"We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun."
But what we know for certain is that at some point in the early 21st century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.
I love everything about The Matrix, except that the core premise makes no sense. Humans are not an energy source; at best we (very inefficiently) transform energy from one form to another.
If we “scorched the sky,” humans would be at least as screwed as the robots, unless we’re getting all our energy (and tons more since we’d have to move all agriculture indoors) from nuclear or such, but in that case, what on earth would the robots need us for? Wouldn’t they just start running nuclear plants? Seems a lot simpler than running the matrix.
Feels like such a sloppy plot hole for an otherwise brilliantly entertaining film.
Even disregarding climate change, we are way past the point where 8 billion people can survive without modern industry. The same will be true for geoengineering in the long term. Remember, we are still in an ice age.
Maybe it's time we all take a personal inventory of our own practices and how they impact the survival of our species, the planet's entire biosphere, before the next generation asks us, "why did you not change yourself to stop this?"
We’d easily choose all out war to keep our kids comfortable long before we’d all choose to lead smaller lives.
We’re not going to hold hands and sing while we all pedal bicycles and live in highly dense housing - we’ll give the army flamethrowers and they’ll keep out the wave of “climate refugees” until we’re fully out of anything we can make napalm out of.
You can't force people to care. That's the whole problem. Everyone thinks their contribution isn't the tipping point and someone else could make a bigger impact. People won't significantly change their habits unless they are forced to.
It's amazing that this solution has not been considered more openly and widely until now. It's cheaper, more effective, and doesn't require draconian regulations or near-impossible expectations on human behavior.
It's also something that could be tested for a year. It's not irreversible. It would allow the undeveloped world a chance to achieve a piece of the global wealth pie.
Why are so many people (especially environmentalists and climate scientists) so opposed to this solution?
Since when has that stopped companies and countries acting in their own best interests?
SpaceX has launched thousands of satellites, and plans to launch many thousands more, polluting sky and space observation for everyone on Earth. This happened relatively quickly, and doesn't require approval from every country, unless they intend to offer service there.
Similarly, it's not far-fetched to imagine a scenario where a "benevolent" billionaire, as the article puts it, or a single country, could decide that SRM is a good idea, and just go with it. Countries still pump excessive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, and historically can't align on a single policy. Why would something like SRM be handled differently?
> Crucially, the biggest problems with SRM are probably not yet known. The side effects of putting sulfur into the stratosphere could be some of the most consequential unknowns in human history.
> Why are so many people (especially environmentalists and climate scientists) so opposed to this solution?
Because it's just kicking the can down the road. This will cost Trillions which you might as well invest in a transition to clean energy now because you have to do it eventually anyway.
If the impact of climate chains looks like it's posing a risk to us as a species then perhaps blocking the sun temporarily is something that should be considered. Right now it sounds like there's still a chance that we could avoid the worst if we continue acting faster and faster. Pointing to a hypothetical sun shield decades in the future, now, is similar to pointing to practically unlimited CCS capacity sometime in the future just so we don't have to do anything drastic now.
pure fantasy that the world will ultimately do the "might as well" there though. The world is moving on but we're running out of time to prevent things that are a lot worse than having to deal with acid rain and simply keep pushing sulhpur into the atmosphere and then slowly taper off the sulphur.
Are there ways this could be done with rapidly biodegradable materials, such that e.g. it would need to be continually done year after year or else the sky would return to the exact same state it was in before?
Also, living in Arizona with 120F/49C summers, I sure wish someone could come up with some geography-wide sunshade!
I guess that will need to be after they stop growing the city forever, and stop paving the earth of my state with black asphalt and concrete, and stop giving all our groundwater to lettuce and alfalfa farming to be sent out of the state or country entirely.
This is covered in the article, and comes with its own trade-offs:
> Sulfur disappears from the atmosphere quickly - it rains out after about a year. This means that once we’ve started SRM, it’s dangerous to suddenly stop. We need to keep spraying particles, all the time. If we suddenly stopped, the warming would spring back rapidly, causing a bad temperature shock. The correct way to stop is a gradual phase out.
Sulphates have a cooling effect and drop out of the atmosphere. There was recently a push to remove the sulphate content in the fuel used for cargo ships from 3.5% to 0.5%, and as the sulphates dropped out of the upper atmosphere the water in the Atlantic warmed significantly. Turns out we had been unintentionally doing geoengineering that was counteracting some of the affects of climate change. The downside is that sulphates are deleterious to human health, causing asthma.
