TLDR: We need to shade a lot of agriculture. So make those shades mirrors too. Practical and scalable with today's tech and supply chain. Adding mirror shades to 15% of arable land cools enough to stay under 1.5C warming.
> ...very people who are most concerned about climate change don’t seem to support [geoengineering].
Ya. Boomers. Whaddya gonna do? Fortunately, or hopefully, the cohort of anti-development environmentalists are finally being displaced.
Meanwhile, at least someone is finally doing the prerequisite basic science on the problem:
I'm always amazed at how little attention and resources are given to these types of strategies. Solar radiation management and geoengineering. Clearly we have a problem of too much CO2, and are having massive trouble even reducing the rate of increase.
We need to think of actual countermeasures and mitigations.
It's like if a patient has dangerously high blood pressure. It's all well and good to tell them about diet and exercise but if the situation is really bad you need to give them medicine too.
I don’t know where the link is at the moment, but I’ve heard it said that it would take about one mountain worth of lime, ground up and spread in the ocean to completely balance out the climate change up to now. I don’t know how much I trust that.
The other one that seemed quite viable is using reflective aerosols like sulfur dioxide over the Antarctic. It would circle around in the polar vortex and not have massive effects outside of the South Pole. But cooling Antarctica would add more ice, slow sea level rise, and the ice itself would reflect heat away from the planet.
Could be problematic for Argentina/Chile, but probably not so much anywhere else. The potential benefits seem huge.
Dr Tao's MEER project is so audacious and crazy, it just might work.
https://www.meer.org
"Volts podcast: Dr. Ye Tao on a grand scheme to cool the Earth" [2022/06/08] https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-dr-ye-tao-on-a-grand
"MEER | Mirrors For earth’s Energy Rebalancing with Dr Ye Tao at Harvard University" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZAIIe4X2MU
TLDR: We need to shade a lot of agriculture. So make those shades mirrors too. Practical and scalable with today's tech and supply chain. Adding mirror shades to 15% of arable land cools enough to stay under 1.5C warming.
> ...very people who are most concerned about climate change don’t seem to support [geoengineering].
Ya. Boomers. Whaddya gonna do? Fortunately, or hopefully, the cohort of anti-development environmentalists are finally being displaced.
Meanwhile, at least someone is finally doing the prerequisite basic science on the problem:
"How to think about solar radiation management" [2023/02/24] https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-think-about-solar-radiation
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Please share any other climate crisis mitigation ideas you may stumble upon. My inner geek appreciates these kinds of hacks.