this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Could a Giant Parasol in Outer Space Help Solve the Climate Crisis? Time and money would be better spent on working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a yes/no question can be answered "no."

It could work (ignoring cost), except that tiny meteors flying around space would rip holes in such an expansive object. Just look at what happened to the JWST, and it's much smaller than this would need to be.

I'm sure the next big brain idea will be to cover the world in sunscreen or change the Earth's orbit with a giant rocket.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The JWST is still functioning at a very high level. It's a poor comparison if you're trying to argue against putting expensive stuff in space.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The point was that it got hit, despite being smaller than this would need to be. That's where the analogy ends, because its purpose is very different from a giant umbrella.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The idea is less umbrella and more parasol. Tiny holes would be just fine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

To add on to that, in more serious proposals, the idea is to mass manufacture a lot of small satellites you could hold in your hand, attached to about a km or so of hyper thin foil. At obital velocity, any micrometeorites or other object will flash vaporize an equal sized hole on contact, and indeed this is how we do modern micrometeorite shielding for spacecraft today.

We just care about blocking a tiny fraction of relevant sunlight, holes don’t really effect the outcome compared to the negative space around the satellite.