Geoengineering - White House proposes blocking sunlight to fight global warming: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

The White House recently announced that it was funding a five-year research plan for a controversial proposal to fight climate change by geoengineering — i.e., technologies and processes that can be used to artificially modify the Earth's climate.

This research would be dedicated specifically to a form of geoengineering known as "solar radiation management," which involves spraying fine aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth. The hope is that, once the sunlight is reflected, less heat will be generated, and ergo temperatures will go down. Presto: actual anthropogenic climate change! A global SPF 100, as it were!

The research reportedly will attempt to model how solar radiation management might impact the atmosphere, as well as assess its viability as a potential technique to be employed to "manage near-term climate risk."

They're hoping to fight the scourge of climate change by blindly trying to change the climate? What is it with Democrats? They're also fighting racism with racial quotas and making race the primary consideration in, well, everything. That's working well, isn't it? Next, they'll propose fighting drug abuse by giving out free needles and crack pipes. Oh wait, they're already doing that. Why haven't they yet suggested we combat STDs by having indiscriminate sex with as many other people as possible?

Now they're going to "cancel" the sun, without which life on Earth would be impossible? What could go wrong?!

And would this be a unilateral decision? "Hope the rest of you guys don't mind, but we're blocking the sun! Oops, we didn't expect that! Our bad. Sorry, might be a bit chillier than we'd like for a while!"

SRM is a speculative form of climate change response. SRM schemes, should they ever be developed and used, would operate by reflecting some amount of incoming solar energy back into space before that energy can be trapped by the gases that produce the greenhouse effect. Think of SRM like a reflective shield, artificially providing regional or global cooling.
Setting aside for the moment potential negative or unintended consequences, increasing the reflectivity of planetary features at any altitude could achieve the cooling goal of SRM.

They really are stupid.

My friend Robert Kennedy, the engineer from Huntsville, not the politician talked to the Russians after the cold war was over about building a Space Sun Shield for this. It was all futuretech at that point, so pre-SpaceX but there was interest from them to shield most of the world but increase their sunlight strength. They wanted a weather machine and to increase their wheat areas land in Ukraine and Siberia.

It’s a lot more closer now as soon as SpaceX Starship is ready. One of the other problems other than cost and scale is that it is one hell of a weapon plus we do probably don’t want to be doing planetary engineering on your sole planet.

What could possibly go wrong is basically this — small changes in the radiation budget (incoming solar energy) might be fairly minor in their effects in the tropical and temperate climate zones, let’s say they manage to reduce the incoming solar radiation by 1%, that would leave our climate colder by perhaps 1-2 C deg, but the big unknown is the effect in higher latitudes which are much more sensitive to rapid changes in climate in relatively small changes of energy budget. That is the main reason I would fear this proposal, and there’s no control planet to test this out before applying it here on earth. You could easily tip the balance rapidly towards the onset of a major glacial advance or an “ice age” climate and once you set that into motion, just stopping the aerosol program will not guarantee a reversal of those effects.

Fortunately I think this fact is well understood by those in the profession and if these proposals go much further they will probably start speaking out against the idea.

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