Decreasing the total energy exposure of the complete biosphere to reduce temperature rise sounds risky to me.
Yes, it might not become as warm, but especially plants need sunlight for photosynthesis / oxygen production. If we deny the plants that energy the ripple effect throughout the biosphere will be huge.
It might also be the case that we have no choice but to do this. I'd rather the research get done now, before that (potentially) happens.
I think the fact that the scientific community is writing these letters should also be interpreted as a data-point indicating that this point is close, perhaps even behind us.
But it isn't "[the scientific community [...] writing these letters", it's a few scientists. There are a wide spectrum of beliefs within the scientific community, each holding a set of beliefs about where we are, and a separate set of beliefs about what should be done.
Alternative solution. Stop worshiping economic growth. Fade out fossil fuels in energy (atomic), industry and transport (trains). Stop animal agriculture (30% of all habitable land), and reforest the grazing lands (double the forest area). Enable rewilding of nature (anthropocene) and repopulation of the oceans (90% of sharks now already gone).
But that would require a will to really do something. It's easier to spray some poisons into the atmosphere, I suppose.
Have you read the letter? It's not a call for implementing SRM, but for studying its effects (so call for funding the research). Even they admit that:
> While we fully support research into SRM approaches, this does not mean we support the use of SRM.
> SRM does not address the cause of climate change, nor all of the effects of increased greenhouse gas concentrations, it likely will never be an appropriate candidate for an open market system of credits and independent actors
Madness is focusing on methods of mitigation of one particular aspect of the "climate change". I put this in the same bucket like the shading of the sun from the space (few weeks/moths ago?). Climate change is in fact a wrong term. We should focus on all aspects of anthropocene, especially on biodiversity and restoration of ecosystems.
With functioning ecosystems and with us not flooding the earth and atmosphere with poisons (stuff that does not belong in such big quantities, like co2, methane, pfoas, plastics, pesticides/herbidices, fertilizers, etc. etc.) the nature will return to the optimum state. Let's diminish ourselves and let the nature repair itself.
Hoping that some miraculous, non-existent technology will solve our problems while ignoring obvious and easy solutions (stop doing the bad stuff) exist is madness. Promoting such efforts makes the population complacement (no need to do anything personally, it's being worked on, let's consume more). Propaganda and greed. Same old, same old.
> I notice that you still seem to be using electricity and a computer.
Electricity is (should be, will be) practically free [0]. Unless somebody is living like a caveman they should not be advocating for responsible stewardship of earth resources?
> I'll bet you're still eating food that was transported by internal combustion engines
You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local [1] [2] [3]
1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local - transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%.
I agree with this research proposal but I'd be lying if I didn't say using this as a strategy moving forward to mitigate climate change didn't absolutely terrify me.
The best and only way I agree with this is some sort of maneuverable lagrange-point satellite mirror. That way if we find we are totally fucking the environment we can reverse it immediately.
Yeah, Lagrange point satellite definitely feels like the only removable option that would be safe... And even that seems like it would be contentious. (How do you decide when to reduce sunlight for what countries)
Also agree with all of the comments, that this is really just a way for us to continue our current trajectory.
Anything short of this in the "upper atmosphere" feels like an absolute non-starter, and this even feels like a non-starter as it is...
Ok maybe it wouldn't be quite so ridiculous of a cackling smoky room headed by the Rothschild conspiracy, but to the comment's point, why do this if it simply provides an excuse to hold off policy and behavioral changes that actually control emissions?
Carbon sequestration/extraction needs to be tied to heavy taxes on carbon emissions. What really annoys me about carbon taxes is that people want to do the offsets of the gas that burns now. Um, what about the untaxed previous century of emissions, which got us to that point?
A true carbon tax addresses offset for the emission AND eats into the existing backlog. Which is .... huge .... amounts of carbon.
If the US is spending more money on the military than addressing global climate change, you know that the power elite simply don't get it. I won't hold my breath on that.
Yes! All these co2 extraction, sunlight reflection and other surrealistic terraforming methods are mainly a way to continue doing what we know is the actual source of this whole shit: running factories.
I argee, in the Termination Shock book the oil companies flipped to die hard believers in climate change, and became supporters in high atmosphere SO2 injection.
Yes, it might not become as warm, but especially plants need sunlight for photosynthesis / oxygen production. If we deny the plants that energy the ripple effect throughout the biosphere will be huge.