"Atmospheric sulfate aerosols" means spraying sulfuric acid into the air. It's all the joy of this solution with the added bonus of primarily blocking visible light, destroying the ozone layer, and scattering light so that solar panels and plant life don't work as well. Oh yeah, and SPRAYING ACID INTO THE AIR. Intentional acid rain, forever. It's an incredibly foolish, destructive idea that people with zero drive to do basic research support vocally.
The cheapest, easiest and safest way to fight climate change is to stop emitting CO2. It would be so incredibly easy to stop 80% of anthropogenic emissions. These geoengineering plans are worse in every way.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfur_aerosols
Which is absolutely true, but no one (basically) is doing it. And the U.S. is moving in the right direction in some metrics (solar, wind) but the wrong in many others (urban planning (https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/8/22/1617782...), nuclear (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603647/meltdown-of-toshib...), and politics (Trump, Cruz, etc.)).
So while I agree with the proposed solution, no one else does, and even then we have to deal with China and India joining the developed world and what that means for CO2 emissions.
The UK continues to meet its reduction targets set in Kyoto in 1990, and its reductions are so massive that it now uses less CO2 per capita than it did in 1900. The UK also has had one of the highest per capita economic growth rates over that time period in the developed world, higher than the US for example. France really has no need of cuts, because its per capita CO2 emissions were already so small (about 4/5th lower for each individual than in the US or Australia). This blanket statement is incorrect.
Evidence disagrees. Chinese coal consumption is declining ever so gradually (~1% annually) despite their economy growing as normal. In fact their overall co2 emissions are slowly falling as well. Its an open question whether this is going to continue or if this is just a false peak, but if their commitment to renewable and green energy is a predictor then they may fall below the us emission level relatively soon.
Don't forget Africa!
Enteric fermentation is still a big problem, but it's a problem for another day- the only reason to solve it now is if it truly is as simple as feeding cows seaweed. That seems highly suspect but I have yet to see anyone accuse it of failing the sniff test.
I don't think it's as easy as you think it is to cut emissions by that much, and it certainly wouldn't be humane.
Biological sequestration is closer to a real solution, since it is analogous to how the hydrocarbons we're burning were created in the first place. It might be easier to irrigate the Sahara and flood it with Salicornia and salt mangrove than to stop China from burning coal.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/35172/20150225/how-the-sah...
No, seriously, it really is that easy. The average cost of a new car in the US is $30k, the model 3 is 35k. Every single passenger road vehicle could be replaced with an electric car for ~$1 trillion. It would cost even less to upgrade the grid to full battery-backed solar power and replace gas heating with electric. Over ten years thats 200 billion annually to eliminate 85% of the co2 released by the US and 50% of the methane.
In terms of threats to the country that barely registers as spending. The iraq war was 10+ trillion dollars, we shipped 12 billion in $100 bills on pallets and lost it. Renewable energy is near price parity to fossil fuels, even if you adopt it stupidly it still isnt that expensive.
You make china stop burning coal by buying them solar panels. Nobody says no to free electricity.
Also, you miss the context of GP's comment by pointing the discussing in this way. They were replying to another comment that claimed cutting emissions was a difficult problem for reasons that are more... physical, I suppose you could say. GP was merely pointing out that technical challenges are not the obstacle holding us in our current predicament.
I don't disagree with you in that the real challenge we face is our species' collective insanity, but I hope you see that in asserting this point that we are both in agreement with GP here.
I don't agree with that. I don't see anything in the comment indicating that they saw the problem as anything other than easy to deal with. Have a look at the reply they made to me, where they said "if we would collectively stop chewing our cuds, it would be cheap and simple to do those things". That's still trivialising the social/political component, making it out as if somehow it's just a matter of making a choice as a society. You can't just wish for society to change its attitude, and while it's easy to talk about making such changes, there's the very difficult process of actually making those changes happen.
You might as well say "if we would collectively invent an infinite, completely clean source of energy, it would be cheap and simple to solve the problem." Well, sure. But that's just stating a goal. It doesn't mean it's easy to reach that goal.
