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The likelihood of unilateral solar geoengineering
- hargup 3y agoThe simpler solution is build a damn lot of solar on Earth and use the energy to suck CO2 out of atmosphere. I did the calculations, it was something like the area of UAE equivalent solar to have enough energy to suck ALL CO2 from the atmosphere.
- hargup 3y agoWith floating solar farms in the sea, you also don’t need a lot of land and can avoid all of regulatory overhead.
- steve_g 3y agoTermination Shock by Neal Stephenson
- HideousKojima 3y agoOr the film Snowpiercer (based on a French graphic novel).
- jboulanger2 3y agoLet's hope these technocrat degenerates never come to that.
- notpachet 3y ago"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." - Morpheus, The Matrix
- jpeter 3y agoBut 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.
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- jadayesnaamsi 3y agoPlot Twist: - AI is not smart enough to take over humanity. - But by playing god with geoengineering by having rain packed with sulfur on our crops, we are facing The Blight, like in Interstellar.
- johnea 3y agoYou know what they say: Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity...
- daeros 3y agoThe matrix was Fiction, Neo. This war on a warming planet, we're not winning it fast enough. I support the move.
- jaredklewis 3y agoI love everything about The Matrix, except that the core premise makes no sense. Humans are not an energy source; at best we (very inefficiently) transform energy from one form to another. If we “scorched the sky,” humans would be at least as screwed as the robots, unless we’re getting all our energy (and tons more since we’d have to move all agriculture indoors) from nuclear or such, but in that case, what on earth would the robots need us for? Wouldn’t they just start running nuclear plants? Seems a lot simpler than running the matrix. Feels like such a sloppy plot hole for an otherwise brilliantly entertaining film.
- justinator 3y agoDimming the sun is like the alcoholic proudly proclaiming they'll be eating salads for lunch. It ain't solving the actual problem.
- incrudible 3y agoEven disregarding climate change, we are way past the point where 8 billion people can survive without modern industry. The same will be true for geoengineering in the long term. Remember, we are still in an ice age.
- justinator 3y agoMaybe it's time we all take a personal inventory of our own practices and how they impact the survival of our species, the planet's entire biosphere, before the next generation asks us, "why did you not change yourself to stop this?"
- analognoise 3y agoWe’d easily choose all out war to keep our kids comfortable long before we’d all choose to lead smaller lives. We’re not going to hold hands and sing while we all pedal bicycles and live in highly dense housing - we’ll give the army flamethrowers and they’ll keep out the wave of “climate refugees” until we’re fully out of anything we can make napalm out of.
- justinator 3y agoI pedal a bicycle. I live in highly dense housing. Maybe you should also do what I do: meditate on just why exactly one turns into such a fatalist.
- imzadi 3y agoYou can't force people to care. That's the whole problem. Everyone thinks their contribution isn't the tipping point and someone else could make a bigger impact. People won't significantly change their habits unless they are forced to.
- deadbabe 3y agoDoesn’t Elon Musk have the means and the cult like following to do this unimpeded?
- justinator 3y ago"If your solution closely follows the story line of the Simpsons, perhaps reconsider" – The Simpson Solution Axiom
- a_e_k 3y ago"Since the beginning of time, Man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing: block it out!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LbxDZRgA4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LbxDZRgA4
- TruthWillHurt 3y agoI was reminded of Futurama actually :) "Thus solving the problem once and for all." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW66EX75jIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW66EX75jIY
- bmmayer1 3y agoIt's amazing that this solution has not been considered more openly and widely until now. It's cheaper, more effective, and doesn't require draconian regulations or near-impossible expectations on human behavior. It's also something that could be tested for a year. It's not irreversible. It would allow the undeveloped world a chance to achieve a piece of the global wealth pie. Why are so many people (especially environmentalists and climate scientists) so opposed to this solution?
- alanbernstein 3y agoBecause warming is just one symptom of the core problem, which is pollution.
