Ask Slashdot: Could Climate Change Be Solved By Manipulating Photons in Space? (9news.com) 382
Slashdot reader dryriver writes:
Most "solutions" to climate change center on reducing greenhouse gas emissions on Earth and using renewable energy where possible. What if you could work a bit closer to the root of the problem, by thinking about the problem as an excess number of photons traveling from the Sun to the Earth?
Would it be completely physically impossible to place or project some kind of electrical or other field into space that alters the flight paths of photons -- which are energy packets -- that pass through it? What if you could make say 2% of photons that would normally hit the Earth miss the Earth, or at the very least enter Earth's atmosphere at an altered angle?
Given that the fight against climate change will likely swallow hundreds of billions of dollars over the next years, is it completely unfeasible to spend a few billion dollars on figuring out how to manipulate the flight paths of photons out in Space?
Here's a recent news report along those lines: A group of Swedish researchers believe that a cataclysmic asteroid collision from hundreds of millions of years ago could have the answers to solving climate change... Researchers have been discussing different artificial methods of recreating post-collision asteroid dust, such as placing asteroids in orbits around Earth like satellites and having them "liberate fine dust" to block warming sunlight, thus hypothetically cooling our warming planet. "Our results show for the first time that such dust at times has cooled Earth dramatically," said Birger Schmitz, professor of geology at Lund University and the leader of the study. "Our studies can give a more detailed, empirical based understanding of how this works, and this in turn can be used to evaluate if model simulations are realistic."
The research is still a ways out from practical use, however. Scientists are understandably wary about recreating a prehistoric dust storm. Speaking to Science Magazine, Seth Finnegan, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley said that the results of the study "shows that the consequences of messing around in that way could be pretty severe."
The university's press release does say their research "could be relevant for tackling global warming if we fail to reduce carbon dioxide emissions." But what do Slashdot's readers think of these ideas?
Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Could climate change be solved by manipulating photons in space?
Would it be completely physically impossible to place or project some kind of electrical or other field into space that alters the flight paths of photons -- which are energy packets -- that pass through it? What if you could make say 2% of photons that would normally hit the Earth miss the Earth, or at the very least enter Earth's atmosphere at an altered angle?
Given that the fight against climate change will likely swallow hundreds of billions of dollars over the next years, is it completely unfeasible to spend a few billion dollars on figuring out how to manipulate the flight paths of photons out in Space?
Here's a recent news report along those lines: A group of Swedish researchers believe that a cataclysmic asteroid collision from hundreds of millions of years ago could have the answers to solving climate change... Researchers have been discussing different artificial methods of recreating post-collision asteroid dust, such as placing asteroids in orbits around Earth like satellites and having them "liberate fine dust" to block warming sunlight, thus hypothetically cooling our warming planet. "Our results show for the first time that such dust at times has cooled Earth dramatically," said Birger Schmitz, professor of geology at Lund University and the leader of the study. "Our studies can give a more detailed, empirical based understanding of how this works, and this in turn can be used to evaluate if model simulations are realistic."
The research is still a ways out from practical use, however. Scientists are understandably wary about recreating a prehistoric dust storm. Speaking to Science Magazine, Seth Finnegan, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley said that the results of the study "shows that the consequences of messing around in that way could be pretty severe."
The university's press release does say their research "could be relevant for tackling global warming if we fail to reduce carbon dioxide emissions." But what do Slashdot's readers think of these ideas?
Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Could climate change be solved by manipulating photons in space?
It Was Us (Score:5, Interesting)
Would it be completely physically impossible to place or project some kind of electrical or other field into space that alters the flight paths of photons
We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky.
And we don't even have the excuse of killer sentient solar powered robots to be acting against yet! Sheesh.
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It's not as crazy as it sounds. People have been looking at the possibility of deploying large sun shields in space for decades. The shield would be in orbit around the sun, and designed to reduce the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth slightly, but not enough to be really noticeable for people living there. Just enough to slow down global warming.
