are you telling me this would definitely have no effect on solar generation and farming? I’ll acknowledge i don’t know the science myself, but deferring to the scientists in the article as most cited weren’t fans of the idea.
i also have the utmost faith after reading that this specific company’ll use whatever material makes them the most profit they’d have no problem taking money from energy lobbyists wishing to hamper solar adoption. call me unimaginative but i cannot fathom a scenario where these guys don’t fuck shit up
On the farming front, go for a walk in the woods and see how many plants are growing in the shade. In full sun, plants are able to use about 2% of the incoming energy and have to use a lot of resources to avoid being damaged by the rest.
Not that there aren’t plenty of valid reasons to oppose geoengineering, as Philosoraptor pointed out, but the impacts to farming from reduced light would not be significant.
for farming i’m more worried about the knock-on effects on the weather patterns rather than the direct effect of the shade. again i’m far from a climate scientist so I’m just going offa the possible mpacts I’m reading in the piece
Yeah, this is a much more serious issue. In particular, we have a lot of very good reasons to think that the impact on precipitation levels and distribution would be significant at even the levels that would be necessary to effect rather minor temperature reduction. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the early 1990s dropped the global average temperature by about half a degree C, but also seems to have caused both severe droughts and severe flooding in various places. The precipitation disruption signal appeared and disappeared at basically exactly the same time that the temperature reduction signal did, so we’re pretty confident that the sulfur compounds Pinatubo put into the atmosphere caused both of them. The overall land-based precipitation on the planet decreased significantly:
Just as worrying (or maybe even more worrying) was the change in how the remaining precipitation was distributed. This is a heat map of the Palmer Drought Severity Index values over the relevant time period. Warmer colors represent anomalously low precipitation levels, and cooler colors represent anomalously high precipitation levels:
As you can see, to a very great extent the precipitation patterns are almost exactly inverted. Places that tend to be dry–the Amerikkkan southwest, parts of Africa, parts of Australia, etc.–were unusually wet. Places that tend to be wet–the Amazon, equatorial Africa, and southeast Asia in particular–were spectacularly dry. Both of those are bad: places that rely on the monsoons didn’t really get them, and places that aren’t used to large amounts of rain were flooded. We think now that this is largely attributable to complex changes in evaporation patterns as a result of the decreased solar intensity, and that was with only enough albedo modification to reduce the global temperature by half a degree. If we were to pursue this policy, we’d probably be looking at reductions at least two or three times as intense as that, which would almost certainly be associated with similarly increased precipitation disruptions. That might end up being more damaging than the warming itself.
It’d be much more troublesome to natural growth, wouldn’t it? Because the plants most adjusted to obstruction are broadly ones already liable to be dealing with obstruction before this new obstruction is added on.
Natural plant populations are already being pretty heavily impacted by climate change, so you’d have to balance out the mitigation potential. If it weren’t for the law of unintended consequences, particularly the potential to substantially alter the planet’s weather, the possibility of termination shock, and the fact that it would most likely be an excuse to continue emitting CO2, messing with solar radiation wouldn’t be a terrible strategy.
Yeah, the impact to either of those things would be negligible; we’re talking about a change that’s much, much less than what you’d get on a even a day that was mildly hazy or had some thin scattered clouds. This is a bad idea for lots of other reasons, though. I did a two-year postdoc in a climate modeling lab focused on evaluating pretty much exactly this proposal.
thank you for the info. I’d be interested in readin what you put together if you have it to show, though i can’t promise i’d understand it i would certainly be interested in learning what i could
are you telling me this would definitely have no effect on solar generation and farming? I’ll acknowledge i don’t know the science myself, but deferring to the scientists in the article as most cited weren’t fans of the idea.
i also have the utmost faith after reading that this specific company’ll use whatever material makes them the most profit they’d have no problem taking money from energy lobbyists wishing to hamper solar adoption. call me unimaginative but i cannot fathom a scenario where these guys don’t fuck shit up
On the farming front, go for a walk in the woods and see how many plants are growing in the shade. In full sun, plants are able to use about 2% of the incoming energy and have to use a lot of resources to avoid being damaged by the rest.
Not that there aren’t plenty of valid reasons to oppose geoengineering, as Philosoraptor pointed out, but the impacts to farming from reduced light would not be significant.
for farming i’m more worried about the knock-on effects on the weather patterns rather than the direct effect of the shade. again i’m far from a climate scientist so I’m just going offa the possible mpacts I’m reading in the piece
Yeah, this is a much more serious issue. In particular, we have a lot of very good reasons to think that the impact on precipitation levels and distribution would be significant at even the levels that would be necessary to effect rather minor temperature reduction. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the early 1990s dropped the global average temperature by about half a degree C, but also seems to have caused both severe droughts and severe flooding in various places. The precipitation disruption signal appeared and disappeared at basically exactly the same time that the temperature reduction signal did, so we’re pretty confident that the sulfur compounds Pinatubo put into the atmosphere caused both of them. The overall land-based precipitation on the planet decreased significantly:
Just as worrying (or maybe even more worrying) was the change in how the remaining precipitation was distributed. This is a heat map of the Palmer Drought Severity Index values over the relevant time period. Warmer colors represent anomalously low precipitation levels, and cooler colors represent anomalously high precipitation levels:
As you can see, to a very great extent the precipitation patterns are almost exactly inverted. Places that tend to be dry–the Amerikkkan southwest, parts of Africa, parts of Australia, etc.–were unusually wet. Places that tend to be wet–the Amazon, equatorial Africa, and southeast Asia in particular–were spectacularly dry. Both of those are bad: places that rely on the monsoons didn’t really get them, and places that aren’t used to large amounts of rain were flooded. We think now that this is largely attributable to complex changes in evaporation patterns as a result of the decreased solar intensity, and that was with only enough albedo modification to reduce the global temperature by half a degree. If we were to pursue this policy, we’d probably be looking at reductions at least two or three times as intense as that, which would almost certainly be associated with similarly increased precipitation disruptions. That might end up being more damaging than the warming itself.
Thank you for this, very helpful.
It’d be much more troublesome to natural growth, wouldn’t it? Because the plants most adjusted to obstruction are broadly ones already liable to be dealing with obstruction before this new obstruction is added on.
Natural plant populations are already being pretty heavily impacted by climate change, so you’d have to balance out the mitigation potential. If it weren’t for the law of unintended consequences, particularly the potential to substantially alter the planet’s weather, the possibility of termination shock, and the fact that it would most likely be an excuse to continue emitting CO2, messing with solar radiation wouldn’t be a terrible strategy.
Yeah, the impact to either of those things would be negligible; we’re talking about a change that’s much, much less than what you’d get on a even a day that was mildly hazy or had some thin scattered clouds. This is a bad idea for lots of other reasons, though. I did a two-year postdoc in a climate modeling lab focused on evaluating pretty much exactly this proposal.
thank you for the info. I’d be interested in readin what you put together if you have it to show, though i can’t promise i’d understand it i would certainly be interested in learning what i could
I made a longer comment on this post answering to most of your questions, you’ll see I mostly agree with you, comrade :)