that repeatedly produces minor ice ages that transform large portions of continents into barren ice deserts for tens of thousands of years. It is also capable of producing major ice ages that last millions of years and cover large portions of the entire Earth in ice and this happens if there isn't enough CO2 in the atmosphere. Not exactly life sustaining. Secondly, ice, the climate that produces it and the Earth at large have no concern for the life that lives upon or within them. They are decidedly unforgiving and will kill any lifeform that doesn't fight for its life against them. Life exists in spite of the abiotic world and in direct conflict with its perpetual slide towards entropy. Given a long enough timeline this system will change into a state that is largely hostile towards human life. It is a massive misnomer to call it life sustaining.

DennisP11• 4 years ago

The ice is a reason for SRM. There are proposals to use aerosols specifically to protect arctic ice. Otherwise it's very likely to melt away before we're able to reduce emissions to zero, much less draw CO2 back down to safe levels.

formvoltron• 4 years ago

Problem is that the only reason we don't push ahead with renewables is that governments would rather use existing infrastructure. They want to amortize sunk construction costs. They don't want to upgrade the grid.

Solar panels now cost just 20 cents a Watt and can convert sun into electricity with about 6 times the efficiency of photosynthesis.

If we make it cheap to punt, then the consequences could truly be dire.

civilized4• 4 years ago

The cost to "punt" is zero, and it is what we are doing today. It is what we will continue doing until there is a perfect magical technology solution with no side effects and very low costs. Something like a 100kW power plant that runs 24/7, creates no emissions, requires no fuel or maintenance, and can be set up in your backyard for $99.

There is no crisis coming that will be severe enough (in the developed world) to change this. Politicians don't care, because people don't care. Climate change doesn't even make the top 10 priorities of most US voters. Not even the people in Florida whose houses will be going underwater care.

I wonder how long we will be waiting for easy button-press perfection with no downsides?

I wonder how dire the consequences of our waiting will be?

jongjong4• 4 years ago

Because humans are apes. Would you trust a bunch of monkeys to tamper with one of the most complex and critical systems in existence? No. Humans are not smart enough and too corrupt to be tampering with such complex and critical systems. The elites can spray as many aerosols into their homes as they like, they can inject whatever substance they want into their bodies and plug their brains into whatever infernal machine they want but don't subject me to these experiments.

usrusr2• 4 years ago

But those apes already did tamper. For centuries. Even the worst hobby surgeon should better be allowed to finish the job than leaving the wound open if there isn't someone better qualified at hand.

j-bos• 4 years ago

My reflex is to consider edge cases. For example, what happens if this is launched, works, and then a Krakatoa 2.0 goes off. What's the game plan in that scenario? Sincere question, these systems are well beyond me.

kortex3• 4 years ago

Then we stop increasing albedo for a bit. Basically PWM-ing the Earth's solar flux. As long as the decay time of the albedo modification is known, it's quite unlikely that we could induce a snowball earth.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

Practically, the planet is very big and injecting reflective material into the stratosphere would be a ridiculously expensive proposition, with little or no immediate economic reward for those carrying it out.

Now, when Pinatubo blew in the early 1990s, it produced about a decade-long cooling effect relative to what otherwise would have happened, but that effect faded. So, you'd have to have a plan to inject a Pinatubo-scale amount of material into the atmosphere at least once a decade, and underneath that, the fossil CO2 and CH4 emissions would steadily be increasing in the atmosphere, so if the project was ever paused, you'd have a rapid heating period which would probably be worse in immediate effect than if you'd just allow the warming to progress more steadily.

Those are the practical reasons I think it's a nonsensical proposal, along the lines of parking a sunshade in space (getting that much material out to Lagrange 1 would be so costly as to be unimaginable). It's far cheaper just to replace, say, 1-3% of fossil fuel production per year with equivalent wind/solar/storage.

tablespoon3• 4 years ago

Those are the practical reasons I think it's a nonsensical proposal, along the lines of parking a sunshade in space (getting that much material out to Lagrange 1 would be so costly as to be unimaginable).

