Global Warming: Orbiting Sunshade, not Kyoto:Kyoto slow if ever

[oscar111]

nations do not cooperate very well.. Kyoto will not do.

Orbiting Sunshade variations... from a foil a million miles up creating larger shadow,

to low orbit artificial clouds of powder shot from ship cannons

to low orbit fifty thousand small mirrors, et et et

all better than Kyoto.

NASA jobs too.

Going beyond just stopoing heat is also possible but not really a part of the orbital idea.

My GO BEYOND idea would go past what most of you want to ever do. Namely, cool earth to a healthier climate.
ecosystems will find a NEW balance.. they always have. We could do the cooling slowly, looking for hazards and stop when we run into such.

Benefits: most tornados all hurricanes gone, and a better climate to just enjoy. Cool climates today, are acknowledged to be healthier... no tropical diseases. More energy felt by folks.

But the basic idea of this post is to merely stop warming and preserve todays temps. Kyoto will not do it. ORBITING SUNSHADE can.

google that phrase, find CBS news page on Lawrence Nat'l labs plans.

[Dogmudgeon]

1. The Link and the Bad News

Here is where it's at:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/01/15/archive/main264362.shtml

Click on it and look for the scientist who has made this suggestion. It's Edward Teller. Yes, THAT Edward Teller, one of the scientists who share the title "Father of the H-Bomb", and the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's and Terry Southern's Dr. Strangelove.

It appears that Dr. Teller has become concerned with global warming recently.

Teller hatched the wild-assed scheme in the early 1990s to spray nebulized or colloidal metals into the upper atmosphere, where they would reflect the Sun's light away from Earth, and probably started the "Chemtrail" panic.

Before that, he wanted to pump electrical energy into the ionosphere to allow long-range propagation of radar. This turned into a million scary stories about HAARP.

It seems like every time the government wants to gauge how people react to scientific high wierdness, they trot out Teller and have him create the adult equivalent of a campfire story. Like his other stories, I have no doubt that the proposal will be found to be un-do-able (in fact, it already might have, since the article is from 2001).

Sorry, Oscar, it was a good try, but Teller has a long history of these kinds of schemes. Even if we did try to shield the Sun, it would have unpredictable effects on the climate just like Global Warming.

My own wild-assed scheme involves moving industry into space, where it will do no harm to the Earth. It's high-tech, it's wierd, but it will have little or no impact on the climate except to reduce the amount of oil-fueled industry we have in our biosphere.

Think I can get a billion-dollar grant to study it? :)

--p!

[NNadir]

3. I propose we tow the earth to another orbit.

We make a giant chain basket out of the titanium on the moon and we have 800,000 spaceships wrap it around the Earth. Then we pull the earth out a little farther until the weather is just peachy.

Every time we add another 5 billion people and increase the earth's carbon dioxide and methane by 50-100%, we repeat the process until we get near Mars. Then we all collectively hop off Earth and go to Mars.

I would like $100 billion to study this proposal.

[Dogmudgeon]

9. That's overkill

Why not just get a giant methane collector and shoot the methane through a giant combustion exhust bell like spacecraft use? It would only have to be 700 miles across. We could ignite the gas with a glow-in-the-dark wristwatch.

We could program a generation or two of humans using spurious electric oscillations in processor chips caused by Windows software.

It might also prevent the world and its methane from spontaneously catching fire from all that radioactive postassium in the seawater.

--p!
Don't think Teller hasn't considered it.

[NNadir]

10. For a mere extra 25 billion, I will study your proposal as well as mine.

However, I must note from the get go that my proposal involving the titanium chains is better than your proposal with the rocket bell because my proposal is mine and your proposal is not my proposal.

This is why I will only require 1/4 as much money as is required to study my proposal to study your proposal. I know your proposal won't work already since it's not mine.

Please note that George W. Bush is spending many hundreds of billions of dollars that we don't have to send a mere 10 or so Christian Missionaries to Mars. In my proposal all of the Christian missionaries get to go to Mars, although many of them seem to be on Mars already.

:-)

[Dogmudgeon]

11. You have two test conditions

NIH (mine) vs Scientifically Sound (yours).

