Posted on 02/02/2024 7:10:16 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
It’s come to this. With Earth at its hottest point in recorded history, and humans doing far from enough to stop its overheating, a small but growing number of astronomers and physicists are proposing a potential fix that could have leaped from the pages of science fiction: the equivalent of a giant beach umbrella, floating in outer space.
The idea is to create a huge sunshade and send it to a far away point between the Earth and the sun to block a small but crucial amount of solar radiation, enough to counter global warming. Scientists have calculated that if just shy of 2% of the sun’s radiation is blocked, that would be enough to cool the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 Fahrenheit, and keep Earth within manageable climate boundaries.
The idea has been at the outer fringes of conversations about climate solutions for years. But as the climate crisis worsens, interest in sun shields has been gaining momentum, with more researchers offering up variations. There’s even a foundation dedicated to promoting solar shields.
Proponents say that a sunshade would not eliminate the need to stop burning coal, oil and gas, the main drivers of climate change. Even if greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels were to immediately drop to zero, there’s already excessive heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A sunshade would help stabilize the climate, supporters of the idea say, while other climate mitigation strategies were being pursued.
“I’m not saying this will be the solution, but I think everybody has to work toward every possible solution,” said Szapudi, the astronomer who proposed tethering a sunshade to an asteroid.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
No, but send me a check and I will tell you what will.
No, but sending all of the insane, deluded, arrogant, condescending, unscientific, “elite,” climate fear mongers to the moon would!
It’s called Lagrange points. Look it up. Basically a device like this sunshade placed at a Lagrange point will maintain a constant position relative to the earth and sun at all times as the earth orbits the sun. There are issues with this idea, but maintaining the position of the shade would not be one of them. Gravity will take care of it.
But, but, but…
Img src=<“https://images.app.goo.gl/mxVkKmwPBUKXtM1s6”>
The set-up is that the temperature monitoring is located in places with higher ambient heat than most of the world. Cities in particular.
“There is virtually ZERO CO₂ in the atmosphere.”
Four hundredths of one percent last time I checked.
“As the UN has stated today, the only item that will fix climate change is cash. Cold hard ca$h..“
If every government in the world confiscated every penny beyond bare subsistence from every person, and spent it all on climate, they could not affect the global temperature by one degree or the sea levels by an inch.
Ok, I hadn’t thought of that.
Yes, and compared to 78% Nitrogen, and 21% Oxygen.... That's virtually 0.
L1 is roughly 1 million miles away from the Earth in the direction of the Sun, roughly 1/100 of the distance (0.01AU). The Sun's diameter is roughly 100 times the diameter of Earth. This means that at L1, a parasol that is big enough to cast shade on Earth has to be TWICE the size of Earth, roughly 16,000 miles in diameter.
So you're not only talking about one HUGE FREAKIN' parasol, you're talking about one that is TWICE the size of Earth.
Ain't happenin'.
I really do hope there are no other lving creatures in space that could flyby and see a stupid parasol and wonder what the hell kind of freaking fairies live on planet earth.
HA! I didn’t know that! Thanks for educating me!
Your math is close for a total earth disk sized shadow. The proposal is to block 1 or 2 percent of the total insolation that would be a disk 150 miles in diameter for a 1% interception at L1 with carbon nanotubes and spinning the disk it could be literally atoms thick to block the IR light wavelengths. Solar photon thrust would be a very real issue you have just created a solar sail on a scale that has been proposed to send probes to proxima Cent. The closer star to terra. You would need to tack the sail against the solar wind to put the thrust vector against the wind vector otherwise it will.rapidly accelerate to sol C3 escape velocity. The theory is valid and a sail of a few hundred miles in diameter is within human technical reach. Should it be done is the better question at least if they messed up the calculations and it cooled too much just tilt it with the solar wind vector and away it fly out of the solar system forever.