But it's sci-fi nonsense, so full speed ahead because I believe in science!

mrpf1ster• 4 years ago

Kurzgesagt covered this in one of their videos, it is not as hard as you make it out to be: https://youtu.be/dSu5sXmsur4

sidewndr46• 4 years ago

I imagine the "inject a Pinatubo-scale amount of material" idea gets many folks excited around the possibility of bringing back Project Plowshare.

DennisP11• 4 years ago

Cheaper, and insufficient. We've got less than 30 years to reduce our emissions to zero. Replace a little more than 3% of fossil plants annually and you decarbonize the grid in that time, but there's also transportation. You'll need way more electricity for electric cars, and then there's ships and airplanes, for which we'll need some kind of carbon-neutral liquid fuel. We have to replace all the steel plants, and figure out some kind of carbon-neutral cement, and somehow stop all the emissions from agriculture, and do something about all the high-temperature industrial processes that burn their own fossil. Meanwhile, our energy usage is increasing by a couple percent a year, which is why with all the wind/solar/storage we've built so far, we haven't made a dent in decreasing emissions.

kaashif2• 4 years ago

Without having actually done the research the White House is now funding, we can't just draw these conclusions and dismiss the ideas as impractical. Funding the research is good. Maybe there is a relatively cheap (can be funded by one nation) and reversible way to do this, don't we have to at least try to find it?

There is no rational reason to be against gathering more information.

It's far cheaper just to replace, say, 1-3% of fossil fuel production per year with equivalent wind/solar/storage.

But this isn't going to happen, and even if it were, it's too little too late to stop climate change, a lot of which is already locked in due to past emissions.

exabrial2• 4 years ago

It’s not a trained reflex; it’s being humble enough to recognize one’s own ignorance when confronted with the complexity of the system at end.

Undoubtedly there would be disaster with unintended consequences.

JoeAltmaier2• 4 years ago

and undoubtably we are undergoing disasters with wholly unintended consequences.

When the house is on fire, you don't worry about water damage.

schwartzworld• 4 years ago

It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility.

It's good to have skepticism about anything additive, as these decisions affect everybody and can have unexpected outcomes, for example using detergent to break up oil spills can make the effects worse on coral https://www.livescience.com/4567-bad-worse-oil-spills-cleane...

I'm not saying the proposed solution is good or bad, but trying new things on a big scale can have unexpected outcomes, and it's good to be wary.

tablespoon3• 4 years ago

It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility.

Yeah, massively ambitious whiz-bang technology has never had unintended consequences. /s

krolden2• 4 years ago

I reflex against this because its going to be a ton of money going into research/deployment of this, meanwhile theres still massive pollution and single use plastic production going on. Maybe spend the money to fix that first.

Meanwhile farmers in Brazil are torching one of the planets lungs and no one seems to be doing anything about it.

DennisP11• 4 years ago

Single-use plastic is a serious problem, but it's insignificant compared to crossing the tipping point on climate.

aeroman• 4 years ago

I understand where you are coming from and agree that we need to know more about this to do it properly if required. However, I think some of this reflex is jusified by the known side-effects (not even the potential unintended consequences).

Greenhouse gases heat the surface and the atmosphere, but solar radiation management (SRM) mostly cools the surface. If you use SRM to get the surface temperature 'right' that atmoshpere is still warmer that it would have been. This means you get less rain. Many places care more about rain than temperature.

This is a well understood consequence, but the specifics are where it gets very tricky. There is a non-zero chance that using SRM to cool the planet may also kill the Amazon rainforest by reducing rainfall. This obviously makes things a whole lot worse and no longer buys us time. [0]

This is not even an unknown unintendend consquence, it is pretty clear already. Obviously this doesn't mean we shouldn't look into it, but we already know the consequences of geoengineering are ... not good.

[0] https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/12/10887/2012/acp-12-108...

TurkishPoptart2• 4 years ago

This is great because this is actually a practical solution over "lower all fuel emissions and stop eating beef" which may actually have zero effect over flooding and wildfires which are supposedly due to climate change but no one can say for sure.