The main issue is finding a material that could withstand the harsh conditions, could be deployed in space and manoeuvred to track the orbit of the Earth.
Re:It Was Us (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not as crazy as it sounds.
Yes it is.
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The idea is not bad
No, the idea is bad.
There's uncountable side effects of reducing the amount of sunlight that hits the ground. The idea is only "not bad" if you stop your analysis at how you'd do it.
Re:It Was Us (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, getting all them little sunscreens orbiting just so in unison so as to shield the Earth might be a problem. On the other hand, one might consider keeping lots in stationary orbits around the sun to shield the Earth.
However, space is big, really really big, so big you wouldn't believe it, mind boggling big. So no, it's a stupid idea meant to distract the gullible.
Re: It Was Us (Score:3)
It's not as crazy as it sounds
But definately as stupid.
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"People" as in "Space Nutters". No one has really seriously been doing any of that.
Re: It Was Us (Score:2)
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It is completely batshit crazy. It's hard enough to scale up from a theoretical micro-experiment to a working prototype in a lab. Now scale it up to something planet-size. You want the entire human race working and spending 100% of its resources on this project for how many years? What are people going to eat in the meantime?
These batshit crazy ideas keep popping up from time to time. This one is right up there with the idea of sprinkling iron filings in all of the oceans to control global warming.
The thing about all this is that it is what you would call "bar talk" or baked talk. Get scientists and engineers relaxed and talking among themselves, perhaps a few drinks, and weird ideas - and sometimes great ones - pop up. It's a kind of free association that can often solve problems. But you laugh at the weird ones because you
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It's not as crazy as it sounds.
It sounds like these scientists were enjoying a degree of Hindu Kush.
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It's not as crazy as it sounds. People have been looking at the possibility of deploying large sun shields in space for decades.
I did some calculations just for fun. To block off 2% of the solar flux on the Earth with mylar like is used for satellites, it would take 33,000 Starship launches just by mass. That would be three superheavy rocket launches a day (excluding holidays) for the next thirty years. At optimistic launch costs guessed at by SpaceX for routine use of Starship alone, the price comes out to about $400 billion. That makes a lot of assumptions favoring an easy deployment, and doesn't include the complexity or cost of
Re:It Was Us (Score:4, Interesting)
Not necessarily - the cause is not the problem, the effect is the problem: excessive solar energy buildup on Earth's surface. And that effect can potentially be addressed in a number of ways. The question is - are any of those ways actually cheaper than addressing the root cause? Especially since we're now so far down the road that even 100% elimination of fossil fuels tomorrow might not be enough.
A sun shield at L1 is the obvious choice - but as you point out, also stupid. We could only really put one shield there, which means it would have to be huge - and the blocked sunlight would constantly be pushing it towards Earth, which means it would need constant station-keeping propulsion expending a similar order of energy (and literal megatons of propellant). Which in turn means it needs a massive rigid structure to distribute that counter-propulsion.
Another option would be a cloud of many thousands of large, ultra-thin reflectors in high Earth orbit, potentially spin-stabilized to reduce the structural requirements to keep them flatish, with only a little gyroscopic control to fine-tune their orientation. They then spend half of each orbit being pushed away from the Earth by the sun, and can reorient themselves to orient that propulsion in the optimal direction.
Would a cloud of ultralight solar sails be cheaper than completely eliminating our fossil fuel dependence overnight?
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It's not stupid due to any sort of technical feasibility.
It's stupid because it ignores all the side effects of reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth's surface.
We've already fucked up the balance of one system due to CO2 emissions. Fixing it by fucking up the balance of another system is a really bad idea.
Re:It Was Us (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isn't a buildup of solar radiation, it is a buildup of HEAT. If you cut the amount of solar energy hitting the earth, you decrease the amount of energy your crops need to survive. You kill off some portion of the animals in the oceanic light column, which are responsible for our aquatic food chain. This is not a plan to save the earth, this would be a plan to starve it.
