Cooling the Earth with a sunshade near the inner Lagrange point (2006)

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0608163103

by gl-prod • 4 years ago

37 75 4 years ago

gl-prod• 4 years ago

"It would make no sense to plan on building and replenishing ever larger space sunshades to counter continuing and increasing use of fossil fuel. The same massive level of technology innovation and financial investment needed for the sunshade could, if also applied to renewable energy, surely yield better and permanent solutions." - Roger Angel

GekkePrutser• 4 years ago

That won't be necessary as fossil fuel is limited anyway. We're already past peak oil. Eventually we will have burned it all.

But I agree it's a technological bridge too far. I could see it help to fix the damage already done (and the damage to be done before we can move to fully renewable) but I don't think it's realistic.

But I don't think other mitigation methods like carbon capture are realistic either (not at a scale to actually matter).

adastra226• 4 years ago

Peak oil is/was a myth. There is at least an order of magnitude more oil than we could ever burn without causing a runaway greenhouse effect.

Peak oil as a concept only ever made sense if you assumed a static price of oil. There are immense reserves when the price per barrel rises, or when new technology like fracking opens up new reserves.

adastra226• 4 years ago

This is a terrible take. First of all, the price of space launch is plummeting, making the cost of launching a fleet of sun shades drop like a rock. It may soon be veeery affordable. Like, something Elon would do just for the kicks.

Second, there are distinct advantages to higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere. It makes agriculture grow more quickly, leading to higher food yields. And the greenhouse effect is mostly independent of latitude so places like Siberia and northern Canada become habitable while the tropics do not become so hot as to be unlivable. Raising the global temp by 2 degrees could double the amount of high quality arable land suitable for dense human habitation.

Third, instead of a sunshade we could use a larger translucent film which blocks UV-B light like sunglasses. Imagine a world without skin cancer!

hoosieree• 4 years ago

I'm not an expert but blocking UV-B may have some negative consequences.

standyro2• 4 years ago

Imagine a world without skin cancer by launching giant space sails is like saying: imagine a world without white people.

People have evolutionarily adapted to the sun by producing melanin in their skin, but for some reason aerospace is the only answer?

Why the West (and frankly many on HN) seems so content on destroying the natural world for problems that only matter to a subset of rich people somehow still surprises and amazes me.

There are distinct advantages to making the internet unlivable, so that insane comments like this don’t have to exist anymore.

jollyllama• 4 years ago

Easier from a perspective of organization and governance, too. Energy policy can be managed with existing institutions. If you want to launch a megafleet to block the sun, who they hell do you ask for approval? The UN? How many countries do you need to sign off on it?

marcosdumay2• 4 years ago

If the "you" here is not the all powerful US, it's a certainty that there will be a war over the project.

If it's the US, it will "just" lose a lot of soft-power.

criddell• 4 years ago

The US will use 20 million barrels of oil today, just like yesterday. Who had to sign off on that?

mc32• 4 years ago

One needs it only long enough to tide us (humanity) over till we have viable alternative shoe-in solutions.

Without that, turning on a dime away from hydrocarbons toward renewables only will inflict lots of damage to progress and people in both rich and poor countries as well.

We need an intermediate solution to attenuate the impact of hydrocarbons while we transition to alternative energy sources gracefully.

Lots people who advocate for the "bandage tear-off" fix are those who envision being able to withstand the consequences of such a choice. (Oh, I'll telecommute, I'll take the train, I'll get geothermal, I'll move to a mild climate, etc.) Most people don't have the above choices.

knappe• 4 years ago

This also puts all of our eggs in one basket. That would seem to be a troublesome thing to do.

boxed4• 4 years ago

That's true. Except the little detail of time. We've already passed the time when that rational and sane option was viable. Now we're in a situation where we need both.

dbrueck2• 4 years ago

I'd love to see a sci-fi writer use this as a premise and explore the unintended consequences. Or maybe a story about this where there was a seemingly minor miscalculation somewhere or some overlooked factor that ended up being catastrophic.

standyro2• 4 years ago

There has to be a book or two that explores this! The closest thing I can recall is the Animatrix/Matrix series exploring the concept of blotting the sun out with some sort of artificial clouds.