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- sgu999 3y agoThe core problem is even worse, it's our inability to live in a closed system.
- pokstad 3y agoThe sky belongs to everyone. Hard to get sign off from everyone on making a change to it.
- landhar 3y agoYou’re right.. and yet I don’t believe everyone got to vote on whether we should burn all those fossil fuels in the first place.
- imiric 3y agoSince when has that stopped companies and countries acting in their own best interests? SpaceX has launched thousands of satellites, and plans to launch many thousands more, polluting sky and space observation for everyone on Earth. This happened relatively quickly, and doesn't require approval from every country, unless they intend to offer service there. Similarly, it's not far-fetched to imagine a scenario where a "benevolent" billionaire, as the article puts it, or a single country, could decide that SRM is a good idea, and just go with it. Countries still pump excessive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, and historically can't align on a single policy. Why would something like SRM be handled differently?
- slimsag 3y agoAre there ways this could be done with rapidly biodegradable materials, such that e.g. it would need to be continually done year after year or else the sky would return to the exact same state it was in before? Also, living in Arizona with 120F/49C summers, I sure wish someone could come up with some geography-wide sunshade! I guess that will need to be after they stop growing the city forever, and stop paving the earth of my state with black asphalt and concrete, and stop giving all our groundwater to lettuce and alfalfa farming to be sent out of the state or country entirely.
- incrudible 3y agoNot sure if you consider sulphur biodegradable, but it will need to be done continually, or else the effect will disappear.
- kraftman 3y agoIt says in the article it only lasts a year, so its an adjustable stop-gap.
- mortenjorck 3y agoThis is covered in the article, and comes with its own trade-offs: > Sulfur disappears from the atmosphere quickly - it rains out after about a year. This means that once we’ve started SRM, it’s dangerous to suddenly stop. We need to keep spraying particles, all the time. If we suddenly stopped, the warming would spring back rapidly, causing a bad temperature shock. The correct way to stop is a gradual phase out.
- slimsag 3y agoThank you for quoting it! For some reason the link won't load for me yet.
- Xirgil 3y agoSulphates have a cooling effect and drop out of the atmosphere. There was recently a push to remove the sulphate content in the fuel used for cargo ships from 3.5% to 0.5%, and as the sulphates dropped out of the upper atmosphere the water in the Atlantic warmed significantly. Turns out we had been unintentionally doing geoengineering that was counteracting some of the affects of climate change. The downside is that sulphates are deleterious to human health, causing asthma. It's possible a sufficiently motivated billionaire or even a somewhat wealthy millionaire could independently finance a project to inject sulphates into the upper atmosphere in international waters and have a measurable impact on global warming, although people with respiratory issues might not be too happy.
- unholyguy001 3y agoThis was the plot of Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson
- michaelbarton 3y agoGlad you brought this up. The CO2 doesn't go away with geoengineering. It's still being pumped into the atmosphere and will dramatically warm the planet in a much shorter time period if the geoengineering stops
- brink 3y agoWhether or not you believe in climate-change, the interesting discussion to me is that climate change is a convenient justification for power-grabs by wannabe dictators. I'm not so sure that the elite will be so ready to give up that lever of control by simply tinting the sky. We'll see, I guess.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoEvery threat to the status quo is either a convenient justification for such, or a conspiracy theory that a power grab will happen. Is not "tinting the sky" a power grab in itself? And a pretty darn serious one at that.
- Lonestar1440 3y agoI'm continually surprised that this idea gets so much traction. While possible to build, it's also strictly Temporary and just leaves us with a worse problem later on. We'll just need a bigger one, 20 years down the line, when CO2 levels keep going up! At some point, it's pretty obviously a non-solution. Let's put this energy into Nuclear Power and CO2 recapture; and actually fix things.
- midasuni 3y agoNuclear power is not affordable, wind and solar are far more cost effective. Carbon capture is a great application for a variable supply grid as it can easily be load shed.