And frankly, it's kind of silly to take this measure when the alternative is that we just be more responsible about the way we treat our home.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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"Climate deniers are not crazy or stupid. They are purely rational. For them, a future that includes AGW is a brighter one than the future without."
This is precisely where your comment (which i thought was going pretty well) went straight into the toilet.
There is ample evidence that at best, a future that includes AGW will be unpredictable at best. The belief that AGW will lead to a brighter future is therefore at best a sign of unfounded optimism. More commonly, however, it's a simple sign of Dunning-Krueg
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Climate change could be solved more cheaply with c (Score:2)
Start launching them at oil pipelines and coal power plants. :D
Re:Climate change could be solved more cheaply wit (Score:5, Funny)
Houthis for the win!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ya, unless the Saudis did it to themselves to suck in a gullible third country to take a whack at Iran so the Saudis can claim to be innocent of said whack. Never trust the Saudis further than you can spit a two-headed rat.
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errm...unless the Earth gets hot enough where a cave is the only place you can live.
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It is indeed quite amazing how oil is enmeshed in our existence. We are MADE of oil, since oil is an input to modern fertilizer.
If the oil is gone, prepare for a pre-20th century level of energy use and farming productivity, combined with the memory of what was possible in the 21st century.
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Start launching them at oil pipelines and coal power plants. :D
We need to get at the root of the problem . . . the Sun.
The Iranians need to get off their lazy asses and start producing nukes. Then they can mount them on their cruise missile drones and fly them into the Sun!
The nukes would reduce the Sun's energy producing capacity.
Maybe.
Wait, is it April's Fools already? (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF are you doing, /.
Yeah, that's some bad physics. So here's better (Score:3)
When I read the story the only thing you can say is that at least two people didn't get as much physics as I did in high school. This "answer" is so crazy that it isn't even wrong. Photons are not charged particles the last time I checked.
Having said that, there is an obvious solution approach with a fatal problem: Space mirrors.
It would be theoretically possible to put large numbers of mirrors in orbit and rotate them to strongly regulate the amount of solar energy that reaches the earth. Block some of it,
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The fatal flaw is actually much simpler: It requires at least a million square km of solar shade at the Lagrange point. Probably 10 times that if you actually want to make a decent dent in incoming solar energy.
We would have to launch millions of tons under even the most optimistic assumptions.
Re:Yeah, that's some bad physics. So here's better (Score:4, Interesting)
Even more fundamental flaw: We'd still be left with the shitty atmosphere we've got now. If we get run-away CO2 release, then we'll be just as fucked, but peeking at the sun through a tiny hole in the beautiful, great wall of mirrors we've constructed. That's likely to make it harder for the earth to recover (with us long-gone).
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Yes, and the extra CO2 is acidifying the oceans which are the base of the food chain. If it starts significantly acidifying the rain, then game over.
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I really wish I could remember the source. I'm pretty sure it must have been SF along the lines of using more technology to solve the problems of technology. You know, like nuclear power plants with 17 layers of redundancy. Like Fukushima.
I'm not advocating that it's plausible. Just that the approach has a basis in actual physics.
As regards the problem with chaotic systems, I'm sure that I didn't understand that much math until relatively recently. There has been a lot of work in that area in recent decades
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No, I'm not clear what approach you're thinking of, but the version I'm talking about would be lots of relatively smaller mirrors in lower orbit. What you are describing sounds more like a solar power satellite system. For the mirrors in low earth orbit, you would need gyroscopes that would constantly be adjusting the angles to compensate for orbital motion, but you'd have an abundance of solar power for that purpose. You can also see that there's a whole lot of computing going on even beyond the weather mo
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We would have to launch millions of tons under even the most optimistic assumptions.
While we've released a couple of orders of magnitude more CO2 into the atmosphere than that, it would still probably be cheaper and easier to just sequester that than to fabricate, launch, and deploy something like this.
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We would have to launch millions of tons under even the most optimistic assumptions.
