TL;DR: viable last-ditch option would resemble Highlander 2 in terms of putting one corporation in charge of “protecting” the planet.
Okay, so I was keeping the idea of using deliberate “global dimming” in my back-pocket just so it wouldn’t worm it’s way through the zeitgeist. It’s a viable last-ditch option, but it comes with steep drawbacks. But since we’re here now, fuck it.
We already know that, thanks to requiring shipping vessels to use low-sulfur fuel, cloud seeding can actually reduce solar gain. The problem is that it also blocks out a lot of the light needed for photosynthesis. So this approach punches down on the environment in a completely different way. As for people, while global warming will absolutely impact agriculture, so would less sunlight.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/
So we could just use airplanes and cloud-seeding. Or we could increase particulates in the atmosphere. Or, as Elon suggests, fly satellites to do the job. The tradeoffs here are awful: disrupt where rain happens, raise lung cancer risks globally, or catapult one man into multi-trilliionaire status while they charge every government on earth for the privilege. Plus, each of those options are more or less forever if we never get around to carbon sequestration that actually works.
We should seriously considering doing anything else first.
Edit: I know I didn’t invent this idea. Rather, I just didn’t want to add to any consensus around it.
Plus, each of those options are more or less forever if we never get around to carbon sequestration that actually works.
Obligatory reminder that the easiest by far way of sequestering carbon is to simply not extract it from the ground in the first place.
That’s such an unhelpful statement. Idk what made you think it’s obligatory. Everyone is talking about ACTIVE SEQUESTRATION. Further extraction of more carbon from current natural sequestration is undoing what already has been done. We need to create ways to artificially sequester the carbon while ALSO limiting emissions.
I think there’s more than 40% of the people on earth, at least in most major western country, that need to hear that statement. How about you calm down when talking to people trying to help.
This is it. Active sequestration is at best a small part of the solution, at worst a dangerous tangent that will grab investments and energy that should go to reduction, restoration and preservation efforts.
Trees sequester carbon. Trees work.
I got curious and will attempt some math and duckduckgoing.
A forest can remove between 4.5 and 40.7 tons of Carbon Dioxide per year per hectare during the first 20 years of tree growth. Sauce
Humanity is currently generating around 40 billion tons of CO2 per year. SauceSo now some simple math: it would take between 1 billion and 10 billion hectares of forests, depending on their maturity, to keep up. 100 hectare = 1 km2 sauce, so this means 10 to 100 million km2 of forests.
Earth’s total surface area is 510 million km2. sauce.
Of that, here’s a quick breakdown:
So 10ish percent of the 510 million km2 of land on earth, or around 5.1 million km2 is a good candidate for tree planting. That’s not enough if we want to sequester all the carbon produced by humanity. Without getting to net zero global warming will continue. The best we can do is slow it down. More disconcertingly, our appetite for energy is only increasing. The good news is that we’re really starting to see large scale wind and farm operations ramping up, but there are still a lot of power plants scheduled to come online in the next two decades.
yeah, sure, but have any of the other carbon sequestration technologies proven more efficient while being equally scalable?
Technologies? No. But the oceans are 42x better at sequestering carbon than the surface, and there are some pretty interesting ideas around promoting phytoplankton blooms and kicking the ocean currents up, that sort of thing.
But trees are rad. We should absolutely have more of them. Besides, they’re proven, as you noted.
But really, humans have to stop emitting as much CO2eq. That’s it. There is no magic sciencey solution.
For a starts, we need to shut down all coal mines and power factories, stop oil, reduce animal exploitation as much as possible, stop fast fashion and reduce AI to scientific uses.
Nothing here is new or controversial, it’s just a bit boring, difficult, and goes against massive entrenched interests. That’s the hard part.
But any approach that is banking on technological breakthroughs maybe helping us capture all the CO2 (and methane, and nitrous oxide, and…) is inane.
I think there’s argument about whether or not even that’s enough.