It's possible a sufficiently motivated billionaire or even a somewhat wealthy millionaire could independently finance a project to inject sulphates into the upper atmosphere in international waters and have a measurable impact on global warming, although people with respiratory issues might not be too happy.
Glad you brought this up. The CO2 doesn't go away with geoengineering. It's still being pumped into the atmosphere and will dramatically warm the planet in a much shorter time period if the geoengineering stops
Whether or not you believe in climate-change, the interesting discussion to me is that climate change is a convenient justification for power-grabs by wannabe dictators. I'm not so sure that the elite will be so ready to give up that lever of control by simply tinting the sky. We'll see, I guess.
I'm continually surprised that this idea gets so much traction. While possible to build, it's also strictly Temporary and just leaves us with a worse problem later on. We'll just need a bigger one, 20 years down the line, when CO2 levels keep going up! At some point, it's pretty obviously a non-solution.
Let's put this energy into Nuclear Power and CO2 recapture; and actually fix things.
Nuclear power is not affordable, wind and solar are far more cost effective.
Carbon capture is a great application for a variable supply grid as it can easily be load shed.
The growth of renewables, particularly solar, is on pace to replace a pretty large proportion of fossil fuels "for free" by being more economically viable. Transitioning most people and industry from ICE to electric and things like heating to more electric is going to happen naturally, but it'll take a few decades. Likewise it's reasonable to believe the biosphere is going to ramp up carbon sinking as time goes by. A stopgap of dimming the sun with sulfur for... eh... 20 years might just be the ticket.
Yes. Solar is growing at an exponential rate, fossil fuel growth rates have been slowing.
Solar and wind growth rates should be expected to continue increasing, fossil fuel growth should reach zero in the next decade and start a long term decline.
> Spraying a form of sulfur from a plane is incredibly cheap. A full programme would cost less than $20b per year. That’s much cheaper than carbon removal ($600b per year, to remove just 10% of annual emissions @ $100 / tCO2).
It is 30x higher both in time and cost to capture carbon. At $20B/yr geoengineering the atmosphere can be done for 50+ yrs. In 50yrs, carbon capture would need $30T vs only $1T for spraying sulfur. Carbon capture as a long-term solution doesn't make sense. Also, how much carbon you can capture in 50yrs? At 10% of annual emissions, you can probably reach 30% by the end of 50yrs. Carbon capture is still leaving 70% carbon in the environment. It's a make believe solution build to give us false sense of action for saving climate.
Among other downsides, spraying sulphur in the atmosphere doesn't remove any Carbon at all. It just tries to balance one pollutant out with another. I'd rather have the sunshade, honestly.
I'm not a physical scientist, but I'd imagine that the amount of Carbon you can capture is fundamentally proportional to the energy you can use on Carbon Capture. That's why I believe a large expansion of Nuclear Energy would be needed.
Alongside a continued reduction in emissions, this is a practical path forward. Throwing new curveballs at the earth, while not addressing the present level of Carbon, is not.
That's not the point the author is trying to make. What he's saying is, whether you like it or not, it's cheap enough that somebody will do it, either a desperate government or an individual American technocrat.
If I did my back of the envelope math right, direct air capture (DAC) at the currently commercially feasible efficiency, powered by nuclear power could capture annually about as much CO2 as we emit annually if powered by around 2300 large nuclear plants.
It could also be done with roughly a million km^2 worth of solar panels.
I'm curious...do we have the resources to build either that many large nuclear power plants or that many solar panels?
In the United States I strongly suspect that at least one major political party's reaction to sulfur spraying would be to try to increase the production and use of coal and oil.
I suspect that this reaction would not be confined to the US.
We could end up in a situation where greenhouse gas levels in 50-100 years are massively higher than they are now, with heating being held in check by continual sulphur spraying.
It would then only take for something to disrupt the sulphur spraying for a year to have sudden massive warming.
It would make more sense to save sulphur spraying for after we are firmly on the road to zero emissions and have reached the point where it is not economically feasible to revive coal and oil. Then sulphur spraying as a temporary measure to lower temperature until our falling emissions make it unnecessary might be safe.
You know that famous (around here) article: "Reality Has A Surprising Amount of Detail" ?
Sadly for all of its popularity the essential message seems to have missed people. I listen to people talk about Mars colonies in their lifetime, because they refuse to acknowledge the complexity beyond "big rocket go fast". This topic is very similar, it requires a staggering amount of engineering, economic, environmental and other disciplines to really understand why it's such a terrible idea. The expense, the known and unknown unknowns, the politics and the reality that it's a band-aid over a sucking chest wound.