It seems like theoretically you could drill deep into the moon, plant all of the nuclear bombs on earth, and split the moon into two haves spreading the debris field at the Lagrange point in such a way as to cast a nice shadow...
Example diagram [superherohype.com]
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I don't know who had the idea first, but they used an "angular soletta" in the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson in order to bring MORE light to Mars.
The thing would have to be ridiculously large and stationed at L1 in order to help us. And probably under spin to retain shape. What a mess.
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There's another branch in this thread that addresses this aspect, but I don't know how you can get there from here.
However, I'm almost certain that Robinson was not my source, though your description matches his. The version I'm talking about was definitely different, because sometimes you wanted to rotate the mirrors to block sunlight.
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The angular soletta is a series of concentrically nested truncated cones. The effect is a series of circles which are 45 degrees from a flat disc. Each circle has to be able to vary that angle and is connected to its neighbor. The whole array is under spin to provide tension. Station is kept in the presence of light pressure by double reflection. Photons first reflect from a surface facing the star, then from a surface facing the planet. If the angles of one ring and the next are identical, the light strike
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The version I must have read about somewhere (but I can't remember where) was more like weather micromanagement. However what you are describing sounds more like a kind of Dyson Sphere or fragmented Ringworld.
Again, some of this was addressed in another reply in this branch of the thread, but I'm not seeing how to negotiate to that reply from here...
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Yeah, you could potentially do it as a ring around the sun I suppose. Just a loose belt of satellites, kinda like the rings of Saturn. But then you would need a hell of a lot of them, so it would make more sense to just block the area right between the Sun and Earth.
You still need a lot of them but it's not beyond reason.
Re: It's BizX... (Score:2)
No! (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Every possible attack on any problem can have unexpected side effects, and therefore should not be attempted."
-The Precautionary Principle
Re: No! (Score:4, Insightful)
We can and should distinguish between possible solutions based on the extremity of plausible side effects. For example, releasing enough dust into the atmosphere that we'd expect it to meaningfully affect the climate carries risks of unintended consequences on the scale of global extinction events.
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We should also distinguish between blatantly stupid ideas and not concentrating on the problem at hand, i.e., too much climate altering gas produced by humans.
One particularly nasty side effect (Score:5, Interesting)
Plants require light. Reduce the light levels and photosynthese reduces which in turn reduces the amount of CO2 the plants can absorb. Own goal.
And thats before we consider the effect on agriculture productivity as 2% might not sound a lot but its a HUGE amount of potential drop in food production taken over the earth as a whole.
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Any engineered solution to reduce incident light would need to target the green peak emission spectrum of the sun. Photosynthesis doesn't really depend on it, hence why plants are green and reflect it. Inevitably we'd just end up with the same issue as CO2 keeps climbing.
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A 2% change in solar energy reaching the Earth is very minor compared to the effects of climate change.
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Over about one hundred degrees, photosynthesis comes to a halt as plants close their stomata in an effort to reduce water loss through respiration. The situation is much more complex than you imagine it to be, and thus you are not qualified to make determinate statements about cause and effect.
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This. I don't know why he thinks too many photons reaching earth is "closer to the root of the problem," the current global warming problem isn't caused by the sun getting stronger. CO2 emissions ARE the root of the problem, and increased global temperatures are just one symptom - others include ocean acidification and, more recently, decreased crop nutrition, and SRM would do nothing to address those.
CO2 isn't just warming the planet, it's also, figuratively, poisoning it. This isn't to say that SRM should
Re: No! (Score:2)
This sounds familiar (Score:3, Insightful)
I know an old lady
She swallowed a fly
But I don't know why
She swallow the fly
- I guess she'll die
I know an old lady
Who swallow a spider
It wiggled and jiggled
And tickled inside her
She swallowed a spider
To catch the fly
But I don't know why
She swallowed the fly
- I guess she'll die
The moral being, don't try to solve your problems in ways that create a new problem. Or, just don't swallow that fucking fly in the first place (too late).
Yesssss (Score:2)
Crazy mad science will solve all our problems! What could possibly go wrong?