TrevorJ• 4 years ago

Erring on the side of skepticism around deploying irreversible global changes is rational. Humans have a track record of deploying techniques and technologies well before the consequences are well understood, so it makes sense to actively attempt to counterbalance that tendency when the consequences of getting it wrong are extreme.

thenoblesunfish• 4 years ago

I was interested to see the relevant term in the IPCC report. If I was reading correctly (not assured) that's a human caused effect which is mitigating climate change.

leobg• 4 years ago

It would also reduce the power output from solar installations worldwide. It’s like retroactively taxing those who invested in sustainable energy generation - and without permission, too.

more_corn• 4 years ago

Climate systems are chaotic. They display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Changing those conditions will have literally incalculable results.

I understand how people might be a bit shy to trust geo engineering since scientists will tell us we can’t precisely predict the results.

That being said, we’re currently conducting an uncontrolled climate experiment with the warming gasses we’re releasing. Reversing some of that is probably safe and sane.

NHQ• 4 years ago

The lack os skepticism in these comments makes me want to go back in time to assassinate William of Okham.

schnitzelstoat3• 4 years ago

So nuclear energy is too dangerous but apparently this is okay?

The biggest danger I see here is that we won't reduce emissions, we'll just carry on business as usual and pump up aerosols to compensate.

And then if one day we can't pump up enough aerosols and they begin to dissipate there will be intense warming. It's a band-aid.

Nuclear power is the best solution we have for a sustainable and prosperous society.

coffeeblack3• 4 years ago

Or if one day we discover that those aerosols have side effects we didn’t think of.

A better way would be to build a large mirror at a Lagrange point between earth and sun. With the huge reduction in launch cost by Starship this would become possible. And it’d be “easily” reversible.

But nothing of this will get done, because there are way simpler solutions.

cgeier2• 4 years ago

We still will need to take care of CO2, as it -- among other things -- acidifies the oceans (which totally fucks up that eco system).

pfdietz• 4 years ago

This solution, for all its problems, has the advantage that it can be imposed on unwilling countries. Short of coercion tantamount to war, you can't make the unwilling stop burning fossil fuels and use non-fossil alternatives instead.

Nuclear also isn't the best solution in any case, for multiple reasons that have been explained here over and over.

extheat• 4 years ago

There is no singular best answer. Nuclear fission for the foreseeable future will remain one of the solutions. There is the caveat that it’s not technically “sustainable” or “renewable”, but practically no source of energy is fully.

ChrisRR• 4 years ago

I'll never understand how

1. People think a non-renewable resource is somehow a permanent solution

2. There is only ever one solution and not a combination of multiple solutions all working towards a common goal

hackerlight8• 4 years ago

1. People think a non-renewable resource is somehow a permanent solution

They usually think solar and wind isn't good enough due to variability. Most haven't looked into it, and are adopting a plausible-sounding line they've heard someone else say. Probably someone who aligns with them politically, given how politically charged and partisan the topic is.

o_16• 4 years ago

I mean i could store all the nuclear waste to power America for 10000 years in a football field 1500 ft deep, with 300-400 of that just being fill. Ideally stored in a salt mine of some sort. It's not "renewable" the can is so far kicked a better power source will definitely arise by then.

throwaway4aday5• 4 years ago

Seems pretty easy to understand. No one is claiming that nuclear is a permanent solution, they are claiming that is a solution we have right now that can produce more than enough to meet our needs for at least a century if not a lot more. I've also never seen anyone say that we should use only nuclear and ban using renewables, their argument is usually exactly what you just stated, that we should use a combination of solutions which would naturally include nuclear.

hackerlight8• 4 years ago

Nuclear power is the best solution we have for a sustainable and prosperous society.

Nuclear or hydro or solar+wind. These are all good solutions.

Nuclear is far more expensive, but it can provide 100% of needs by itself.