People just don't get it, and only engage with these topics as a sort of sport, not something they need to grasp the complexity of.
The article makes the point that it's the kind of thing an arrogant billionaire will probably do on their own because they feel it's necessary. I'd say that your point probably reinforces that idea.
The history of industrialization, as well as most people’s consumer choices, should explain why it has so much traction. When faced with an expensive solution that permanently solves a problem vs a cheap one that kicks the can down the road a few years, people invariably choose the cheap one. That’s how we got in this mess in the first place.
Remember that people are mortal. Rather than invest in permanent solutions that grant us eternal life, evolution favors solutions that keep us alive just long enough to reproduce, then making a half-copy and throwing out the old body.
A nuclear power plant generating 5gwh/year could capture around 4 million tons of CO2 per year at 1,200 kwh per ton. Emissions are in the billions of tons per year.
I hear that argument lot, but the perspective that seems missing to me are the secondary effects - right now, we have a lot of self-reinforcing loops from rising temperatures, like melting permafrost emitting even more greenhouse gases. At least those should stop if the earth is artificially cooled down, no? If so, then it could be considered a form of preemptive removal - stop it from getting into the atmosphere in the first place. Not sufficient on its own, but a bandaid that would buy some time (which has its own risks, given our record of dealing with problems too late).
What's funny is I think it's one of the most rational takes on the current situation that I've ever read. What's crazy is the status quo wherein we are destroying the only ecosystem that can support our civilization. We are already engineering the climate, just not purposefully.
I think there are certain actions that are only insufficient because the trend line isn't steep. Electric car sales go up every year, solar/wind both go up as a % of our energy mix in the west every year. Some amount of geoengineering might allow the current pace of those trends to be 'fast enough'
I disagree; I think we are doing a lot. We're on track so that renewable sources will provide 1/3 of all electricity generation by 2025. That's quite a massive change, considering how much electricity infrastructure needs to change for that to happen.
The issue is that CO2 emission is so massive that even big changes are a drop in the bucket.
Dude you're discounting things like the fact that solar and wind account for like 44 percent of europe and even in the united states I go driving around and see solar panels everywhere. Like, it's all growing like a weed and going gang busters but still it needs to go even fater sure but buy us time and solar and wind would get even cheaper along with batteries and anyone who tried to advocate for more coal or natural gas would be met with resistance in corporate america as there are cheaper alternatives.
I wonder if simply tainting the fuel of airliners with sulfur would be good enough for a meaningful effect.
A half a percent in the global jet fuel supply would put that order of sulfur into the atmosphere, a bit lower than what I think is being proposed here. But adulterating the fuel supply would be affordable and equivalent to a smallish tax on flight.
This is a really interesting idea to me, honestly. Someone would have to do some modeling, but I'm guessing that amount being emitted would be low enough to not dramatically cool the Northern Hemisphere (where most of the air traffic is) and messing up some weather patterns. The author stresses several times in TFA that sulfur emissions should be done at the equator to have an equal, global effect.
Can anyone suggest a less baity title? I looked through the text trying to find an accurate, neutral, representative phrase and couldn't find one. That's unusual and probably a bad sign.
I don't think it is baity? Just creative and interesting. Meshes perfectly with its content too, as the main argument of the article is that someone is going to do it without any general consensus as it is possible to do with some billionaire or small nation level cash.
Would this process work the same way climate change is warming? Because climate change, while on average increasing the global temperature by 1.5C, has pretty big variations in actual temperature decrease by region. It's important if you use sulfur to decrease the temperature that this decrease counteracts regional temperature increases and not just average global temperature.
- Accelerated silicate weathering for carbon dioxide removal (basically, crushing a lot of alkaline mafic rocks so they react faster to neutralize CO2 that's already in the atmosphere and the oceans)
The IPCC proposes carbon dioxide removal too, calling for "net negative emissions" to neutralize CO2 that has already been emitted [1], except they give examples of afforestation, reforestation, and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage as removal techniques. (I personally think that those are poorly scalable and will not make much headway compared to silicate weathering, but I'd be happy to be wrong.)
What about the transitional time before we get to "the long term?" The majority of global electricity still comes from fossil fuels. Most road vehicles sold today burn fossil fuels. Even after we reach the tipping point where most vehicles are electric, the old ones may continue to operate for decades.
In the meantime, CO2 that has already been emitted is trapping more energy from sunlight and raising temperatures. Once temperatures go up enough, there are bad feedback loops where e.g. tundra thaws, microorganisms start releasing the previously frozen carbon compounds, and we get vast new emissions from thawing regions even as direct human emissions fall. In other regions, temperate forests may dry out, burn, and transition to different biomes with lower carbon sequestration capacity.