Climate is only one part of the environment. (Score:4, Insightful)
It is the overall environment that is important - not just the climate. Increases in CO2 emissions also result in the oceans becoming more acidic. This impact is felt strongest at the poles where shellfish are already starting to suffer. In addition, phytoplankton, which are largely responsible for sequestering CO2, also have trouble with acidic oceans. Basically, the entire ocean food chain is beginning to be destroyed from the foundation.
So even if we are able to stabilize the temperature, continuing to emit CO2 will have disturbing effects on the environment. Perhaps the climate will not change, but our environment and lifestyles will.
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So even if we are able to stabilize the temperature, continuing to emit CO2 will have disturbing effects on the environment. Perhaps the climate will not change, but our environment and lifestyles will.
Then we should be building nuclear power plants. Anything anyone can bring up against nuclear power plants right now is something that people will have decreasing concern about as the problem gets worse. I don't care what someone might bring up in opposition of nuclear power, nobody cares about that any more. Nobody.
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There are way too many of them, and increasingly the are fat and stupid
The second part is crucial and more important than the first. I suspect that if you halved the number of humans today, the other half would just begin to consume twice the amount. The problem is an economy that assumes more plenty than there is.
Yeah, or maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's just drop a giant ice cube in the ocean every so often, stick our heads back up our asses, and pretend that everything on the planet is OK!
Even if we prevent a global temperature rise by means other than reducing emissions, if we continue to live the way we have the air and water will still be polluted.
"What if you could work a bit closer to the root of the problem..."
How is reducing heat from the sun closer to the root of the problem? The sun is not the problem. The sun provides the Earth fscking life!!! It IS a solution through the use of solar energy. WE are the problem. WE pollute the earth. WE kill living things for selfish profit.
And what have we learned from previous endeavors when humans tried to change and control nature? We just had an article about genetically modified mosquitoes that shouldn't have been able to reproduce, but did. Now we don't know what effect that will have in the future. The same goes for trying to cause a global dust storm. How fscking bad do they want to kill more plant species? We already have issues feeding people, and this seems like it would only fsck our food supply and raise prices because yeild went down after they fscked our atmosphere with dust.
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It probably helps to see different problems for what they are - different issues. The greenhouse gases we usually talk about (mostly CO2 and methane) are so naturally occurring it's really hard to call them pollution. Pollutants typically block sunlight and have a slight cooling effect. Ideally you would not run weird experiments in the atmosphe
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There has been a warming climate trend for tens of thousands of years (with some pauses and declines in there too).
The warming trend peaked about 8000 years ago, and then reversed to a very slight cooling trend.
We just don't know which part is CO2, and which part is other causes
We do have a pretty good idea. Greenhouse gases are responsible for more than 100%. The other causes have a small cooling effect.
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Sure, you can break up the temperature graph in a million ways. Temperatures 8000 years ago were about the same as they are now, temperatures 15000 years ago were 8C cooler. I think one of the key takeaways of looking at a long term temperature graph is that as a species we should be prepared for very significant changes in temperature.
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"How is reducing heat from the sun closer to the root of the problem?"
There's a lot of denialist dumbasses who claim that global warming is caused almost exclusively by cyclical solar forcing. When i read a sentence like that i assume that it was written by one of them. As if we couldn't account for that. Noobs.
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Any solution is going to have to be technical. Maybe not this technical solution, but technical solutions nonetheless.
We are obviously not going to solve this by going stone age, and shriving ourselves for our carbon crimes. If that was going to work (socially, economically, politically, etc.) it would have worked by now.
Not as easy as that (Score:2)
The problem is that light does not interact with any kind of fields and the only ways to change light's path are with gravity (not really an option) or with some sort of physical object like a Dyson sphere [wikipedia.org], which was proposed to harness the energy of a star, or maybe a smaller version that covers the Earth to a certain degree.
