e.
Thank You for pointing me in the direction of the IPCC, they seem to be addressing many of the questions I have.
It’s quite likely, in fact (I would say almost certain) that the optimal response will include at least some of all of the strategies. Even if we mostly follow a strategy of carbon scrubbers, for instance, there are some easy ways to reduce emissions, and doing that will decrease the amount of carbon we need to scrub. Even if we decide it’s most economical to relocate people away from areas that are becoming less habitable, that’ll be easier if we plant a few new forests in especially suitable areas. All of these strategies have some low-hanging fruit to them, so let’s pick all of the low-hanging fruit first.
Which probably won’t be enough. We’re almost certainly going to have to do some hard things, too. But we’ll also do the easy things, and there are many, many different easy things. There’s no one single solution.
How do you figure?
You said we’re burning these plastic sheets. That releases CO2. And then we need to replace the plastic sheet we just burned, which will eventually also be burned, and so on. A constant amount of plastic-sheet coverage requires a constantly-increasing amount of carbon dioxide.
If we didn’t need them anymore that would be the end of it.
How would we get to the point where we didn’t need them any more? And how would we continue to not need them after adding such a massive amount of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere? And what kind of orbit are they in: If they’re in an orbit high enough that they won’t come down on their own within a decade or so, then they’d be in a high enough orbit that it’d be very expensive to bring them down to where they’d burn up quickly.
Not true, it seems. If we ignore anthropogenic global warming, the current interglacial is likely to last about 50,000 years, according to Berger and Loutre.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1076120
I would note that their calculation has been subject to some dispute, but in any case anthropogenic effects will probably make this all irrelevant.
Seriously?
Yes, seriously. The plastic sheets would be to counteract the effect of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So as long as we have the carbon dioxide, we’d continue to need the sheets. The only way to not need the sheets any more would be to get rid of the carbon dioxide. So, how do we do that?
Plastic sheets are also about the worst thing you could use. They will tend to allow high frequency photons pass through to the surface, but will tend to block lower energy (infrared) photons escaping to space. They would really only have the effect of warming the planet even further.
There’s a reason that greenhouses are often made out of plastic.
If you were going to do this, and I don’t recommend that you do, you want something that is reflective in higher frequencies, and transparent in lower ones.
The plan is to put these at L1, which is 1 million Km away. At that distance, the issue you raise shouldn’t be a major issue. They’ll cover a significant portion of the Sun as seen from Earth, but a not very significant fraction of the entire sky. And that section of the sky would be otherwise covered by the Sun, which is not a direction that the Earth radiates toward to cool off.
That’s a plan, and possibly workable, if difficult. That was not the plan that was proposed by the poster.
I can’t seem to find the original plan. I thought it’d been to put the sheets at L1, but perhaps that was something someone else suggested.
By the ever increasing use of wind/solar/wave generators and switching to electric cars to replace CO2 generating machinery.
Right, but that counts as “limiting emissions”. The title of the thread seems to be asking for suggestions on climate-change measures that don’t require limiting emissions.
Putting plastic sheets in orbit around the earth for solar blocking wouldn’t be helpful if the amount of additional CO2 required for creating, maintaining and disposing of them is larger than the amount of existing CO2 whose effects they counteract.
Saying that that won’t be a problem as long as we can get CO2 levels down low enough by other means is basically just switching your proposal to a “limit emissions” strategy. If we have to drastically cut CO2 levels anyway to make the plastic sheets a good idea, then why not just concentrate on drastically cutting CO2 levels in the first place and skip the whole plastic-sheets detour?
If you interpret it that way then read the first post by the op. It explains what the op meant.
Yes, I’ve read the OP’s posts. Nothing in them contradicts my objection that your proposal of a solar-blocking technique that would apparently produce a net increase in warming—which would then have to be compensated for by cutting emissions—would be less efficient than just doing the emissions cuts on their own.
uh huh. Blocking out the sun from hitting the Earth increases the temperature. Got it.
?? Are you really not getting this? I’ll try to be clearer:
The issue is whether the decrease in warming produced by the action of the solar blockers would be enough to outweigh the increase in warming produced by the emissions associated with manufacturing, placing, maintaining and disposing of the solar blockers.
If it wouldn’t, then the solar blockers would produce a net increase in warming. In which case it is self-evidently a better plan, climate-change-wise, to just not bother with the solar blockers in the first place.
All you’re doing is throwing a “what if” as if it’s an argued fact.
The thread is about ideas. I posted one based on a proposed test that was directed at blocking the sun.
Obviously any attempt in this direction will be based on a net temperature decrease. The op was asking for ideas in addition to the reduction in Co2 that we’re currently engaging in.