A solar sail of somewhat higher density but much smaller size would cast a shadow that would block only a small part of the solar disk (viewed from Earth surface) but would have to block a lot more of the solar radiation per unit area, and thus would be subject to much higher degradation. The Solar Wind is not to be trifled with. And then as you point out, you have to keep it from blowing away.
The shadow would necessarily oscillate +/-22 deg in latitude with the seasons, and probably piss off a lot of solar panel enthusiasts. Such is life.
BTW, in the 80's I designed attitude control systems for LEO and GEO spacecraft, using combinations of IR limb sensors, gyros, and electromagnetics, but those birds were orbital and had entirely different missions. Thinking about the problems of placing a quasi-stable sun-shield at L1 fascinates me.
Is there enough of earth’s magnetic field strength at GEO altitudes for magnotorquers to work for inertial wheel unloading? LEO they are common I would have assumed at GEO you would use ION thrusters or arcjets to unload the reaction wheels for attitude control. Tethers that are electromagnetic have always fascinated me. Pump current across the magfield and Lorenz force should push you to higher orbital delta V conversely pulling current using the tether as the current source sshould drag against the EM.field lowering orbital velocity down to where the atmosphere can drag a stage down. It would be a way to deprive apogee boost stages from GTO to an ocean spashdown.
These boffins want to block 1% averaged over the whole earth disk surface that would cool the planet as would a 1% loss of solar output would. From the planets point of view it’s identical loss of solar insolation. The real question is should humans mess with the earth sun energy balance at all. Carbon dioxide is a tool for Marxism, climate actually changing is a constant for the earth’s system largely driven by orbital cycles and solar output cycles in the star itself. Should the sun heat up which as it ages down the main sequence of solar fusion humans could stave off the inevitable warming for a few millennia extending our habitable period by at least that much. Eventually as the sun moves towards it’s red giant phase the earth will heat up to point oceans will evaporate and all life will end. That’s hundreds of millions of years from now. Till the oceans are in trouble.
You're absolutely right, the torquers were used at LEO. I vaguely recall that the GEO birds used hydrazine thrusters for station-keeping. The GEO gear I worked on developing was an infrared scanning sensor (bolometer), under contract to Intelsat. I don't know whether they ever ended up using that particular design or not; I had moved on to other adventures by the time it would have flown, and the processing technology available rad-hard had advanced quite a bit by then.
I'm rather pleased to admit that I was part of the team that designed and supplied the torquers for the Hubble Telescope, and one of my joys is when someone asks me what I did in those days, I pull out a pic of the Hubble and point to the diagonally mounted torquers. I helped with a lot of great projects in those days; it was a lot of fun, and of course very instructive in the importance of doing things correctly.
> The real question is should humans mess with the earth sun energy balance at all.
They're insane. They have no concept or appreciation of the scale of the forces they're dealing with, the history of Earth's temperature over the last, say, 400M years, or even the most recent 50K years.
They make foolish assumptions of stability and continuity which are not supported by the geologic evidence, much less things like orbital changes, solar variations, etc. They are the most dangerous kind of fools.
I'm 72 and likely won't live to see such things attempted, but I fear for my daughter's generation and onward. They will bear the brunt of the crazy, murderous antics of these so-called scientists.
Unfortunately these science types are not insane they are evil. With the right mega engineering man could affect the earth system. The evil ones only care for money and their political masters are all too happy to feed them money as long as they tow the line of the Marxist ideology. A one or two percent loss of solar influx wouldn’t be catastrophic it’s window dressing on a power play. If they went for ten percent or more then the whole planet would be in danger. Fortunately a solar sail of that size is outside of human tech for the time being if ever balancing a sail size against solar wind is not going to be easy. The other way is stratospheric particulates, sulfur dioxide , micro carbon blacks or sodium would do the job put it in jet exhausts as a fuel additive there is enough high altitude flights per year to put enough particulates up to cool the planet by tens if not twenty degrees F . 50,000+ flights per year fly in the upper atmosphere change the jet fuel change the world.
It’s for people such as Cara Buckley for whom Warning labels were invented.
Michael Moore and/or Al Gore would work,too.
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