The problem could possibly be solved with some large panels at the primary Earth-Sun Lagrange point, which would put them permanently between the Earth and the sun, thus creating shado
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The structures, when placed at the Lagrange point, will effectively act as solar sails and be inexorably pushed towards Earth, which means they would need some sort of propulsion to create a counter-push. Since this counter-push needs to go on all the time, currently known propulsion systems would probably not be able to handle it without constant refuelling, which would be extremely costly, and an ongoing expense.
That "push" could be the gravity of the sun. Don't put the sun shade "exactly" at the Lagrange point, put it where the sun's gravity counteracts the force of the light. The shades would presumably be able to rotate or otherwise be able to move to adjust the amount of light that gets through. Presumably this sun shade space station would have solar panels for power. Put some crew on the station, or some kind of semi-autonomous "pilot" to fly the station using the force of gravity, the force of the sunlig
Re: Not as easy as that (Score:2)
L1 is unstable; you'd need thrusters & fuel to keep it there.
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L1 is unstable; you'd need thrusters & fuel to keep it there.
Or a solar sail.
no (Score:2)
No, and dryriver is a clickbaiting retard.
The obvious answer is (Score:2)
Don't fuck with things you don't understand.
Sure Climate Change is real, it changes all the time. Tectonic plates move too.
But maybe trying to fix a symptom could instead kill off plant life, or start another ice age.
Rational thought, and not doing things just because someone "thinks" they'll help are probably more valuable then tossing unproven solutions at a problem, and hoping something will stick.
Besides, almost all the people reading /. today will be long gone before the shit hits the fan...
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Don't fuck with things you don't understand.
Following that advice we'd never get to understand anything.
Re: BUILD THINGS! (Re:The obvious answer is ) (Score:5, Interesting)
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But I don't think the input data to this one graph is important. There is plenty of data now, including raw data that you can access yourself. And the general conclusions of the graph have been reconstructed using different methods and data records - so many times its not funny.
I opened the article you linked. How can you read that? It's so atrociously written, biased, and the language is act
Would it be completely physically impossible (Score:2)
As far as our understanding of physics goes, with the exception of a gravitational field, yes it would be impossible.
The only known ways to alter the path of a photon is through interaction with matter, which causes the photon to propagate slower through an optically dense medium than in vacuum and therefore alters their path way - also known as refractive index.
Another way to effectively change
Huuuuge solar sail. (Score:3)
Seriously, though. If the oil and coal lobby weren't so ruthless, adoption of solar would have been even quicker. Even now, as it stands, renewables are being adopted all over the place and are becoming not only viable, but seriously cheaper. And that trend will only continue, so it's not all bad news =)
Sun Shield (Score:2)
Re:Sun Shield (Score:5, Funny)
Put a giant disk of tinfoil in orbit to reflect the sun's rays. If it doesn't work, it could be much easier to get rid of than a dust cloud.
You mean give the whole planet a tin foil hat? That seems quite appropriate.
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Timeline (Score:3)
1. Remove the energy source that drives the green stuff that ingests CO2 and spits out O2.
2. Tax usage of diminishing O2 resource
3. Profit!
4. Death for all
5. 500 million years time, newly evolved life worships the microplastics god that is still all pervasive in the environment
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2. Tax usage of diminishing O2 resource
Spaceballs, the business plan!
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I was thinking Total Recall. The Mars corporation made people pay for air in that, didn't they?
Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe we stop using the Rube-Goldberg approach as an engineering guide and stop emitting the CO2 and store and remove the excess CO2 using biomass using that resembles a sane plan.
Quit ignoring the real problem (Score:3)
Europeans and some Americans are so afraid to address the real issue: China.
Until you get China to stop polluting the planet, no amount of banning straws or messing with outer space is going to make a bit of difference.
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Europeans and some Americans are so afraid to address the real issue: China.
Until you get China to stop polluting the planet, no amount of banning straws or messing with outer space is going to make a bit of difference.
What do you expect Americans and Europeans to do? Bomb China's power plants, factories, and mines?