Solar+wind is far cheaper, but the variability means that we can only get about 70-80% of the grid that way (no storage needed), with the remaining 20-30% made up by cheap storage or gas.

o_16• 4 years ago

Yeah building nuclear plants should be priority one. There is no replacement for the quality(variability) and quantity of power produced by them. It's obviously political, there's no money in building nuke plants for the current ruling class, only in "renewables".

fundatus2• 4 years ago

Nuclear is an energy source of the past. It's too expensive and therefore rejected by the markets. Modern, emmission-free energy-sources like solar or wind (accompanied by storage in homes, districts and some larger-scale storage facilities) became so cheap in the past decade that you can now build more than 10 times the capacity in renewables for the price of a nuclear reactor. It's simple economics why nuclear is dying a slow death.

daxelrod• 4 years ago

Perhaps I misunderstood your point, but building nuclear plants can't be priority one because we don't have time to wait around for them to be built. We should be building them in parallel with more immediate initiatives that can buy us time.

coffeeblack3• 4 years ago

Isaac Arthur has a few videos about the viability of this on his YouTube channel. Very much worth a watch if you are into the science part of science fiction.

londons_explore• 4 years ago

Approach #2...

Send a 747 flying across the desert loaded with white paint, and literally paint the land white.

carbonwhales4• 4 years ago

Why do exotic and dangerous solution like dimming the sunlight, get attention and funding, but natural, safe and evolutionary tested carbon sequestring biological systems are ignored?

For example, we have been trying to find funding to get our project off the ground and no one is interested (including Y Combinator). Meanwhile we just lost 477 pilot whales (amazing biological carbon sequestering systems) in mass stranding in NZ because there are no resources and technology to save them.

concordDance5• 4 years ago

Eh? Plenty of funding gets thrown at carbon capture...

In fact, things like dimming and sunshades get very very little funding.

Problem is most forms of biological carbon capture aren't sustainable (e.g. don't dump that carbon back in the ground, you need to instead continuously sustain that forrest or those pilot whales). The ideal form of carbon capture is probably growing forests then chopping them down and putting them in landfill, but you get soil depletion like that...

carbonwhales4• 4 years ago

What do you mean, not sustainable? Cetacean populations are still well below pre-whaling numbers and are very sustainable. Not only they capture and store vast quantities of carbon in their bodies (and when they die and sink, they take all this stored carbon with them), but they are the only source of important nutrients that are required for the phytoplankton to thrive. Phytoplankton is a super potent and effective carbon capturing system as well.So not only cetaceans help carbon sequestering directly, they also help indirectly by helping phytoplankton to grow. This is a perfect system, it is safe and it is effective, unlike dimming the sunlight and changing the atmosphere.

kaashif2• 4 years ago

Is it actually possible to breed enough pilot whales to completely reverse climate change? Presumably you have the research to back that up.

carbonwhales4• 4 years ago

Please see our comment below for detailed data and numbers regarding cetaceans and carbon capture and sequestration. We can start by preserving what we already have and working towards increasing cetacean numbers.

sudden_dystopia• 4 years ago

I heard the White House is also planning research on how Nuclear Armageddon will actually be green in the long run. /s

coffeeblack3• 4 years ago

Why don’t we all just leave the fridge door open for a day or two? That should cool the planet.

orthecreedence• 4 years ago

Another great argument for nuclear power: it keeps on humming even when you block out the sun.

jl6• 4 years ago

The weight of a decision is often determined by the ability to back out of the decision should it turn out to be the wrong one. This seems like a solution that would be very hard to back out if we discover unintended side-effects.

A giant mirror in space would be harder to achieve but much easier to turn off.

icare_1er• 4 years ago

I don't see why research is a bad idea. Research is a great idea and should be encouraged. Of course it sounds scary to modify the atmosphere of the whole planet, but please, at least allow some scientists to take that money, go away and run checks for a few years and present back what they think.

dudeinjapan• 4 years ago

The goal should be to have a thermostat on our planet. Alien civilizations are looking at us like we're living in a house without A/C. They out here building dyson spheres and sh*t.

