Space Sunshade Might Be Feasible In Global Warming Emergency

[smb]

Space Sunshade Might Be Feasible In Global Warming Emergency

... Angel, a University of Arizona Regents' Professor and one of the world's foremost minds in modern optics, directs the Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory and the Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics. He has won top honors for his many extraordinary conceptual ideas that have become practical engineering solutions for astronomy.

For the past year, Angel has been looking at ways to cool the Earth in an emergency. He's been studying the practicality of deploying a space sunshade in a global warming crisis, a crisis where it becomes clear that Earth is unmistakably headed for disastrous climate change within a decade or two.

Angel presented the idea at the National Academy of Sciences in April and won a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts grant for further research in July. His collaborators on the grant are David Miller of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nick Woolf of UA's Steward Observatory, and NASA Ames Research Center Director S. Pete Worden.

Angel is now publishing a first detailed, scholarly paper, "Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near L1," in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The plan would be to launch a constellation of trillions of small free-flying spacecraft a million miles above Earth into an orbit aligned with the sun, called the L-1 orbit.

The spacecraft would form a long, cylindrical cloud with a diameter about half that of Earth, and about 10 times longer. About 10 percent of the sunlight passing through the 60,000-mile length of the cloud, pointing lengthwise between the Earth and the sun, would be diverted away from our planet. The effect would be to uniformly reduce sunlight by about 2 percent over the entire planet, enough to balance the heating of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere....

[Atman]

1. Crisis? What crisis?

A big umbrella is the solution? Yikes.



.

[Auggie]

2. Sounds like a band-aid solution

Intriguing, though

[EmperorHasNoClothes]

3. Never mind the feasibility

of manufacturing, then launching, "trillions" of small spacecraft.

[phantom power]

4. We'll put them up there with our flying cars, of course!

:eyes:

[bloom]

5. This is what I would expect from people

who think of technology as a band-aid - instead of looking at meaningful long-term and short term actions and solutions.

It's been band-aid technological solutions without concern for consequences that has us in this mess.

[phantom power]

6. Just for the exercise, I'm going to play devil's advocate.

Suppose this guy has a practical and affordable plan for putting a trillion light-scattering pico-sats in orbit (I'll have to read the paper. Resistance is futile). Suppose that we can afford this plan, and also afford to establish a carbon-neutral civilization. I'm unconvinced that we can afford either, but we're all going to find out soon enough. Anyway, suppose we can. The anticipated lag-time between an actual CO2 emissions reduction and the response from the atmosphere seems to be weighing in at 50 to 100 years. In a scenrio where we obtain a CO2 neutral economy, but have to deal with a response lag of 100 years, is a scenario where a band-aid would actually come in handy. Stop the bleeding until we can repair the artery, as it were.

[Javaman]

7. And I will play devils advocate to your devils advocate...

Suppose we do deploy this hugely expensive band-aid. And suppose it works wonderfully.

But also suppose that, oh say, 20 years from now, it develops a problem and since the earth's population was living on borrowed time, suddenly has to deal with global warming quite suddenly instead over several years to actually fix the problem?

The global shade is perfectly ridiculous idea. The amount of money that it would take to develop, deploy and maintain such a thing could be used instead to develop solar and other alternative technologies to ween us off fossil fuels. Instead of blocking a source of free energy, we should be doing our best to exploit it.

The solar shade is a band-aid on a broken arm. Once it's up there, do you honestly believe people will suddenly act responsible???? Heck no, proof is in the sales of SUV's. When the price of gas went up, people were screaming for fuel efficient alternative powered cars. Since the price of gas has dropped, no more demand and the SUV's are once again selling at a brisk pace.

People(in general)don't learn. People don't care. People don't want to do the hard work anymore. People just want their plastic fun box to watch. People will die because of their stupidity.

Until death comes knocking on their doors, people will continue to eat twinkies.