You'd better ask for double anyway.

If mine works at all, you could also declare a cost overrun and inflate the bill.

--p!

[hatrack]

12. I was going to say, don't forget to specify a cost-plus contract!

:evilgrin:

[Kool Kitty]

14. All I can say is-

you must really hate the Martians. ;-)

[oscar111]

20. NNadir, no need to study the towing idea

it is obviously a flawless idea, and i wish they would get it going fast.

Great idea! Possibly i could be one of the first up to mars? I think other repliers on this thread would happily pay my passage to mars.

LOL. just kidding.

[oscar111]

15. Dr. Teller, Hitler, dogs: Hitler loved dogs - does that make it a bad idea

you made a logic error, my friend.

Just because Teller espouses an idea does not make it bad.

Hitler espoused love of dogs. Is it thus wrong to like my dog?

Sunshade is superb idea. Regrardless of messenger.
Teller BTW is not the only messsenger of this idea.

[dcfirefighter]

2. how about we

just burn sooty coal, and let the clouds of soot block the sun? ;)

[phantom power]

4. Exercise for the proposer...

Compute for us the amount of mass we'd have to use to build this shield. Then compute for us the cost of putting all that mass into orbit. Since we haven't yet proven we can build a space elevator, we are stuck with around $10,000 per pound up to low earth orbit. More, if we need to use a higher orbit.

If we can't get our act together sufficiently to even agree on something as milquetoast as Kyoto, why do you think we could conduct an orbital engineering project of the vast scale you are proposing? We can't even marshall the political will to finish the ISS.

[hatrack]

7. The Shuttle can't even leave low Earth orbit - it it's safe to use

That, of course, is subject to debate. The Russians don't have anything even approaching this kind of lift capacity either.

How about these crazy concepts:

Maybe try and limit the amount of GHGs we emit?

Maybe try and improve energy efficiency and empahsize conservation?

Maybe try and rebuild what used to be outstanding mass transit systems in this country?

Maybe change tax structures to encourage growth of renewables and discourage exploitation of fossil fuels?

Maybe try and make energy-saving and renewable technologies available to other countries - why, we might even invent and manufacture them here and make some money doing so!

[phantom power]

8. So crazy... it just might work.

[oscar111]

16. Lift capacity? ship cannons, zero LC needed

the cloud idea nixes that objection.

for a foil, you do it in parts... we put tons on the moon with Apollo. Just a series of those payloads, and got a big rollout foil disk.

[oscar111]

18. Easier to get one nation to do a thing for Lockheed's profit, than get 16O

nations to do Kyoto with industrial slowdown profit crash.

No immediate profits from Kyoto path. Thus: wont get done.

eg, americans havent abandoned gas guzzlers for the environment. The world will not , in a parallel way, abandon factories full tilt, to get Kyoto to work.

As to US spending for Sunshade... if it profits mr. Lockheed, it will be done.

[Strelnikov_]

5. So You Think Limiting The Sunlight Being Delivered

to an energy starved world is a good idea?

The problem is not sunlight, it is greenhouse gases.

This idea has blow-back written all over it.

[oscar111]

17. World is not energy starved: it is overenergized with overheating

by definition.

Need energy? The shade would look "like a tiny dot on the sun's disk" said the link. Plenty for photovoltaics left.. or Barstow solar boiler towers with mirrors.

[Xithras]

6. Dumbest. Idea. Ever.

You know, the Equator was temperate about 15,000 years ago. The rest of the world knew that period as an ice age.

As an added bonus, we'll get to cause the extinction of thousands of species of plants and animal species that rely on high levels of sunlight, shorten the summer plent growth season, slash food crop yields, increase iceberg hazards to shipping, wipe out what's left of our coral reefs, further pollute the oceans by increasing freshwater runoff, and as a final insult, you'd probably INCREASE GREENHOUSE EMISSIONS by causing people to run their gas and oil burning heaters more.

Yup, brilliant idea. How about we just STOP POLLUTING SO MUCH?!?!

[megatherium]

13. Will the orbiting sun shade be made of tin foil? nt

[oscar111]

19. Aluminum i guess, but good joke

liked it LOL.