AndyForSRM• 4 years ago

I have not seen a mention of the most efficient and controllable method of reflecting solar energy away from the earth: - Ground mounted mirrors, which can be glass or plastic film. They provide a cooler living space underneath and global cooling potential. See MEER.org

Stephen-E• 4 years ago

This will sound very familiar to anyone who read Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock. The picture of Pinatubo was too much.

reader_x• 4 years ago

While post leads with “the White House is pushing…” in fact the report was requested by Congress:

“In the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy […] was directed by Congress to develop a five-year – “scientific assessment of solar and other rapid climate interventions in the context of near-term climate risks and hazards.” /1

1/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/legal/

I point this out so those with concerns can direct letters to all relevant actors.

nashashmi• 4 years ago

I am not sold CO2 is causing the warming anymore. CO2 is heavy and so falls to the ground if cool. Adding more trees and vegetation on the ground near cool areas should do the trick.

Methane is probably more of a contributor. And blocking the sun is not a real solution. It has the potential for catastrophic changes like less vegetation.

Plus there are studies on global dimming. More pollution leads to global dimming which leads to less evaporation which leads to less clouds cover.

As a matter of fact, global dimming is better studied and should be a topic before conducting this research

nomdep• 4 years ago

Isn’t dropping a giant ice cube in the ocean enough? (<~ Futurama reference) Both are creative attempts of a solution without having to mess with the source of the problem

meltyness• 4 years ago

Here's hoping the mirror they construct has infinite focal length.

deworms• 4 years ago

spraying an aerosol like sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere What happened to it being a toxic gas? And is this why they were pushing so hard to completely discredit the notion of "chemtrails" so that all criticism of this idea can be killed easily?

raydiatian• 4 years ago

Five years, isn’t that like, all of them that are left?

incomingpain• 4 years ago

If this plan would only impact the sun received by the USA. Fine feel free to do whatever you want to yourself.

In reality this plan is intended to impact all countries. So this war mongering country is unilaterally deciding how much sun my country receives? No, that's not allowed.

All this to fix a problem that you caused? Clear incitement of war; which is exactly the USA's goal. The USA doesn't know what it's like not to be at war.

rizoma_dev• 4 years ago

I hope we manage to reduce emissions before we're forced to enact these desperate measures. Be prepared to strike if your industry isn't planning to reduce consumption to safe levels

hn10000000• 4 years ago

nice, this could create a new business model a new SaaS, Sun as a Service

sumosudo• 4 years ago

You, nor your car, or your plastic straw, or the waste you create comes even a 'nith close to volcanoes and the Military Industrial Complex.

pmlnr• 4 years ago

Artemis Fowl much?

jongjong4• 4 years ago

What worries me the most is that some day, a mad billionaire will decide to implement such measures without anyone's approval. That's why we need to reform the system such that it is impossible for anyone to be a billionaire. Nobody should have the resources or power to unilaterally transform the earth without majority consensus.

The problem must be solved at the individual level. We need an efficient economic system which gives individuals enough financial surplus such that they can afford to start worrying about such issues as climate change.

Most people are too busy trying to survive the next day to even think about such long term issues as climate change. It became the elites' problem because nobody else has the surplus resources necessary to do anything about it... Even though the problem would be far easier to solve on an individual basis if each individual was responsible for negating or offsetting their own environmental impact.

joenot443• 4 years ago

A lot of people feel the same way about nation states in which one actor can make decisions which unilaterally transform the earth without majority consensus. The world actually has a long history of political leaders making short-sighted decisions which affected generations to come, can you think of times an individual billionaire has done the same?

I'm personally much more concerned with the concentrated individual power of the likes of Putin or Xi than I am of Buffet or Gates.

jongjong4• 4 years ago

I would definitely prefer governments to be made up of small autonomous city states with a simple NATO-like 'An attack against one is an attack against all' clause to maintain peace.

chrismartin• 4 years ago

What do people do when they have more money? You think they'll be eager to spend it on insulation retrofits and ground-source heat pumps? In our fossil fuel-powered economy, I think they'll buy more stuff and travel more, and most of those activities will increase GHG emissions.

