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Can we stop Global Warming?

RandFan

Mormon Atheist
RandFan
Joined
Dec 18, 2001
Messages
60,135
Space Ring Could Shade Earth and Stop Global Warming

A wild idea to combat global warming suggests creating an artificial ring of small particles or spacecrafts around Earth to shade the tropics and moderate climate extremes.

There would be side effects, proponents admit. An effective sunlight-scattering particle ring would illuminate our night sky as much as the full Moon, for example.

And the price tag would knock the socks off even a big-budget agency like NASA: $6 trillion to $200 trillion for the particle approach. Deploying tiny spacecraft would come at a relative bargain: a mere $500 billion tops.

But the idea, detailed today in the online version of the journal Acta Astronautica, illustrates that climate change can be battled with new technologies, according to one scientist not involved in the new work.
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Interesting. Ideas?
 
Hi Randfan

....would illuminate our night sky as much as the full Moon, for example.
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The side-effects on the natural world of having an artifical full moon every night would be catastrophic. Most of the creatures on the planet which have synchronised breeding (e.g. corals, turtles) organise themselves according to what is happening to the moon.
 
JustGeoff said:
Hi Randfan

The side-effects on the natural world of having an artifical full moon every night would be catastrophic. Most of the creatures on the planet which have synchronised breeding (e.g. corals, turtles) organise themselves according to what is happening to the moon.
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Yeah, I suspect that such a response would have unintended consequences.
 
For $200 trillion, you'd think we could afford to get off this rock entirely.
 
Not to mention that astronomers (both amateur and professional) would be seriously pissed off. I shudder at the thought of the Great Nerd Riots of 2010...
 
What about first proving that global warming is happening?

Or rather, that it isn't a natural process.


Just my 0.02.

And no, i don't believe global warming is caused by humans.
 
But the idea, detailed today in the online version of the journal Acta Astronautica, illustrates that climate change can be battled with new technologies, according to one scientist not involved in the new work.
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I think some nerds have already spoken. It'll be nerd-on-nerd violence on this one - that'll be something to watch.

I imagine we'll see a lot of such nonsense as people try to link their area of interest to the "new technologies" which seem to be the new post-denialist position. We've been through "it won't happen" to "it won't matter" to " we can fix it". Anything but accept that business-as-usual is not an option.

Why not build a space-pyramid with the Earth at the Focus Point so as to re-balance its energy flow alignment thingie?
 
TobiasTheCommie said:
What about first proving that global warming is happening?

Or rather, that it isn't a natural process.


Just my 0.02.

And no, i don't believe global warming is caused by humans.
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Well, to launch all that stuff we'll have to develop chlorofluorocarbon-fueled spaceships launched from polar positions, see...
 
DavidJames said:
You're right, cancer, heart disease, etc. are also natural so screw 'em no need to do anything about them either.
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So are forest fires... took us the better part of a century to realize that we need to let them burn... t'aint a simple world out there folks.

Besides, if the worst of the (realistic, non art-bellian) global warming scenarios occurs, we'll lose a few costal cities, but it's not the end of the world.

Not saying we shouldn't be paying attention, just that we shouldn't be panicking.
 
DavidJames:
read what El_Spectre wrote

El_Spectre:
Exactly. Spot on.

The temperature is falling over antarctica and greenland.. Also iceland i believe.

Currently it looks like the temperature will increase with 0.8C in the next 100 years.. That is in contrast to 0.6C in the last 100.

The water is falling... not rising.

In all the area's where it is still bad(according to some claims), it is still much better now than 5-10 years ago(ie, getting worse at a lower rate).

So.... lets sit back and get the facts straight... instead of doing the forest thing again.

Thanks El_Spectre

Sincerely
Tobias
 
The power of scattering sunlight has been illustrated naturally, the scientists note. Volcanic eruptions, such as that of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, pumped aerosols into the atmosphere and cooled the global climate by about a degree. Other researchers have suggested such schemes as adding metallic dust to smoke stacks, to flood the atmosphere and reflect more sunlight back into space.

In the newly outlined approach, reflective particles might come from the mining of Earth, the Moon or asteroids. They'd be put into orbit around the equator. Alternately, tiny micro-spacecraft could be deployed with reflective umbrellas.
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Er... Metallic dust to smoke stacks? They've spent the last century developing technology so less of that sort of thing ends up in the air we breathe. Can't imagine how they even think that'd work.

How they intend to get all this stuff into orbit seems to be glossed over in the article. Our current methods of achieving orbit tend to be on the fuel-intensive side. I think the vast amounts of pollution caused by the necessary number of launches would have be considered as a serious environmental impact.

Nice to see people bouncing possible solutions around, though I have to admit that despite all the lovely threads on this forum and others about the topic, I still don't believe all the doomsday predictions about the subject.
 
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