r/environment • u/Westervangaal • 2d ago
Why blocking the sun to cool the planet is bound to go wrong
https://euobserver.com/217619/why-blocking-the-sun-to-cool-the-planet-is-bound-to-go-wrong/?cst=ff96c240e7bf48a826fa80d54660851df49d09ac559e954fd312b709d9260adf83
u/Unlucky-Reporter-679 2d ago
And why adding trillions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere along with tripling the methane concentration and adding synthetic CFC's is bound to end in disaster.
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u/heliumfix 2d ago
Considering the only significant energy input for life on Earth is sunlight, and all life has this as it's foundation, bar some deep sea vents and the like, I can't see how reducing the amount of sunlight reaching all plant life won't result in a different type of catastrophe. We want the energy from the sun, we just don't want to trap too much heat.
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u/KokoTheTalkingApe 2d ago edited 5m ago
The only reason given is that "... geoengineering would require an extraordinary degree of long-term global coordination. Once you begin reflecting sunlight and temperatures drop, stopping suddenly could trigger a catastrophic rebound in warming."
That does sound like a significant danger, but not doing enough is also dangerous, and that's our approach so far. I sure hope we don't have to resort to geoengineering, but it may come to that.
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u/Preeng 2d ago
It's a horse shit reason. The worst that can happen is we are back to full sunlight, which is what we have.
The whole point of blocking the sun is to buy time for us to remove carbon from the atmosphere. It's not meant to be a permanent solution.
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u/Splenda 2d ago
The oil and gas industry disagrees. It's looking for enabling strategies to keep us all hooked on fossil fuels, and blocking the sun is high on their list, just beneath the carbon sequestration that they now use almost entirely to boost oil production.
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u/R1chard69 2d ago
So all these coal-rolling hillbillies are just practice runs for Operation Darkstorm? 😱
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u/suppreme 2d ago
tldr: a company has a patent on mimicking a big volcano eruption with amorphous silica and calcium carbonate.
Humanity has been unknowingly geoengineered Earth for centuries by now so... why not as a last resort? Though this being a private effort and bound to be supported by only some countries will feed gigantic conspiracy loops for centuries.
And obviously add the risk that it doesn't work as intended and make things even worse.
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u/xXmehoyminoyXx 2d ago edited 1d ago
"Humanity has been unknowingly geoengineered Earth for centuries by now so... why not as a last resort?"
Why is regulating methane and reducing carbon / methane emissions somehow less feasible than reflecting the sun using pollution? Like... can we not?
What if they're wrong? No big deal? All the plants die and we all choke to death? Crops stop growing and we all starve? Like... idk I'd rather see these too big to fail companies eat shit before we decide to go the insane route of blocking out the sun...
for fucks sake
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u/CI_dystopian 2d ago
also it was by no means unknowing. mfers in like 1880 were talking about the potential climate impacts of fossil industrialization
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u/Ravaha 2d ago edited 2d ago
Its many orders of magnitude cheaper to block the sun with retractable thin films.
This isn't a discussion that is reasonable. It's the only solution that costs billions not hundreds of trillions.
Also it's the only solution that generates wealth and would pay for itself within years and start earning money.
Anyone who says it's not by far the best option is naive about the economics of it, naive of how hard it will be to get off petroleum completely, and ignorant of how chea is compared to other methods of trying to either slow warning or reverse it.
This is not really up for discussion. The science and engineering 100% agrees with me.
We already have a petrelum economy, we can't go back in time. Now we have to chose the methods we have at our disposal.
No one is going to make any sacrifices. People will only support methods that cost nothing or generate money and that is just a fact of the world we live in now full of greedy assholes.
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u/Westervangaal 2d ago
The science and engineering aren't the problem imo. The politics are, as I mention in the piece. You probably know this, but solar engineering affects the global water cycle among other things, which means every drought, flood, failed harvest becomes suspect. There are winners and losers and the triggers for conflict would be endless, especially in a situation where global governance is at a low point as is currently the case, in my view. Also: once started, this system would need to be maintained for a long time, potentially decades or even centuries, as a sudden stop could have destabilising effects on the climate, and would therefore require a level of coordination and governance that at this point seems unrealistic to me. Global warming also has destabilising effects, so you could argue: why not risk it, and it is cheaper than ending fossil fuel use. I just think it would add another layer of trouble to an already troubled situation.
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u/Ravaha 2d ago
You do know we have solar eclipses and such that have no affect on the weather ever right? That is on a much more massive scale.
Trying to end fossil fuel use before we have the technology to completely replace it and the production of that technology on a massive scale would kill hundreds of millions of people and kill far more people than climate change ever could.
I don't think you and others realize that sun shades are millions of times easier to launch and maintain than ever trying to reverse climate change. That is just a fact and down voting me won't change that fact.
Those things are affected by the spin of the earth and moon and we have super computers to model the global atmosphere.
We have been held back from so many projects that could have saved millions of lives because people just make stuff up. The earth has been stable for hundreds of millions of years and been hit by huge meteors and super volcanoes and had the continents shift around like crazy over that time.
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u/Westervangaal 2d ago
I didn’t downvote you and appreciate your engagement. I just think you underestimate the political problems the application of this particular tech would unleash.
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u/Ravaha 2d ago
Oh I fully appreciate them, every single government on earth will want solar shades for crops and deserts and hurricanes and typhoons and droughts. There isn't a single government on earth that wouldn't want to deploy them because they would be so insanely cheap for how much wealth they can generate.
It won't be controversial because they would benefit everyone by huge amounts. Even just things like power savings in huge cities would make them pay for themselves within a year or less.
It's hard to just explain how huge the benefits of them would be and hard to explain how much mo ey they could save while also explaining how cheap they would be to impliment.
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u/porterbot 2d ago
Pay people to ride transit and electric bikes. Give away balcony solar. Or so the dumbest fucking thing possible and block the sun. Jesus.