- colechristensen 3y agoThe growth of renewables, particularly solar, is on pace to replace a pretty large proportion of fossil fuels "for free" by being more economically viable. Transitioning most people and industry from ICE to electric and things like heating to more electric is going to happen naturally, but it'll take a few decades. Likewise it's reasonable to believe the biosphere is going to ramp up carbon sinking as time goes by. A stopgap of dimming the sun with sulfur for... eh... 20 years might just be the ticket.
- TremendousJudge 3y ago> is on pace to replace a pretty large proportion of fossil fuels Is it? According to ourwoldindata[0], fossil fuel usage is growing worldwide. ie more fossil fuels are being burned now than ever before. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-fossil-fuel-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-fossil-fuel-consum...
- gwill 3y agowell written. terrifying but practical. hopefully calcium carbonate experimentation gets underway so we can learn about its effects.
- m3kw9 3y agoWe are already messing around Mother Nature with all the fuel burning and now you are double shafting it, what could go wrong?
- colechristensen 3y agoI wonder if simply tainting the fuel of airliners with sulfur would be good enough for a meaningful effect. A half a percent in the global jet fuel supply would put that order of sulfur into the atmosphere, a bit lower than what I think is being proposed here. But adulterating the fuel supply would be affordable and equivalent to a smallish tax on flight.
- clintfred 3y agoThis is a really interesting idea to me, honestly. Someone would have to do some modeling, but I'm guessing that amount being emitted would be low enough to not dramatically cool the Northern Hemisphere (where most of the air traffic is) and messing up some weather patterns. The author stresses several times in TFA that sulfur emissions should be done at the equator to have an equal, global effect.
- synthc 3y agoactual chemtrails, the conspiracy theorists will love it!
- TruthWillHurt 3y agoYou'll get in trouble with Big Solar for disrupting their production!
- _boffin_ 3y agoDid some people start reading Neil's book, Termination Shock?
- daeros 3y agoAre we seriously using fiction to argue against doing things in reality?
- antisthenes 3y agoThus solving the problem once and for all!
- tamaharbor 3y agoWhat could possibli go wrong?
- NotYourLawyer 3y agoGood. I mean, not good good. But better than the alternative.
- dang 3y agoThis title is breaking HN's guidelines by being linkbait. ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) Can anyone suggest a less baity title? I looked through the text trying to find an accurate, neutral, representative phrase and couldn't find one. That's unusual and probably a bad sign.
- quadcore 3y agoThat's unusual and probably a bad sign. It's a bad, bad sign I agree. That said Id propose "someone may decide to pour sulphur in the stratosphere"
- justinator 3y agoStill link bait-y and but infinitely better. You have my vote!
- throwaway290 3y ago"On the likelihood of unilateral solar geoengineering"? The article itself edges on mongering to be fair.
- dang 3y agoOk, let's try that. Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions!
- dkarras 3y agoI don't think it is baity? Just creative and interesting. Meshes perfectly with its content too, as the main argument of the article is that someone is going to do it without any general consensus as it is possible to do with some billionaire or small nation level cash.
- justinclift 3y agoMaybe: Solar Radiation Management (SRM) as a temporary climate change solution
- mipsi 3y agoIn terms of Murphy: "If there is a wrong way to do something, then someone will do it."
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoWould this process work the same way climate change is warming? Because climate change, while on average increasing the global temperature by 1.5C, has pretty big variations in actual temperature decrease by region. It's important if you use sulfur to decrease the temperature that this decrease counteracts regional temperature increases and not just average global temperature.
- kraftman 3y agoIt says in the article that it would need to be carefully done to have an even impact.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoAs I wrote, climate change is not even. Do we even have the theoretical basis for knowing how to do this so as to counteract regional climate change?
- jhwhite 3y agoI feel this article was basically daring Elon to do it.
