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
I think this is the new phase of the bad-faith propaganda. Promote weird, outlandishly expensive but vaguely-plausible-sounding solutions to get people away from talking about the things we can actually do (but which would lead to someone making less money and so, unacceptable.)
It's not a bad idea if we had the technology to mass-produce film in the quantity required, the ability to easily and consistently place them where needed, and could maintain the array. None of those are true right now. If they were, it would be viable.
Yeah. If we could do it, someone could run the numbers and find out that it's about ten to a hundred times cheaper to just build a bunch of non-coal power plants, or find and eliminate methane sources, or, hell, I don't know. I'm not an expert. But I definitely know that they're not talking about this because it's the easiest way.
Weirdly, I'm not completely opposed to this. Solar sail technology is a promising avenue for interplanetary travel/exploration, and we'd want to test the technology for giant solar sails somewhere near the Earth, so why not?
Besides the fact that "block the sun" is a traditional supervillain master plan, I guess.
This sort of plan is not being proposed as a alternative to carbon reductions. It would take decades to build up the lumar or asteroid based infrastructure at minimum, and thouse manufacturing lines would need to run for decades to build up the array to the point it starts making an impact. It’s a plan that would at best start to have an effect around 2075, and that’s presuming sustained hundreds of billions of dollars investment. If we are not already close to achieving net zero by then, then we never will be.
The point is that it provides a possible pathway to reverse temperatures, and related things like storm intensity, agricultural area, and sea levels, back down to preindustrial levels, hence reducing the sustained human death toll being continually exacted for emissions done generations before. It is living with what was already done, not an excuse to pollute more.
It’s difficult, but your unlikely to run into any unexpected problems after you get your first satellites placed beyond thouse that come with scalding up. In raw scale, this is a project on terms with building and maintaining the international highway or rail systems, or for a more topical example the solar buildout we need to do to reach net zero in the first place. Vast yes, but hardly unprecedented.
Humans don’t have a track record of failing to do so either. Most civilization collapses are localized, and rather hyperbolic. The collapse of the Roman Empire for example is much closer to the collapse of the British Empire into the modern day UK than the ideas of abandoned long lost cites and technologies pop culture likes to portray it as for instance.
Moreover, unlike a lot of other geoengineering proposals, there are no significant snapback effects from stoping maintenance, just a slow return over fifty to a hundred years to the point you were already at before starting.
An L1 array wouldn’t have that drawback from my understanding, and an earth orbital array would allow you to vary the intensity being let through simply by haveing the satellites turn sideways, or enter a slow constant rotation if your worried about RCS system wear. You could also actively plan the luminosity over a given region to destructively interfere with major storm events, once again saving lives on the ground.
Would it not be beneficial in conjunction with other actions?
Like they say even if stopped everything today, we would still be warming for decades more. In that case, a quick cooling fix would help alleviate some damage while we focus on undoing the causes.
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.
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.