Here's what Europeans and Americans can do, build nuclear power plants at a rate never seen before. This will leave China no excuse for their continued coal use because so far when any complaint is lodged against them they simply point to how the other nations are polluting.
While doing that drive China out of the markets that pollute. One big one is the rare earth metals market. The rules on mining in the U
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put it on the list (Score:3)
sure, put it on the list of all the things we can do to prevent global warming.
just be sure to put it at the bottom of the list.
hmm, well, maybe second last.
the last would be - do nothing.
Fix real problems (Score:2)
"What if you could work a bit closer to the root of the problem"
That is not the problem. "Solving" it would not fix the actual problem.
In my younger days I had a roommate who built houses. He would call this "solution" "structural paint".
Already been costed (Score:2)
No force field (Score:2)
Would it be completely physically impossible to place or project some kind of electrical or other field into space that alters the flight paths of photons
Not an electric or magnetic field. Photons are neutral and don't interact with themselves (barring some weird and extremely rare quantum stuff).
Gravitational fields could work if we could manipulate stellar masses at will. If we could do that, we would most likely be busy colonizing galaxies instead of worrying about a planet becoming slightly warmer.
Other than than I can't think of any force field that can affect the flight path of a photon (strong, weak, higgs... ?)
Because photons interact with electrons,
photosynthesis (Score:2)
How would that affect plant life that rely on the sun directly for their energy? Plants also remove some CO2 from the atmosphere, so would this also slow down the consumption that already exists?
Maybe, maybe not. But there are other solutions (Score:2)
Like reducing carbon emissions. Instead of speculating about convoluted schemes we need to tackle carbon emissions because cheap low tech solutions exist.
no that won't "solve" climate change (Score:2)
The impacts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere extends past temperatures; ocean acidification has the potential to devastate the oceans. Also, if atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reach 1000 ppm, have fun being tired and headachey 24/7.
Makes as much sense.. (Score:2)
That makes as much sense as the solution of gathering all the world's robots on a single island and having them all fart at the same time, thus creating a thrust vector moving the Earth farther away from the sun.
Short answer (Score:2)
Can you address global *warming* this way? Yes. Can you address climate *change* and its ecological impacts this way? No, because while you would stop *warming*, it would be at the expense of creating other changes that could be nearly as bad.
There's basically two approaches to carbon-mediated warming that wouldn't change the Earth radically: (1) carbon sequestration and (2) emit less carbon. Of the two, emitting less carbon is less expensive.
just another weapon of mass destruction (Score:2)
sounds like something that could be weaponized. If you could start redirecting photons, think what you can do to other countries.
I have a solution! (Score:2)
Better option, increase cloud cover (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a simpler and cheaper option to reduce insolation: A fleet of unmanned, wind-powered ships that spray a fine mist of seawater into the air. This will "brighten" clouds over the area where the spraying is done, increasing albedo. A group at the University of Washington that is researching this approach says that they estimate that the planet could be cooled by 1C for about $200M per year. The cooling would be somewhat localized so, for example, the US could deploy a fleet of cloud-brightening ships in the Mediterranean and South Atlantic. Cooling that area would reduce the energy available to hurricanes, reducing hurricane frequency and strength, which would more than justify the expense.
A big advantage of this approach is that if it appears to be causing more problems than it solves, you can simply stop spraying. It's only water, and does nothing but create clouds. Stop spraying and cloud cover will quickly dim back to what it would be otherwise.
Note that this variety of geoengineering would be a strictly short-term tool to reduce/slow the impacts of warming while we make long-term, structural changes to our economy and industry to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. There's a risk that this sort of idea could convince people that we don't need to make changes. That's wrong. But it's equally wrong to ignore global warming mitigations like this. We've already emitted so much CO2 that the planet is going to warm substantially even if we were to halt all new emissions overnight -- and clearly it's going to take decades to get to net zero emissions. Some inexpensive tools to mitigate the worst of the damage while we solve the root problem make a great deal of sense.
Re:Done before (Score:4, Funny)