- philipkglass 3y agoThe long term fixes for excess atmospheric CO2 are (IMO): - Using energy more efficiently (e.g. insulating homes better instead of burning more fuel in the winter) - Electrifying as many energy demands as possible (heating, ground transportation, materials production, chemical synthesis) - Replacing fossil-powered electricity generation with low emissions sources: solar, nuclear, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, tidal - Accelerated silicate weathering for carbon dioxide removal (basically, crushing a lot of alkaline mafic rocks so they react faster to neutralize CO2 that's already in the atmosphere and the oceans) The IPCC proposes carbon dioxide removal too, calling for "net negative emissions" to neutralize CO2 that has already been emitted [1], except they give examples of afforestation, reforestation, and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage as removal techniques. (I personally think that those are poorly scalable and will not make much headway compared to silicate weathering, but I'd be happy to be wrong.) What about the transitional time before we get to "the long term?" The majority of global electricity still comes from fossil fuels. Most road vehicles sold today burn fossil fuels. Even after we reach the tipping point where most vehicles are electric, the old ones may continue to operate for decades. In the meantime, CO2 that has already been emitted is trapping more energy from sunlight and raising temperatures. Once temperatures go up enough, there are bad feedback loops where e.g. tundra thaws, microorganisms start releasing the previously frozen carbon compounds, and we get vast new emissions from thawing regions even as direct human emissions fall. In other regions, temperate forests may dry out, burn, and transition to different biomes with lower carbon sequestration capacity. That's why I think that solar radiation management will be needed. It can break the feedback loops where higher temperatures denude forests and release vast quantities of soil carbon. It doesn't directly reduce emissions or draw down atmospheric CO2, but it keeps temperatures down so there's time for the energy transition and CDR techniques to stabilize and reverse the atmospheric CO2 excess. A world with 550 PPM of atmospheric CO2 is bad, but a colder world with 550 PPM can be stabilized while a warmer world at 550 is going to keep going up even if anthropogenic emissions are slashed. [1] "What are Carbon Dioxide Removal and Negative Emissions?" https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/faq/faq-chapter-4/ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/faq/faq-chapter-4/
- clintfred 3y agoAnd somehow, in the US at least, we don't even have broad agreement that climate change is real, happening, and will dramatically adversely affect humans for centuries to come. Anyone have any good resources or techniques for having honest discussions with friends and family that simply refuse to believe a problem even exists? Real solutions will only come once we admit there's a problem.
- nvm0n2 3y ago[dead]
- PaulKeeble 3y agoVarious small organisations are already doing a number of geoengineering projects on the ocean and various other biomes/habitats. Its simply a matter of time and there is currently no framework to stop it happening, anyone with the funding can just do this and break no laws. If it all goes wrong due to unforeseen consequences we all suffer. Just like climate change really, people on the other side of the planet are causing harm to everyone and refuse to stop.
- choeger 3y agoSulfur is probably not the best agent to do it, but we know that it works from the unintentional ship fuel experiment. In any case, if 2023 wasn't an exception, I'd rather have someone start a program this year. It can always be stopped or scaled down. And I am confident that renewable energy, electrification, and battery deployment will continue unabated anyways.
- ericfrazier 3y agoWe would rather block the sun than reduce the military industrial complex by 10%, the world's largest polluter.
- tzs 3y agoWhat wavelengths of light would be reflected? My understanding is that the way greenhouse gas induced warming works is that we have incoming solar radiation over a broad range of wavelengths. Some of that ends up being absorbed by various things on the surface which heats them which causes them reradiate some of that absorbed energy as infrared. Greenhouse gases absorb infrared, and so some of that reradiated energy that would have been radiated back into space gets trapped by those gases. From a purely reducing warming perspective then it probably wouldn't matter much what wavelengths you are reflecting. Any light you stop from getting absorbed and turned into heat below would help. But incoming radiation often does useful things before or instead of getting turned into reradiated infrared. For example it may be used by plants for photosynthesis. It would seem then that if reflecting light in the stratosphere to reduce warming you'd want to try to avoid deflecting wavelengths that are important for photosynthesis or other useful things. You'd want to pick wavelengths that don't do much other than just end up getting absorbed at the surface. Does sulphur do this?