That's why I think that solar radiation management will be needed. It can break the feedback loops where higher temperatures denude forests and release vast quantities of soil carbon. It doesn't directly reduce emissions or draw down atmospheric CO2, but it keeps temperatures down so there's time for the energy transition and CDR techniques to stabilize and reverse the atmospheric CO2 excess. A world with 550 PPM of atmospheric CO2 is bad, but a colder world with 550 PPM can be stabilized while a warmer world at 550 is going to keep going up even if anthropogenic emissions are slashed.
And somehow, in the US at least, we don't even have broad agreement that climate change is real, happening, and will dramatically adversely affect humans for centuries to come.
Anyone have any good resources or techniques for having honest discussions with friends and family that simply refuse to believe a problem even exists? Real solutions will only come once we admit there's a problem.
Various small organisations are already doing a number of geoengineering projects on the ocean and various other biomes/habitats. Its simply a matter of time and there is currently no framework to stop it happening, anyone with the funding can just do this and break no laws. If it all goes wrong due to unforeseen consequences we all suffer. Just like climate change really, people on the other side of the planet are causing harm to everyone and refuse to stop.
Sulfur is probably not the best agent to do it, but we know that it works from the unintentional ship fuel experiment.
In any case, if 2023 wasn't an exception, I'd rather have someone start a program this year. It can always be stopped or scaled down. And I am confident that renewable energy, electrification, and battery deployment will continue unabated anyways.
My understanding is that the way greenhouse gas induced warming works is that we have incoming solar radiation over a broad range of wavelengths.
Some of that ends up being absorbed by various things on the surface which heats them which causes them reradiate some of that absorbed energy as infrared.
Greenhouse gases absorb infrared, and so some of that reradiated energy that would have been radiated back into space gets trapped by those gases.
From a purely reducing warming perspective then it probably wouldn't matter much what wavelengths you are reflecting. Any light you stop from getting absorbed and turned into heat below would help.
But incoming radiation often does useful things before or instead of getting turned into reradiated infrared. For example it may be used by plants for photosynthesis.
It would seem then that if reflecting light in the stratosphere to reduce warming you'd want to try to avoid deflecting wavelengths that are important for photosynthesis or other useful things.
You'd want to pick wavelengths that don't do much other than just end up getting absorbed at the surface. Does sulphur do this?
The idea that a billionaire is just going to yeet a program together is pretty far fetched. Even at "only" $20 billion dollars a year, there are less than a dozen billionaires in the world with that kind of free capital. And none of them could sustain that kind of spend for more than 1-2 years.
The "country of no choice" similarly applies to only a small handful of countries that have no decent way of mitigating climate change but also have the funds and resources to do SRM. So really, just China (which has already shown enthusiasm towards geoengineering) or India.
The primary human response is still going to be crop adaptation and mass economic migration. I think we are going to have to see a lot more of this before we see someone dim the sun.
: For instance, some of the hydrogen released will react with the atmospheric compound hydroxyl, creating ozone, which in the lower atmosphere is a greenhouse gas. And by using up hydroxyl, which is the atmosphere’s main cleansing agent, hydrogen will leave less of the organic compound available to break down methane and other greenhouse gases, resulting in those gases lasting longer in the atmosphere and causing additional warming.
What a horrible idea. Equivalent of kicking out your ill child with a fever into the frosty night to "cool down" or ordering a diet coke to fast food meal.
I've been fascinated by marine cloud brightening, a related technology. I'd love to see that explored first, as it seems cheaper and lower impact. Still, if it was a choice between pretending that we're going to effectively mitigate climate change at this point without geoengineering, and darkening the sun, I'd say darken the sun.
Its not fair that you guys keep changing the funny titles after i come up with a zinger for them.atleast give me a day or two to make my dimsum jokes before you make it serious again,....
The simpler solution is build a damn lot of solar on Earth and use the energy to suck CO2 out of atmosphere. I did the calculations, it was something like the area of UAE equivalent solar to have enough energy to suck ALL CO2 from the atmosphere.
Probably too late with this comment, but from today's WSJ: "Scientists Resort to Once-Unthinkable Solutions to Cool the Planet"
Lends some support to the author's thesis. A little unsettling that the reflective SRM material in the WSJ article isn't sulfur (apparently) but something proprietary of undisclosed composition.
Have we thought about impact on plant life? Like wheat? Seems like a bit of a problem for a solution like this. One might say that plant life literally evolved for the solar conditions we currently have.
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