Those challenges were likely not made easier by picking a company name that echoed Star Wars’ “Project Stardust” — the codename the bad guys in the Galactic Empire used for the Death Star, a weapon designed to destroy entire worlds.
You know how everyone says conspiracy theorists are silly because why would the illuminati go around leaving clues about its existence in corporate logos? And yet…
It’s Thiel’s favorite thing for some reason
I kinda get it - if I were an evil mastermind operating legally and out in the open, making journalists interview me about my new company, Murder Everyone with Chainsaws (For Real) Inc. would be amusing
They’re dabbing on us!
Gundam fans are even more nervous about a project Stardust.
will it work to cool the planet? maybe, maybe not. would it destroy/disrupt our food supply? likely. would it destroy solar power generation, locking in fossil fuel use indefinitely? yes and i think that’s the #1 goal. other likely downsides are simply points of profit to exploit
would it destroy solar power generation, locking in fossil fuel use indefinitely? yes
Hmmm, why are you so sure of this? Solar panels absorb energy for the most part in a determined region of the visible light spectrum, increasing the albedo of the Earth could be done in less critical parts of the spectrum. The same applies for plants, chlorophyll also absorbs sunlight in the visible spectrum. Increasing the albedo in infrared could be a possibility that dodges both chlorophyll and solar cells.
No, you wouldn’t want to increase the albedo in the infrared, because the peak emissivity of the sun is in the visible spectrum, but the peak emissivity of the Earth is in the infrared. You’d end up blocking more of the outgoing radiation than the incoming radiation. Stratospheric aerosol injection plans also would not meaningfully impact either solar panels or photosynthesis, though. The plans on the table would adjust the global albedo by low single digits watts per square meter. Neither plants nor (especially) solar panels are operating so close to the edge of full efficiency that such a small adjustment would meaningfully impair their performance. The big problem with this proposal is that it’s likely to have all sorts of knock-on climatological effects, especially on precipitation levels and distribution patterns.
I mean, peak emissivity of Earth surely isn’t in the near-infrared, is it? My point is that you could probably dodge the most of it by carefully selecting the spectrum.
But thanks for your correction anyway, I appreciate discussion of sciency stuff in hexbear.
Peak for the surface is ~7μm, so not NEAR near, but not super far infrared either. This is the whole pickle with the greenhouse effect: the atmosphere is basically transparent with respect to peak wavelength for incoming solar radiation, but close to opaque for outgoing infrared. The idea with albedo modification geoengineering is to sidestep that problem by just cutting down on the amount of energy coming into the system before it even has a chance to pass through the atmosphere. It would definitely work at its primary task of cooling the atmosphere, but both theoretical and real-world models (like the eruption of high-sulfur content volcanoes) shows it’s also very likely to significantly disrupt other parts of the climate system.
chlorophyll does not absorb green light, which is the peak color from the sun so yeah block green?
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 :)
Please don’t build another torment nexus
Wasn’t this literally the reason machines started using humans as batteries in The Matrix? Humans blotted out the sun to prevent the machines from being able to use solar power?
Yes. There’s a two part episode of the Animatrix that goes into this. It’s by far my favorite story.
Second Renaissance Parts 1 and 2. Best parts of the Animatrix. I wish they’d done even more with that part of the backstory, but what they managed to squeeze into those two segments was fantastic.
I loved those so much. added so much depth. activist and leftist humans fought and died alongside the machines to protect them from genocide and then were purged a long with them, leaving a world of vicious reactionaries.
and then the best part is after they were banished into the Arabian desert they managed to build FALSC and the war only started because they were “destroying” the world capitalist economy by being China on steroids.
One problem with many of these methods is that the geoengineering program must continue.
Let’s say we did it for 60 years, still emitting greenhouse gasses due to the lack of immediate warming effect. Then, society shifts, the world decides that expensive geoengineering projects are unnecessary, outside of the budget, or that politicians think the risk is overblown. We stop the programs. Then we have extremely rapid warming that could push us over multiple tipping points in a few short years before anyone admits fault.
These projects need to be considered as a stay-of-execution, but many in power will treat them as an excuse to continue fossil fuel emissions.
yeah this is the most obvious path programs would send us down
even if these could work, it’ll be just like mask mandates and isolation periods in 2020. once cases went down they tore down all precautions.
the ruling class would probably use these as an excuse to accelerate emissions because the problem is “solved” until eventually killing the project and dooming it all
I think the scariest thing about this is how incredibly cheap it is to do. Meaning that any moderately sized corporation or basically any state larger than a small island can just start doing this and then we’re stuck doing it forever until we sharply drop emissions (lol) or else face a termination shock that would basically end the world.
Capitalism is gonna paywall daylight.
Yeah there are startups for giant space mirrors for projecting sunlight at earth.
Isnt this how the apocalypse in the Matrix happened?
I will forever hate journalists for the butchering they do to every topic but particularly science on headlines.
Increasing the albedo of Earth (i.e. the total reflectivity) is a very different concept to “blocking out the sun”. If it was a gas or particles reflecting energy in regions outside the visible spectrum, say thr infrared, for the most part people, solar panels and plants wouldn’t notice. There are obvious concerns about secondary effects, but aren’t we seeing already the primary effects from the opposite, that being greenhouse gas emissions? We are already doing geoengineering, whether we like it or not, and scientifically looking for solutions isn’t a bad idea.
Now, should this be in the hands of a startup called Stardust or whatever shit? Absolutely fucking not, this should be a collective worldwide scientific discussion and effort, on the order of magnitude of the LIGO experiment, the LHC or similar projects. But as always, this is a matter of execution within capitalism and not of the theory, which needs a lot of scientific development and, yes, experimentation.
Useful experiments that we have already unintentionally carried out with “inverse greenhouse gases” are for example the emissions from transoceanic merchant ships. In 2020, regulations about sulphur dioxide emissions in merchant ships entered internationally, and abruptly cut 80% of SO2 emissions from said ships. As a result, given SO2’s inverse greenhouse effect, there has been a significant undesired increase in global radiation absorption.
We NEED to push for the study of these phenomena internationally by public entities and actual scientists in research institutions, and not let journalists and companies muddy up the topic as has happened with climate change overall.
Apologies for South Park, but…
Mr. Burns ass shit
The owls will deafen us with their incessant hooting!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