- legitster 3y agoThe idea that a billionaire is just going to yeet a program together is pretty far fetched. Even at "only" $20 billion dollars a year, there are less than a dozen billionaires in the world with that kind of free capital. And none of them could sustain that kind of spend for more than 1-2 years. The "country of no choice" similarly applies to only a small handful of countries that have no decent way of mitigating climate change but also have the funds and resources to do SRM. So really, just China (which has already shown enthusiasm towards geoengineering) or India. The primary human response is still going to be crop adaptation and mass economic migration. I think we are going to have to see a lot more of this before we see someone dim the sun.
- EricE 3y agoBehold, the great filter
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago> and (more practically) high-altitude balloons filled with sulfur and hydrogen/helium. Helium's a bad thing to fill with because it's a limited resource. Hydrogen is bad because it's a sink for greenhouse gas eliminating hydroxyl. https://e360.yale.edu/features/natural-geologic-hydrogen-climate-change https://e360.yale.edu/features/natural-geologic-hydrogen-cli... : For instance, some of the hydrogen released will react with the atmospheric compound hydroxyl, creating ozone, which in the lower atmosphere is a greenhouse gas. And by using up hydroxyl, which is the atmosphere’s main cleansing agent, hydrogen will leave less of the organic compound available to break down methane and other greenhouse gases, resulting in those gases lasting longer in the atmosphere and causing additional warming.
- thefz 3y ago> #2 - Billionaires are getting interested Yeah! So that they can keep on destroying the planet for profit.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoThis story about urban albedo interested me earlier [0]. Painting roofs and roads white, and simply having more green parks instead of paved areas would actually make a difference. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39356361 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39356361
- kilotaras 3y agoUrban area is around half percent of earth area (2 mln km2 vs 510). Improving albedo there may have some local effect, but unlikely to contribute significantly to climate change mitigation.
- phreeza 3y agoSolar irradiation is around 1000 W/m2, and greenhouse gas forcing is about 2.5 W/m2, so it's not that outlandish.
- ArekDymalski 3y agoWhat a horrible idea. Equivalent of kicking out your ill child with a fever into the frosty night to "cool down" or ordering a diet coke to fast food meal.
- karaterobot 3y agoI've been fascinated by marine cloud brightening, a related technology. I'd love to see that explored first, as it seems cheaper and lower impact. Still, if it was a choice between pretending that we're going to effectively mitigate climate change at this point without geoengineering, and darkening the sun, I'd say darken the sun.
- hackeraccount 3y agoI think I read somewhere the CO2 absorbed by ocean causes acidification which the ecosystem needs a bit of adjustment to live with. I don't think the a sun shade would do anything for that. That said the Simpson's quotes in this thread are making laugh enough that I'm starting to get onboard with this plan whatever my initial doubts.
- snapplebobapple 3y agoIts not fair that you guys keep changing the funny titles after i come up with a zinger for them.atleast give me a day or two to make my dimsum jokes before you make it serious again,....
- trevithick 3y agoProbably too late with this comment, but from today's WSJ: "Scientists Resort to Once-Unthinkable Solutions to Cool the Planet" Lends some support to the author's thesis. A little unsettling that the reflective SRM material in the WSJ article isn't sulfur (apparently) but something proprietary of undisclosed composition. https://www.wsj.com/science/environment/geoengineering-projects-cool-planet-weather-f0619bf7 https://www.wsj.com/science/environment/geoengineering-proje...
- not_your_mentat 3y agoHave we thought about impact on plant life? Like wheat? Seems like a bit of a problem for a solution like this. One might say that plant life literally evolved for the solar conditions we currently have.