I'm not arguing against measures to decrease wealth inequality. But is the sum of (potentially richer) individuals' actions likely to address climate change in a better way than a hypothetical billionaire's geoengineering project? I'm not convinced in either direction.

rubyist5eva• 4 years ago

What could go possibly go wrong?

p0pcult2• 4 years ago

Pinatubo already did this. The side effects have already been observed. We survived. This is not a permanent solution, so much as a hotfix (heh) while we develop more sustainable solutions.

If I were a wealthy truck-stop billionaire, I'd probably do this without asking anybody. If I were the head of a global NGO, I'd be advocating for this.

noveltyaccount• 4 years ago

Came here looking for Termination Shock references, was not disappointed :)

p0pcult2• 4 years ago

I liked Termination Shock a lot, but I actually preferred "The Ministry For The Future" (the NGO callout), which is more a political thriller and addresses notions of dealing with climate change from many angles, not just geoengineering. (The need to clamp down on financial flows who are still betting on fossil fuels, for example, or the people who will short initiatives to mitigate or reverse climate change.)

aurelien• 4 years ago

We could also ask the God of Sun to reduce his level by some sacrifice.

LinuxBender• 4 years ago

What percentage drop in solar conversion will PV panels have after the change? If I have 40x400 watt monocrystalline panels rated at 22% efficiency what will my power reduction be, approximately? Or in other words, how many panels will I need to add to maintain 16kw? Not delivered yet queued up with a vendor, may change order

smoovb• 4 years ago

Also in the news "Solar Power Harnessed From Space Could Be Wirelessly Transmitted to Earth" https://www.newsweek.com/wireless-electricity-space-solar-pa...

Maybe get these teams together?

coryfklein• 4 years ago

Shoot, I was looking for my personal favorite [0] but it isn't in the list: send a few hundred rockets loaded with thin sheets of aluminum foil to the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, and unroll them in space as a sun shield.

It is crazy enough to be exciting yet practical enough to potentially be within reach given recent technological developments and – perhaps best of all – very easily reversible!

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...

ruffrey• 4 years ago

It will help, we need these big efforts.

But it won’t reduce ocean acidification via too much CO2.

liseman• 4 years ago

I am actively working on SAI. If you'd like to help, please reach out.

k0k0r0• 4 years ago

As someone else once pointed out here on hacker news: "Mankind will rather fight the sun than capitalism."

marshray2• 4 years ago

Nobody's stopping you from returning to subsistence farming.

Probably still plenty of feudal Lords out there willing to accept some new serfs to work the land.

pastacacioepepe2• 4 years ago

Oh please, like the only two options are world-suicidal capitalism or medieval serfdom. You sound worse than a religious fanatic.

credit_guy• 4 years ago

Now imagine this: if we could do this, we could just as well put a shade in front of Venus. We could cool Venus as much as we want, in particular we could cool it to below the freezing temperature of CO2. All the CO2 in the atmosphere would fall to the surface. The pressure would decrease from the current 93 bar to very nearly 1 bar (the pressure on Earth). A factor of 3.5 comes from the lowering of the temperature (from about 700K to 200K) and another factor of 30 from the disappearance of the CO2, which currently represents 96.5% of the Venusian atmosphere

How long would it take for this to happen? Most likely just a few years.

But how do you make Venus habitable? If you let more light come through, the temperature goes up, but so does the CO2. You need to first sequester the CO2.

We would need to plant trees on Venus. Initially, we'll put them in some greenhouses. Besides CO2, trees need water and oxygen, but not a lot of oxygen, because once they get started, they create oxygen from CO2. As for water, there's very little of it on Venus, but there's plenty of clouds of sulfuric acid, from which we could make water. After that trees would need nitrogen, and Venus has plenty. Also potassium and phosphorus. I'm not sure if they'd be easy to source.

AddingValue• 4 years ago

This is a very tricky topic.

If NASA (or whoever) sprays too much UV blockers it might lead to crop failure.

White House is pushing ahead research to cool Earth by reflecting back sunlight

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