CM302• 4 years ago

I recall Snowpiercer had a similar premise, or at least the animated prequel thing did. They tried to reverse global warming by using some sort of aerosol substance to block sunlight, and ended up casting the Earth into a massive ice age instead.

dbrueck2• 4 years ago

Thank you, I'll check it out!

Cyberdog• 4 years ago

Ever seen the movie Snowpiercer? It was based on a comic called Le Transperceneige and they also more recently made a TV series about it, but I've only seen the movie and highly recommend it. It takes place on an Earth stuck in a planet-wide heavy winter due to an anti-global-warming scheme gone wrong. It's the first thing I think of whenever I hear of space umbrellas or these sorts of anti-warming ideas.

EDIT: Ah, someone sniped me.

biomcgary• 4 years ago

The nice thing about using the L1 Lagrange point is that it is unstable, so eventually the sunshades will disperse. Even with station keeping, the satellites will eventually break.

boxed4• 4 years ago

Highlander 2. I don't recommend it though heh

at_a_remove2• 4 years ago

I'm not a game theorist or an economist, but I believe that dealing with climate change will involve, uh, "non-cooperative solutions." People saying, "If we can all just get together and ..." keep forgetting we can't even get humanity to stop stabbing each other in the face. If the "solution" depends on mass cooperation, and worse yet, cooperative mass sacrifice, I just don't think it will happen.

Therefore, we need to look at solutions that don't require eighty percent of humanity agreeing on something.

wmf• 4 years ago

Check out Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock. In fiction you can consider things that are too taboo to discuss seriously.

CM302• 4 years ago

Yeah. Which is why things like this (limiting sunlight so greenhouse effects are mitigated) mixed with a push to 100% clean energy and carbon capture (both via trees and technology) are probably the way forward. You might get away with pushing to limit non reusable resources if companies were the targeted party though (so instead of asking people to recycle or reuse, governments outright demaded corporations stop providing as much disposable packaging).

candiodari• 4 years ago

And what happens when one realizes that limiting sunlight, of course, is an incredible weapon against your adversaries. Or, god forbid, ampliflying sunlight?

And then, when the inevitable happens and it moves from theory to "you know ... actually ... our atellite could actually do that" and then to actually doing it against that really-evil-dude-that-totally-deserves-it du jour?

Or we do it first to lessen the economic impact of a cold not-very-well-oiled winter in Europe?

Plus, I'd like to point out that even when it goes perfectly smoothly, ironically, fixing climate change will make many climate change effects worse. For instance, currently meltwater is helping offset the draught in California (and in the nearly-1-billion-people Indus valley, and a hundred less important valleys). If we slow down climate change that meltwater contribution stops, today, almost entirely.

The same with many other effects. For instance the greening of the Sahara will stop, we will not only see less extreme weather, but less rainfall ... everywhere. And that will do a lot to prevent the countries from growing.

mrtnmcc3• 4 years ago

Wouldn't these sunshade concepts all reduce solar energy available to plants as well as total thermal radiation?

fHr• 4 years ago

Well good luck on that, how will you get to a solution withouth getting money/people on board.

mort962• 4 years ago

You need money/people on board, but not on the order of 80% of the people of the world; you need the leadership of singular countries to decide to do something. Consider how easy it was for individual countries to pour a ton of resources into developing atomic bombs, compared to how difficult it has been for countries to come together and agree to get rid of nuclear weapons.

It's easy for a country to do what's in its own self-interest. It's difficult for multiple countries to come together and do things which are in everyone's common interest but which is against each individual country's interest.

esotericsean• 4 years ago

I sorta disagree. During Covid, the entire world came together. I think the world can work together as long as they're forced to.

x86x873• 4 years ago

Did it though? I remember the whole "muh body! No masks" entitled attitude. I also remember people literally dismissing the vaccine - a tech wonder - because Bill Gates.

The world did not come together. It was a shirt show. If the world came together we would have burried Covid sooner and with less people dying.

bell-cot• 4 years ago

Giant "sunshades" at L1, funded/designed/launched/operated by the Pentagon, using SpaceX Starships. Each "shade" consists of thousands of long variable-pitch "slats" (like a mini blind) in a very thin, light framework. The paper-thin slats are slightly curved ("for rigidity"), and the control system is always fiddling with their pitches - to keep the shade's location fixed, without expending rocket fuel, in spite of L1 being unstable, light pressure, the solar wind, etc.

