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A Sunshade In Space To Combat Global Warming
ultracool writes, "While the only permanent solution for human-driven global warming is developing renewable energy, a temporary hack to counteract possible abrupt climate change is to build a giant sunshade in space. The sunshade would be launched in small pieces by electromagnetic launchers, conventional chemical rockets being far too expensive. The sunshade could be developed and deployed in 25 years, would last about 50 years, and would reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by 2% — enough to balance heating due to a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." From the article: "The [trillions of] spacecraft would form a long, cylindrical cloud with a diameter about half that of Earth, and about 10 times longer... Sunlight passing through the 60,000-mile length of the cloud, pointing lengthwise between the Earth and the sun [at L-1], would be diverted away from our planet... The sunshade could be deployed by a total 20 electromagnetic launchers [collectively] launching a stack of [a million] fliers every 5 minutes for 10 years."
I wonder what else this would stuff up? Less light for photosynthesis for example.
We could just cut down on our insane energy usage/wastage.
But hey, that would involve personal effort and we can't have that, can we.
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The trouble is with things like that are the unintended consequences that it'll undoubtedly have. The real fix is that we start living sustainably. The sunshade won't fix problems such as that which will be caused because we're using 4 barrels of oil for every new one discovered.
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I agree. One problem is called global dimming, and means that our earlier pollutants (such as soot) have been reflecting sunlight out of the atmosphere and thus hiding the effect of the greenhouse gases. When we move to cleaner energy systems (not in terms of CO2, but other light-reflecting pollutants) the hidden effects due to global dimming might accelerate global warming faster than our current CO2 emissions can account for.
Another factor is the sea. The sea is currently acting like a buffer solution, taking up a certain amount of the emitted CO2. This may not last forever. And besides, the effect the more and more acidic oceans has on the seaborne species are still mostly unknown. One should worry, since the oceans are the primary supplier of oxygen on this planet (as opposed to the Amazon rainforest that some people think) and a critically important source of food.
"...It's like making a complex solution to a simple problem ..."
The weather system of the planet is about as far from "simple" as you can get. We have no clue about how the ecosystem of our world actually works. All this rancor about the "problem" of global warming and possible "solutions" are built upon an alter of such vast ignorance that I often find the discussion and "debate" of the topic to be the epitome of absurdity. The one prevailing predicate of almost every discourse about global warning and/or global climate change, is an unspoken implication that we (the human race) understand how the environment we live in works. WE DO NOT. And there exists a vast amount of historical evidence demonstrating that very notion.So the proposal of building a "shade" system for the planet to "cool it down" is so laughable due to the vast amount of hubris required to give it any consideration at all.
Perhaps we should work first on understanding the problem before coming up with solutions. Yeah, that means that the "I said it first" mentality will be hamstrung, but that, in my opinion, would be a good thing.
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