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.
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.)
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).
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.
This is studied as global dimming. And the effects are bad. Global dimming is happening even now but contradicts the global warming narrative for some reason.
In reality, global dimming is worse than global warming. Much of the co2 is absorbed by the ocean planktons powered by sunlight. There are other ramifications too.
It seems you'd want to block infrared where most of the thermal energy is transferred, while letting the shorter wavelengths through for plants/plankton.
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.
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.
There is other evidence of changes. But the evidence connecting climate change to CO2 is purely these models. If there's so much evidence, surely you can find evidence for this connection that isn't circulation model?
Code quality is extremely relevant. These models are nearly untestable. Climate is too chaotic and these models don't predict anything successfully on short timescales, and some of them don't predict anything on large timescale either - look up the term "flux adjustment".
So at this point the entire trust in these and the entire narrative comes from a code that any experienced programmer with physics knowledge would never put the faith of the world economy on.
Do you know what's even worse than not stopping a human made climate change? Destroying the world economy just to find out that it did not solve anything and still end up with worse climate but without economic power to deal with it. Somewhat similar to coronavirus lockdowns.
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 :)
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.
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.
I don't know where esotericsean and x86x87 are from.... Being from different parts of the world could explain different perspectives. But here in the U.S.....is was a real shit show as x86 said. It was definitely not "coming together" by any stretch. COVID made us feel more divided than we were before the pandemic.
On a much more systemic level, the whole global patent and intellectual property system worked to ensure that countries who would have been able to create vaccines themselves instead had to rely on ordering vaccines from the few companies with the IP rights, drastically limiting vaccine rollout. Literally putting corporate profit above the lives of millions and the well-being of billions.
Those people were certainly loud, but also certainly in the minority when you look at the % of people who actually got vaccinated.
Rage gets engagement, algorithms boost the wild opinions and soon it feels like everyone is taking crazy pillS, but that is just your feed trying to keep you doom scrolling.
I member a time when most adults would have somewhat reasonable opinions and we could have a discussion about a specific issue without jumping to "you're a <insert political party>" therefore you suck, therefore your opinion is bad.
Nowadays I hear straight up batshit crazy things all the time. All the time.
It used to be that if you had crazy ideas you would receive feedback that you're crazy and people would not want to associate with you. Nowadays instead of thinking about it you just double down. Other nuts are coming out of the woodwork and all of a sudden "we have to consider all points of view". We cater to the lowest common denominator and entertain things that should be summarily dismissied.
"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
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.
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?
Friendly reminder that a private company with launch capability currently is massively increasing the space junk problem and about to trigger the Kessler scenario for a quick buck and internet access without cables, while at the same time ruining surface-based astronomy.
I'm no Musk fan but is this true? I thought Starlink was low altitude so everything would fall back down pretty quickly. And while I imagine its not great for astronomy surely it's not much work for some institution or enterprising individual to create a tool for using the known position and timing of such satellites to help remove their impact on images?
Low-altitute, quick-decay orbits are fine as long as the satellite does not get damaged. Once one satellite is hit by something, the debris field will spread to all kinds of orbits, some of them pretty long-lived. [1] is a fascinating read that describes the phenomena surrounding orbital crashes.
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).
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.
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.
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!
It does not. UV-B is ionizing radiation and is incapable of being used by biological processes as a source of energy. About the only effect it has on our biome is that it contributes to the production of ozone, and it is possible that filtering out UV-B might reduce (but not eliminate) the ozone layer. However the main/only benefit of the ozone layer is to filter out UV radiation, so...
UV-B is like mosquitos, one of those rare things that really only does cause harm and can be safely eliminated if possible.
Bees see with both. UV-A (320-350nm) and UV-B (290-320nm) both overlap with bee visual spectrum (300-650nm).
Do you have data on which flowers in which geographical areas reflect with UV-A and/or UV-B? Maybe to bolster your argument you will need to prove that this won't affect bees, and pollinators more generally.
The harmful UV-B rays are under 300nm, and that’s the cutoff for bee vision for the same basic biological reason. Below that limit is what you’d want to filter out.
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.
>There are distinct advantages to making the internet unlivable, so that insane comments like this don’t have to exist anymore.
I always imagine these kinds of things starting in a conversation of a bunch of stoners munching on Funyuns while chugging Mountain Dew. "Like, dude, it would be so cool, if like, we made a giant sun shade in space. That'd be so rad!" Only someone thought it sounded smart when heard from outside the circle which is the really sad part.
At least one of us has worked in the aerospace field and has relevant domain knowledge to evaluate the feasibility of this idea. I'm gonna guess its not you.
Well that's just kind of dumb logic really, as if it were you, you wouldn't need to guess it was me now would you. Sometimes, smart people can be kind of not smart.
Also, at least one of us can get a joke, and I'm guessing it's not you
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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".
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.
> 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.
>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.
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 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
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.
That's a good question. I don't think we do. What we know is that we contribute to climate change by burning fossil fuels, at a rate that is orders of magnitude higher than natural effects. We know a lot less about long term effects of burning fossil fuels than not. Given that the global effect (on something so uniquitous as temperature) is so large, it's clear to me that we're currently running an experiment that can drastically change the environment much faster than biological evolution adapts.
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.
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?
Therefore, we need to look at solutions that don't require eighty percent of humanity agreeing on something.