And if any other nation down on Earth causes too much trouble? One quick flick of all the slats, and the sun briefly gets 10,000X brighter & hotter for them.

(Yes, I know enough optics to know that really wouldn't work. It's still a cool story.)

gnramires• 4 years ago

All is needed (at least for start?) I think are stronger accords and mechanisms to make demands (or even just give help) for those who don't meet the targets. Don't lose hope :)

https://climateactiontracker.org/

https://ccpi.org/ranking/

machina_ex_deus2• 4 years ago

The only scientific connection between climate change and CO2 are global circulation models. I've read the code of several of these. The quality of code is terrible, with so many obvious mistakes, unreadable functions, code copy between different models and what not.

The entire narrative controlling trillions of dollars rests on code whose quality wouldn't pass 10$ bug bounty.

Quite like how the Fed economic policy which predicted transitory inflation was probably done with similarly bad models. Or how coronavirus spread models overshot and led to terrible decisions.

I don't trust centralized decisions done like that. They amplify expected errors into devastating proportions.

boxed4• 4 years ago

There are tons of independent lines of evidence. Climate models are but one, and the code quality isn't really relevant. If they can successully simulate past climate, then bad coding practices is irrelevant to their proposed predictive ability.

Plus, all the reports have been WAY too optimistic. Year after year there actual measurments come out and it's worse than the climate models.

slowhand09• 4 years ago

So when different groups assume they have the "correct" answer... And we all take matters into our own hands?

at_a_remove2• 4 years ago

Much like most decisions have been made by humanity since the dawn of time, yes.

jeffjobs40002• 4 years ago

Geoengineering projects should be getting far more attention in the public eye. There are serious alternatives to letting society crumble due to climate change. People are choosing not to have children and citing climate anxiety as the reason. Just today, two teenagers in London ruined a Van Gogh for a climate protest. It's absurd. If you apply any amount of rational thinking to the problem, you'll realize that it's incredibly likely that we'll solve climate change.

The paper cited here is from a U of Arizona professor who previously won a MacArthur "genius" grant, and develops the optics for some of the largest telescopes in the world. Not a quack. Harvard has a Geoenigineering department. Smart and credible people are working this problem out. We should give them our attention, money, and talents. The paper in this post lays out a plan to reduce climate change for under 0.5% of world GDP in 2006. The price of launching weight into space has plummeted in the 15 years since this paper was written.

If you're worried about unintended consequences of geoengineering, then contribute to reducing risk by helping to develop AI. Then we'll be better able to model its effects and mitigate risk through increasingly accurate simulation. We need to tell people to study materials science or something that will actually help if they're concerned about the climate.

Climate Fatalism is so mid.

soulofmischief• 4 years ago

ruined a Van Gogh

Ok, I'll bite. Let's read up on this claim. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1129098184/van-gogh-sunflower...

Climate protesters threw soup over Vincent van Gogh's "Sunflowers" in London's National Gallery on Friday to protest fossil fuel extraction, but caused no discernible damage to the glass-covered painting

jeffjobs40002• 4 years ago

Well that's good news. Thanks for correcting me. I think the attempt still makes my point that people are doing drastic things because of the prevailing narrative on the subject.

I also don't mean to rag on the kids, I appreciate their passion. I just think it's misguided, and that if the wider array of potential solutions were better known then people could be more productive working on solving the problem. I think the fatalism about the topic is sad and unnecessary. I didn't mean the comment to be a cultural war "pick a side" post. The passion around the subject is justified, but I think it could be channeled more productively.

Many people use to agree with Malthus in the 1800s that the world was about to run out of food. Then the Haber-Bosch process was discovered, and problem solved. More mental energy should be put into finding a similar solution for climate change versus this century's equivalent of "the world needs less people because of food limitations".

DocTomoe3• 4 years ago

ruined a Van Gogh for a climate protest

tried to ruin. The painting was protected by a piece of protective glass. Doesn't mean these kids shouldn't be prosecuted, but the good news is that a priceless piece of cultural heritage was NOT destroyed by teenagers.

TaylorAlexander• 4 years ago

If you apply any amount of rational thinking to the problem, you'll realize that it's incredibly likely that we'll solve climate change.

