this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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[–] Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (10 children)

However, there are quasi-stable positions slightly sunward of L1 where you can balance these instabilities and actually use the solar sail effect for station keeping in a swarm. It would require launching a lot of rockets, but is entirely doable with today’s technology.

Not a scientist, but I'm still fascinated by this stuff.

The cost of that is going to be the big issue. No government is going to want to pay for routine shipments of fuel and parts to L1, which is expensive as hell. And I wouldn't bet on international cooperation being a thing either. Each country is going to be too busy fighting over food and water, and keeping migration at bay.

Completely guessing here, it would probably be cheaper to raise the albedo of the planet through various means. Maybe including massive scale cloud seeding over the oceans. At least it's on planet and therefore hypothetically can be done with minimal fossil fuel use. How to do that without fucking up the environment with chemicals for cloud nuclei is the hard part.

That, or intentionally inducing a light nuclear winter, ideally without the nuclear part. With enough particulates in the upper atmosphere, it would do the job. The tricky part is doing that without overdoing it. This is the dumb version, but it's personally how I see things going. Especially because this is something a lone country could probably do on its own. China doesn't want to deal with all the effects of climate change? They may light up a bunch of islands in the Pacific with nukes to "solve" it.

Another dumb option that might arise, a country intentionally trying to start another global pandemic to reduce emissions. Emissions dropped dlike a rock with COVID, and a lot of countries have the ability to produce bioweapons.

There are myriad of dumb, harmful, cheap ways that individual countries could use to curb climate change. The next few decades are going to be dangerous as hell.

[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Engagement, huzzah! Okay, the funding issue is an issue. Ironically, it requires companies like SpaceX (or their competition as they come online) to get the launch prices down. It's doable though. Back of envelope: The largest solar sail launched so far has been a paltry 14x14m, if my memory serves correctly. In order to reduce the incoming sunlight by 0.1%, you would need something like 60x1000 km of solar sails. Assuming you can make them 1 sq km each, you're looking at 60k solar sails. But they can be very very lightweight. Wikipedia proposes 0.02 g/m2 as a lower limit... let's use 0.05 g/m2 so we have some leeway and don't need exotic materials. Thus a 1km2 solar sail would weigh only 50kg (of sail material). Add another 200kg for some tensile frame and some control electronics and you're looking at something like a Starlink mass to get 1km2. Sure you'd need 60k of these things, but launching Starlink swarms that size is doable (to LEO -- you'd need a bigger rocket than the F9 for L1). Let's suppose Starship (or similar) is launching them in batches of 60 for $10M/launch... That's 1000 launches. Currently SpaceX is launching about every three days, so assuming Starship is online and capable, that would be three years of launches at the same rate as Starlink (but with a bigger rocket) and ten billion dollars. Okay, even if costs go up by an order of magnitude, we can do this, now, today, for about the cost of purchasing twitter. Musk really fucked up didn't he ;)

Okay, that's a lot of methane to launch the rockets. Back of the envelope, assuming one launch uses ~300t of methane. The per capita use of natural gas (globally) is about 50 cubic feet per person per day. A cubic foot of natural gas is about 35 grams, so the per capita usage in mass is about 1750g/day/person. So a single rocket launch uses about the same amount of natural gas 171,428 people would for one day. It's actually very small, comparatively. Even if I got my estimates wrong by two orders of magnitude (on total number of launches), it's still very small compared to the total amount of gas burned globally every day.

Okay, other options: we put the solar sails in a very high earth orbit (above the comms satellites) -- doable, but you'll require many many more of them as they won't site between the Earth and the Sun during most of their orbit. LEO would cause problems with collisions with comms satellites. You can't put them very low due to atmospheric drag. Plus, the closer they are, the more likely they are to create where little eclipses as their shadows pass by. L1 really is probably the best option.

Blimps flying around could do it. But you'd need like 60k blimps flying around in the upper atmosphere and each blimp would have to be an engineering marvel to get to that size. Probably not doable.

There's cloud seeding, as you suggest. But that becomes a political hot potato (blimps would too) due to where the clouds are created. What if China seeded some clouds which cause a torrential rainfall and flooding in Mexico as the atmospheric currents move those clouds. Etc.

A light nuclear winter sounds like a disaster -- what do we do, nuke a few volcanoes to set them off prematurely? That doesn't sound sustainable. Burn all the forests to release ash? Nope, that's our carbon sink that's burning...

Ironically, raising our albedo might be a decent local option -- just mandate white roofs everywhere. Just under 3% of our surface is urban and white roofs would also help with the urban heat island issue. You can probably paint 0.2% of the surface white. Not as good as blocking sunlight, but useful. The bad part is, solar panels are all dark, and moving to solar decreases our albedo. So maybe this will just offset changes in our average albedo due to solar panels.

Your last option reminds me of: Kill all the poor!

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

There’s cloud seeding … What if China seeded some clouds which cause a torrential rainfall and flooding in Mexico

Or the exact opposite: what if China is successful? Cloud seeding doesn’t change the amount of moisture in the air, only where it falls. If you do succeed in getting it to fall prematurely, that means it’s not going to fall where it would otherwise have.

Any earthbound intervention is likely to be similar: even if you’re successful in modifying local weather, you’ve also modified someone else’s weather, and likely not for the better

Humans have gone to war for less

[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 weeks ago

Right -- cause rain to fall here, cause a drought elsewhere. Etc. Could probably be weaponised if clever about it.

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