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US considers 'sun blocking' to cool the Earth: What is it and does it really work?
(www.euronews.com)
This is what I call a "hotfix" .
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Re-engineering our space program towards space manufacturing, mineral extraction, and building permanent residences in space sufficient enough to support the people that would be needed to build and maintain space-based infrastructure like a reflector would be an undertaking I'm not sure humanity currently has the drive for.
Science and futurism YouTuber Isaac Arthur is going to love this. Giant aluminum reflectors are a huge part of future space infrastructure and he is happy to point this out quite often.
I believe they're trying to chemically blocking the sun (using sulfur dioxide) rather than physically blocking it.
It is obvious we're not gonna fix this by changing our habits, so I'm all for a technological solution. It will have unforeseen consequences and we will deal with those, too. Humankind is nothing but adaptable.
We will do literally anything to avoid changing our ways huh
Next month:
Europe considers sacrificing babies to Satan
I was reading about how carbon capture from the air is going to be a trillion dollar industry. Just SMH. It’s so much easier to not emit than it is to recapture. But since we’ll never get China and India off of coal, I guess we have to do something.
Not emitting is not that easy. We are in a transition period at the moment. Electric vehicles are here but we don't have all the infrastructure needed to support them. Let alone the fact that battery tech is not developing as fast as we need it to.
Right now liquid fuels still have the advantage of greater energy density. If we could move to hydrogen fuels that would be cool, and we could repurpose existing petroleum facilities.
But who knows which way the tech is going to go. The only sure thing is that we are in for a wild ride one way or the other.
But since we’ll never get China and India off of coal, I guess we have to do something.
This is a bad and uninformed take.
Per person, emissions in both China and India are still substantially lower than almost all developed countries. India’s per person emissions are less than one-quarter of the global average, and roughly one-tenth of those of the US. Close to a quarter of all carbon emissions come from manufacturing products which are exported and consumed in other countries. Textiles and clothes exported from India and south Asia account for over 4% of global emissions.
Labelling India and China as the chief villains of COP26 is a convenient narrative. The financial aid which rich countries promised yet failed to deliver as part of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015 was supposed to help developing countries dump coal for cleaner sources of energy. And while the world berated India and China for weakening the Glasgow Climate Pact’s coal resolution, few questioned the fossil fuel projects being floated in developed nations, like the UK’s Cambo oilfield and the Line 3 oil pipeline between Canada and the US.
And that's without even going back to look at imperialism and its impacts on those countries, and why they're now having to play catch up with the west (who not only did our fair share of polluting during our own industrial revolutions, but still continue to do so pretty much freely), mostly to provide for the west.
This, like the overpopulation myth, are nothing more than racist distractions created by the rich and powerful to get us to blame "others" rather than look for who is really at fault - them (Edit to clarify: and by them I mean all obscenely rich and the governments they control, faux communists included).
You may be surprised to learn that I totally agree with you. In my extremely brief statement I did not treat the nuances of this issue. I think the developing world has every moral right to pursue the same industrialization path as western nations have. I believe our world economy is driving their coal usage. I believe they are still relatively small as a contributor on a per capita basis.
However I also believe that they have less ability to transition to renewables and I expect them to pursue their right to lift their populations out of poverty. And so: we’re never going to get them off coal. With their huge populations, they will inevitably be top contributors as this process progresses. Therefore, we need to focus on mitigations as well as renewables, since this massive set of emissions appears to be non negotiable, and in fact we’d be hypocrites to try, as you point out. I would consider active mitigations the moral obligation of the developed world, and in fact that’s where air capture efforts are mainly occurring.
This isn’t racism, and playing that card in the face of these simple facts is a great way to get nowhere with the issue.
We're never going to "get them" off coal because we keep weaselling out of providing them with the support to do so after centuries of exploiting their people and resources for profits the size of which we can't even comprehend, not because of the size of their population, and not because they're top contributors, because as stated, neither of those are even true.
What we need to focus on is the fact that this is a global problem and that shirking and shifting responsibility to others only gains those making the profit more time to make more profit. We all breath the same goddamned air, and pretending like there are "us" and "them" in this mess is ridiculous beyond words.
As for that last part - no one is "playing a card" (seriously??), and while your intent might not be racist, the trope you are using, and its impact, are. You not being aware of this fact (or comfortable with it now that you are) doesn't change it.
Okay I can tell you’re red hot to defend your narrative. Sorry for making it harder for you.
It's difficult to get China and India off coal because they're doing most of the world's manufacturing and some processes are currently impossible without it. But 'we' exported manufacturing to Asia and 'we' buy the products the coal is used for. 'We' don't get to wriggle out of responsibility by pretending that a couple of low and middle income countries are somehow responsible for 'our' excessive consumption.
China's usage of coal is huge, but it's proportiojn has dropped from 75+% in 1990 to around 55%. It's slow progress - it may accelerate. The problem is the rest of the world exports so much of its manufacturing requirements to China.
Western countries are just as guilty, if not more. We contributed terribly for several hundred years, and still today net carbon use is still increasing in developed countries. It's just not increasing quite as much as before.