Yes, that’s the minimum :)
Once more for the people in the back:
=>AI only for science.<=
Slop isn’t adding ANY value to life on earth.
Get rid of it.
AI is not all GenAI and LLMs, I hope you know.
Oh, I wasn’t trying to say trees can’t help. I was only saying that we also need to go on a massive carbon diet.
Emphasis on “tiny” adjustments, per the article. I don’t think Elmo comprehends just how much surface area is going to be required to make any measurable let alone meaningful impact, nor the cost of hefting all of that mass up there and keeping it there.
This whole crackhead idea is completely infeasible. But he probably hopes it’ll help him scam the government out of a bunch of money trying (and failing), while wasting vast amounts of rocket fuel.
Usually when people talk about this kind of thing, they suggest making a sun shade and delivering it to the Lagrange point between the earth and sun. It certainly feels more reasonable to do it that way. But I wonder which method really is more feasible. (Obviously both methods aren’t realistic right now)
Well, two things about that.
One, the L1 Lagrange point between the Earth and Sun is further out than the orbit of the moon. Even without doing any math, just a cursory observation of how shadows work will illustrate that, given that the moon itself can just barely cover the disc of the sun from where it is, any such object placed there would need to have a diameter larger than that of the moon in order to completely block the sun’s light. Or some appreciable and nontrivial fraction of the diameter of the moon if you only want to block part of the sun’s light. Lofting something that massive up there and more importantly keeping it there given that it’d also be well within the gravitational influence of the moon would be quite the challenge. (“Quite the challenge,” by the way, is rocket scientist talk for, “This is complete science fiction, and whoever suggested it is insane.”)
Point two is that the Deep Space Climate Observatory is currently already parked there.
any such object placed there would need to have a diameter larger than that of the moon
Well that’s kind of my point, that’s still a lot smaller than what Elon is suggesting. Elon suggested a sphere with a diameter larger than the earth, if the alternative is a disk larger than the moon, well that actually seems like a much better deal. Also, assuming a disk and a sphere have an equal diameter, the sphere has 4 times the surface area, so that’s not a trivial difference.
Lofting something that massive up there and more importantly keeping it there given that it’d also be well within the gravitational influence of the moon would be quite the challenge.
That’s interesting. Yeah that could be a challenge. Given the size of the thing, it seems like the obvious thing would be to utilize solar wind for maneuvering, as it’s already essentially a solar sail.
The Japanese space agency tested a solar sail in orbit with a novel steering system, rather than changing shape, it used something much like LCD cells to shutter individual quadrants of the sail. Something like that could potentially work.
Point two is that the Deep Space Climate Observatory is currently already parked there.
Yeah, that’s a good point. Although if you were actually building something this big out there, you would probably build in some capacity for probes to dock to it. This is a huge installation after all, a facility more than a probe. Or just add on a module that duplicates the capabilities of the deep space climate observatory. I mean once you’re constructing something this massive, that additional cost has gotta be a drop in the bucket, right?
You wouldn’t be blocking all of the suns light. That’d kill us. Blocking 2% would be a noticeable “fix”. It’s been a thought out on paper project for decades. It’s “possible” in the strictest sense, but would take something (or many smaller somethings) the size of most of South America to do. It would take thousands of launches to a destination around 800,000 miles away, and then it would also all have to be able to adjust for orbital changes because the lagrange point isn’t a stable orbit.
We just need another massive once a millennium volcano eruption. Throw the world into chaos and starve half the population to death while the earth is half covered in atmospheric ash for a year. The slow Thanos snap.
the lagrange point isn’t a stable orbit.
That’s totally true, but to be fair, it’s still more stable and requires less maneuvering than low earth orbit. So if we’re comparing the two orbits…
We just need another massive once a millennium volcano eruption. Throw the world into chaos and starve half the population to death while the earth is half covered in atmospheric ash for a year. The slow Thanos snap.
