31–40 of 125 posts
"If your solution closely follows the story line of the Simpsons, perhaps reconsider" – The Simpson Solution Axiom
"Thus solving the problem once and for all." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW66EX75jIY
Dimming the sun is like the alcoholic proudly proclaiming they'll be eating salads for lunch. It ain't solving the actual problem.
I'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.
Are 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 ea…
> 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.
It'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 envir…
The sky belongs to everyone. Hard to get sign off from everyone on making a change to it.
I'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.
It is 30x higher both in time and cost to capture carbon. At $20B/yr geoengineering the atmosphere can be done for 50+ yrs. In 50yrs, carbon capture would need $30T vs only $1T for spraying sulfur. Carbon capture as a long-term solution doesn't make sense. Also, how much carbon you can capture in 50yrs? At 10% of annual emissions, you can probably reach 30% by the end of 50yrs. Carbon capture is still leaving 70% carbon in the environment. It's a make believe solution build to give us false sense of action for saving climate.
"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
It'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 envir…
> Why are so many people (especially environmentalists and climate scientists) so opposed to this solution? Because it's just kicking the can down the road. This will cost Trillions which you might as well invest in a transition to clean energy now because you have to do it eventually anyway. If the impact of climate chains looks like it's posing a risk to us as a species then perhaps blocking the sun temporarily is…