My frustration comes from seeing cutting co2 as somehow harder than seeding chemicals into the atmosphere over the entire planet, or building a tube to the stratosphere, or lanching a sunshield into space. Those solutions are an insane level of difficulty above cutting co2.
Yes. Both need to be addressed.
Saying "the problem is easy besides the political component" is not the same as saying the problem is easy. It's an intensely hard problem but the focus needs to almost entirely be on politics, because the rest is easy in comparison. I'm not drawing attention away from the political difficulty by emphasizing how easy the technical side is, i'm drawing attention to the difficulty of the political side.
The most green car is the one you already have, as long as you do, even if it's a SUV.
If people downsized in large numbers it might even move some buyers away from new large vehicles (if the anticipated resale value of large vehicles dropped).
[1]: http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life-...
You're being hysterical about acid--- using a scary sounding word, even though it isn't. (You're not far off from the people who think that any chemical they don't understand must be bad, even though they never took an organic chem. class!) Volcanoes naturally put sulfur in the air, so what we'd be doing wouldn't all that different.
Honestly I think a big change that human industry will have to make over the next century is becoming comfortable with intermittent peak power. Some stuff will happen when it is sunny, or windy, and not otherwise. It's not crazy to say "maybe we should only smelt during peak solar hours", and probably not even crazy to say "maybe our bulk freight should only be moving during peak solar hours".
Once you get rid of the need to do energy intensive stuff at night, the power storage problems become a lot easier.
One example i ran into recently were concrete blocks that would be heated during periods of excess production, and then the heat converted back into electricity during slumps.
Never mind that smarter, nation wide, grids can allow electricity to flow in either direction depending on where the production and need is.
But every transformation you put your energy through between harvesting it and harnessing it has a cost, whether you are converting your electricity between DC and AC willy-nilly, storing it as chemical energy, or converting it to mechanical motion and storing it as gravitational potential. If you have a list industrial application that is not time sensitive, and is running at night from an 80% efficient storage mechanism (effectively, even if off the grid), you can boost your efficiency by 25% by running when it is sunny! Who wouldn't do that?
Larger grids are also more vulnerable grids. We should learn from the lessons provided by, e.g. the 2003 blackout in the northeastern U.S. We don't need bigger, more vulnerable, more tempting targets for the bad guys. We need more compartmentalization to limit potential damage and make systems easier to understand and repair.
Please provide some evidence for this massive claim.
NB that this claim is in response to a proposed solution of building a gun to shoot a sun shield into space. The difficulty is relative. One is incredibly easy compared to the other.
While I agree with your general sentiment in this thread, simple electrification isn't enough; we also have to roll out major renewable energy generation and storage (which is still far wiser than building a gun to shoot a sun shield into space).
We know how to build solar, wind and nuclear plants, do that and just shut down coal power plants. That is like half. Then keep working to get old inefficient cars off the roads. Tax SUVs and give tax breaks to electric buyers.
None of these things are politically easy, but technologically require nothing new and might leave us with a stronger more economy because of the amount of new players and innovations in the fields affected.
But the current political discourse is functionally stalled on the issue because people don't care until it unambiguously affects them. That works great for many smaller issues but for this by the time it affects the average voter we are fucked.
Never mind that diesel engines, used in most heavy machinery, is not as picky about its fuel as a gasoline engine is. As long as it goes bang under pressure, a diesel engine can potentially run on it. what is not needed is to electrify anything, but that CO2 in vs CO2 out sums to zero (or a lot damn closer to it than it currently does).
Interesting historial fact: the reason the USA was able to engage the Japanese relatively quick after Pearl Harbor is because the shit bunker fuel ships use doesn't burn easily at all so the ship fuel reserves were left intact.
There will be soon enough. And even if there was no way to match liquid hydrocarbon fuels for some applications then we just need to make those fuels from renewable sources.
Electrical emissions are more like 30% according to this[1]. Transportation is another 27%, electrifying half of that would get us close to like half.
We're a long way from any of that, but maybe it's technically feasible with what we have now.
1. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Long distance semi tractors drive 500-800 miles a day. That doesnt require a huge battery.
You're joking right? Do you realize how much weight they tow compared to the weight of a Tesla? On top of that most of the Tesla weight is the battery itself.
Battery powered semis for long haul is absolutely not a solution.
>On top of that most of the Tesla weight is the battery itself.
That is very, very wrong. According to wikipedia the Model S' battery weighs 540 kg, while the car weighs 2,200 kg.
Please do more research before stooping down to sensationalism and fear-mongering.
Nonsense. The cooling is less effective at higher altitudes, and all the sulfate currently in the atmosphere provides a forced cooling of .4 W/m^2 vs the greenhouse gas warming of 2.4 W/m^2. The cooling relies on atmospheric water which decreases the higher you go.
We would need to dump way, way more sulfates/sulfites into the air than we do currently.
As far as I am aware, most (all?) discoveries were made from surface vessels, often seeing a foaming sea, foaming methane. It's real bad.
It's all data-driven rather than opinion and while it paints a dark future, there is strong agreement in the scientific community that we have not yet triggered unavoidable positive feedback on a catastrophic scale. Even if we stopped emissions dead right now the future wouldn't be roses and perfume but it's not a nightmare. For the near and medium term the most important factor is still the amount of CO2 we emit, which far outweighs the current feedback loops and the ones that are likely to activate soon.
For instance siberian/canadian permafrost, clathrates and arctic albedo have all been triggered to some extent, but the releases have been outpaced by anthropogenic emissions. This will change, first with arctic sea ice, but at this point we are reasonably certain they won't pick up exponentially until we expect them to.
Further, there's a substantial difference between "respiration" and absorption of sunlight. Pineapple plants, for instance, only "breathe" at night.
It works so well that this could even be how the current "icehouse earth" conditions got started in the first place. The Azolla bloom of 49 ma dropped atmospheric CO2 levels from 3500ppm to 650ppm in less than 1 my, and CO2 has been in that lower range ever since.
I recall there being experiments for areas are iron limited, so they spread iron sulfate and created algae blooms.
I suppose intuitively, if you scoop up a bucket of ocean water, it is not green. If light were the limiting factor you would expect the water to contain lots of light absorbing algae. This does happen in nutrient rich waters, like the sewage lagoons and creeks I grew up near.
Moreover, as multiple posts in this thread point out, sunlight is not the limiting factor in plant growth.
Astute observation, but the problem is easily fixable. Plants use particular wavelengths of light (IIRC mostly from the visual spectrum) for photosynthesis. If the proposed spacecrafts were to block mostly UV and infrared, letting most of visible spectrum through, it'd do plants no harm at all.
The relevant technology is already available and widely used. For example typical car's windshield consists of two or more layers of special UV/infrared absorbing foil sandwiched between glass panes for structural support.
In case of a spacecraft, all you'd have to do is spin the fuselage at low RPM to keep the foil extended.
EDIT: my only contention with any sun-blocking spacecrafts is that they'd have to be carefully engineered to prevent use as a weapon for attacking ground & orbital targets with focused beams of light.
This hurts to read.
Blocking sunlight "might" not lower temperatures. It is absolutely certain. It's a very basic fact that sunlight is what heats our planet.
You can read this sentence as:
"Sure, you might block or deflect some light and that will lower Earth's temperatures..."
Our planet has two primary natural methods for lowering atmospheric CO2. One, natural weathering, is not impacted with this strategy.
The other, plantlife, is absolutely affected. If you were to take 10% of sunlight away from Earth, then it logically follows that plants would get 10% less sunlight to convert CO2 into starches and H2O into oxygen. The resource you're trying to constrain, in the name of fighting effects of rising CO2 levels, is the very resource you need in order to fight rising CO2 levels.
Sure, blocking or deflecting some light might lower Earth's temperatures temporarily, but you'd exacerbate CO2 levels semi-permanently.
We, as a community, need to come to the realization that our CO2 problem is not strictly a temperature problem.