Yeah historically the United States has admitted the most carbon of any country to date. Other countries are having their industrial revolutions and we are hypocrites for criticizing them.
The vast majority of pollution is from agriculture. Are you gonna quit eating meat anytime soon?
I call BS
I did, and so should everyone else that claims to want to do something about the climate catastrophe.
Artificially grown meat is quickly becoming more and more viable, it's not like it will be impossible forever to have a steak.
So we've reached "bargaining". Good to know.
Wasnt this the start of Highlander 2?
You must be confused. The first Highlander movie was followed up with Highlander 3. There was no Highlander 2.
Will they use diamondium or diamondillium?
WERNSTROM!!!!!
Growing evidence that governments/corporations would sooner give up seeing the goddamn sun than get off even a fraction of fossil fuel usage
to be fair, they'll probably make it block only infrared light, so the visible luminosity stays the same at first..
Then they will be selling ad space on the sunshield! Remember this tweet.
Literally what happened in the Matrix.
This is the world that you know: the world as it was at the end of the 20th century. It exists now only as a part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix… We have only bits and pieces of information, but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration.
We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI: a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power, and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.
What could ever go wrong
The best part is you can dual purpose the shades to collect solar power and microwave beam it wherever you want.
The Simpsons isn't just an animated sitcom. It's a documentary about the future:
- Reduction of fossil fuels
- Literally block out the sun
we’re fucked
Even if we stopped all use of fossil fuels overnight, there’s a lot of ‘baked in’ warming. This isn’t ‘instead of’ it’s ‘in addition to’ when it comes to halting warming.
Yep, it takes about 30 years to see the effects, what we're dealing with right now is the 1993 emissions, if we stopped using all fossil fuels right this instant things would continue to get worse well into the 2050s.
American arrogance at its best.
The EU is also thinking about the same exact measures:
This is human hubris just like how the Holocene extinction is human hubris, we don't need to pin things on any single national entity.
I think it's a combination of hubris and desperation. Hubris because it could still go very wrong and serve us a frozen extinction instead of a boiling one. Desperation because those who acknowledge what's happening know that something probably needs to be done to not only stop but reverse this but the corporations might be more likely to burn it all down protecting their interests than cooperate.
The "easy" solutions will likely lead to war and might not even help anything at this point. The promising technologies still need to be scaled up (also in a way that makes sure we don't overshoot the cooling targets or remove so much CO2 that plants die out).
The more I think of it, the more I like this desperate idea. If it does work too well, we can always just send more rockets to move whatever it is out of the way. Which we should have built and ready to go shortly after the blocker is deployed. Preferably sitting in orbit to minimize the chances of it screwing up if desperately needed.
Hmm sunlight is also a carbon reducer since it drives photosynthesis. But desperate times...
The main aerosols proposed for SRM also cause ozone depletion and acid rain. There is some level of control as to where the bad consequences and up and which regions get more extreme weather.
Anyone want to take a guess as to which countries won't end up with the consequences?
All I can think of is the last episode of the show Dinosaurs. This is the wax fruit factory and the bunch beetles all over again, except with us as the stars of our own show.
God damn was that a downer ending for a lighthearted sitcom. That kids watched. I didn't see the final episode until I was an adult, but I bet a bunch of kids were traumatized when it first aired.
Imagine if, instead of the four of them ending in jail at the end of Seinfeld, they died in a nuclear holocaust. Or if How I Met Your Mother ended with zombies eating the whole gang while we watched them scream. I'm guessing that was the level of trauma for kids watching the finale of Dinosaurs.
It was a total downer. As an adult, I don't watch that episode anymore. It had some enjoyable content, but I can't start it because of how bleak it gets. Otherwise, that show is probably among my top 50.
I mean this is just saying the US is open to researching the possibility. They aren't even committing to researching it.
"However, the report also clarifies that no decision has been made to "establish a comprehensive research programme focused on solar radiation modification.""
It's a very prudent decision to study it. We can determine and quantify the risks this way.
taxing the rich properly would (blasphem alert) help redistribute wealth among workers and decrease inflation, and also make the world colder, since we dont have to work as much. but i guess we would be stripped from our daily dose of uv light soon. yea who needs vitamin b3 anyway ?
Given much of the transition to renewable energy is planned to be solar this may be counterproductive. China is rolling out monumental amounts of solar at the moment, we can't just block the sun since it's part of the solution.
Unless we block the sun with a big solar panel!
Won't help with ocean acidification. Stop using fossil fuels, leave it in the ground.
Yeah, I saw a link to a study that modeled outcomes within the next fre decades where acidification kills enough marine life and favors the reproduction of other microbes. Something about either low oxygen in the oceans and/or the atmosphere, or maybe a dangerous increase in stmospheric toxins resulting from that.
Maybe I'll try and find it to verify.
Isn't this part of the plot of Snowpiercer? At least the movie.
I immediately thought the same thing. We need Wilford to hurry up with his train.
You meam Charlie?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yqi0FabHHs&t=1467s
Great the solar roadways of climate change fixes.