I gotta be honest, that sounds like a less-than-optimal solution. But I like that you’re thinking outside the box!
Lol. Thanks.
Low earth orbit is consistently unsstable but the drag and gravity is pretty consistent so you’re guaranteed to have to consistently adjust away from earth and speed up, or go the starlink route and just plan on launching a satellite replacement every 5 years(they do still have thrusters and adjust to stay in the right areas for their lifespan).
The lagrange point actually has a wobble to it. Due to solar radiation and gravity from other planets as they move around, so that sweet little perfect spot of neutral gravity moves around in distance between the sun and the earth all the time.
We’d probably have an easier time covering like 5% of our planet in mirrors spread out all over the place. That would cool the planet down by about 2c. Good luck keeping them all clean.
Where’s Marjorie?? THERE HE HIS MARGE THE WEATHER CONTROLLER
Hell if we just launch enough satellites we won’t have to worry about the pesky sun. /s
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE CONTAINS POTENTIALLY LETHAL AMOUNTS OF SARCASM:
I’m sure this will be a complete success, and I see no downsides.
An yes weather control satalites. Has he been reading too many comspiracies?
Watched the None like it Hot episode of Futurama and liked Wernstrom’s idea.
Ah… Souls in the Great Machine… A good book, but a terrible guide for humanity’s development.
Didn’t they just make this illegal in Florida
Why save Earth he’s going to live on Mars anyway. Can he just go already?
PS: plus he can stay there with his “girlfriend” https://www.theverge.com/news/814168/xai-grok-ani-employee-biometric-data damn I’d actually pay to actually help him go.
We already have the answer of how to deal with this:
We can and have shut this thing down when the political will is available. The efficiencies developed in agriculture and manufacturing have shown that the vast majority of economic activity is effectively idle, not necessary, and purely for the purpose of creating the impression of larger economies than are actually present.
No one starved due to lock-downs. No governments collapsed. Netflix views increased. People took on hobbies and got more exercise.
We have an exact template of what we would need to do to save our climate future.
All that we lack is the political will. And no, geoengineering solutions to prop up and support a broken approach to economics isn’t a solution.
While I agree that we have the technology to wildly decreas emissions by just cutting down on inefficient production, I do want to point out people did infact starve due to covid/lockdowns. Many lost jobs, big corps took the opportunity to run mom and pop shops out of buissness, prices skyrocketed. My family wen’t from scrapping by to relying on food drives
next pandemic when?
No one starved due to lock-downs.
Not true, the pandemic caused major inflation, doing the same for a prolonged period of time would be devastating.
But there are ways we can cut CO2 without increasing inflation. Like make the use of private jets illegal.
USA could cut their CO2 in half by following the model Denmark has developed since the 70’s.
Denmark has higher industrial and agricultural production than USA, and has more data centers per capita than USA, yet we only release half the CO2 per capita. And that’s without using nuclear!It cost governments around the world trillions of dollars to get through COVID… The uk’s debt went from 80% of GDP to 100% in the space of just 18 months. It’s hardly a viable economic plan to carry out on an ongoing basis.
Many non essential industries and travel just completely froze And guess what? Co2 production barely even stuttered according to your graph.
The solution is to transition into a renewable, prosperous, circular economy. Not go backwards into poverty.
This dude is like some drugged out crazy guy ranting on a street corner.
Just some drugged out crazy guy manipulating entire governments to his increasingly unhinged whims.
Simpsons did it: https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Sun_Blocker
no. just… no.
(fuck)
Can we just launch elon into orbit? Preferably from a cannon.
Even though, knowing how physics works, putting anything in orbit with only a cannon is not possible, no matter how powerful it is, I wholeheartedly agree we should try it with Elon anyway.
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You and I know he will most likely become pink mist but him and his dipshit fans boys don’t. We could have them all there cheering and them boom it’s raining fascist. I can’t think of a more beautiful sight.
He just keeps getting more idiotic