Funny because lots of very rational climate scientists [1] who spent quite a bit of time thinking rationally about climate science suspect that we are on track for several degrees of warming (2, 3, or 4 deg C) and express concern that we’re not doing enough to mitigate things getting worse.

Ex: Paul Beckwith https://youtu.be/2HZsUhAzSDc

GolfPopper2• 4 years ago

If you apply any amount of rational thinking to the problem, you'll realize that it's incredibly likely that we'll solve climate change.

I think that confusing can with will is a good way to increase the chances of won't. "Solving" climate change seems to be within our technical capabilities, but we currently appear to lack the collective will.

Buttons8402• 4 years ago

I'm not sure that's a good idea, but it does remind me...

One thing I remember about a solar eclipse I saw was once it began, and a tiny corner of the sun was covered, all the heat from the sunshine seemed gone. We were in the middle of a hot field under some trailer awnings. It was miserable in the sun until just 1% of the sun was covered, and then the sunshine was barely different than the shade. There was no visual difference in the sun, but you could feel the change in radiant heat.

klabb33• 4 years ago

until just 1% of the sun was covered

Was this confirmed? It's easy to underestimate because the sun is so incredibly bright that it bleeds outside and maintains it's perceived intensity and radius much more so than the actual numbers, due to various optical phenomena.

For instance, our eyes have logarithmic intensity response curve, so a 2x increase feels more like – say – a 1.1x increase.

Buttons8402• 4 years ago

No, it's a subjective estimate. Everything I said is subjective.

I did look at the sun with glasses that made it appear as a dim orange ball, and as soon as the moon barely started to cover an edge it was comfortable to walk around in the sunshine. By totality we were all wearing jackets. This was in Idaho.

cs702• 4 years ago

If the stakes weren't so important, this tidbit from the abstract would be really funny:

The concept builds on existing technologies. It seems feasible that it could be developed and deployed in ≈25 years at a cost of a few trillion dollars, <0.5% of world gross domestic product (GDP) over that time.

mysterydip• 4 years ago

How much energy would have to be absorbed/refracted in order to make a difference, and what material can withstand that much energy continuously without melting?

seydor2• 4 years ago

Cooling tech is like a shit-test for climate change absolutists. If one truly believes the models and premises that the observed climate change is antrhopogenic and catastrophic then there should be almost no objections to cooling tech, unless the models predict that cooling the earth would be worse

mrtnmcc3• 4 years ago

In control theory, something can be observable without being controllable

immmmmm• 4 years ago

You apparently didn't heard about ocean acidification nor the fact that the latter provide half the oxygen you and I breath.

Oh sorry, i forgot we can techno-fix that with iron-seeding and massive alcali dumps.

So to make it short: these "solutions" provide FF companies more arguments to pump more oil.

BTW we are already MASSIVELY reducing forcing (0.8W/m2) with sulfur aerosols from sea shipping. When that goes down expect even faster heating, with consequences beyond what the bleakest models predict.

I leave you the size of the sun shade to get that negative forcing as an exercise.

klabb33• 4 years ago

No it isn't. There is a night and day difference between finding a causal link between X and Y, and controlling Y with a new method Z. It's orders of magnitude more complex and it took decades for consensus on only the causal link, and the predictions vary tremendously. Our prediction power on complex systems is extremely limited.

If you take medicine as an example, all drug development comes with unpredictable side effects. The process for putting the safe label on a drug is through testing it on 10s of thousands of people – it's extremely primitive and only works if we're willing to accept catastrophic failures from time to time. Even when something goes wrong, we often don't know why. And even when we know why, Pharma companies have so much invested that they often hide it for profit reasons.

Or: When we started producing CFCs we had no idea that we'd weaken the ozone layer. How could we? It's a miracle that the causal link was found at all.

The problem of having only one planet makes climate engineering extremely risky. Obviously it depends on what method is used. Carbon capture is ~easy to test for side effects in isolation, whereas chemicals in the stratosphere or a space sunshade is harder.

seydor2• 4 years ago

But that works both ways, how do we know that renewables/CO2 removal will revert climate change?

GolfPopper2• 4 years ago

I fully expect Musk (or someone trying for the same niche) to be actively pitching geoengineering and/or near-Earth megaprojects in response to climate change by the end of the decade.

Cooling the Earth with a sunshade near the inner Lagrange point (2006)

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