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Underground > Laboratory >

Giant Space Mirrors

Hydra vs Leviathan

18:10 / 29.01.07

USA considering anti-global warming technology including reflective smoke and/or giant space mirrors.

Scientists have previously estimated that reflecting less than 1% of sunlight back into space could compensate for the warming generated by all greenhouse gases emitted since the industrial revolution. Possible techniques include putting a giant screen into orbit, thousands of tiny, shiny balloons, or microscopic sulphate droplets pumped into the high atmosphere to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption. The IPCC draft said such ideas were "speculative, uncosted and with potential unknown side-effects".

This seems pretty ludicrous to me. "Let's come up with some mad, crazy, trillion-dollar sci-fi way to reverse the effects of global warming, because, you know, reducing emissions would just be unthinkable!"

Could something like this work? What other effects could it have on the environment/atmosphere?

Well, at least the US now seemingly accepts that "there is a 90% chance that human activity is warming the planet", even if the only proposed solution it can come up with is a ridiculous, grandiose gesture-of-power "cure", rather than any attempt at prevention...

(As an aside, i vaguely remember reading something years ago about the Soviets having plans to use giant space mirrors, but in the opposite way, to try to reflect more sunlight towards the earth, specifically in far northern parts of Russia, in order to try to increase crop yields and the length of the growing season... I'm not sure if those plans were ever put into practice tho, altho one bloke i used to know once pointed out to me a bright light in the sky (which, in all probability, was either Jupiter or Venus) and claimed it was "the Russian space mirror"...)

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

19:50 / 29.01.07

Given my growing fear that the ship has sailed and we've passed the Point of No Return for the greenhouse effect -- that reducing emissions by 50% won't make a crap of difference given current momentum, and that the world isn't going to do it anyway -- alternative plans are okay by me at this point.

I'm aware that it's kind of like building a raft because you set the boat on fire, but man, the boat's really burning at this point.

Lagrange's Nightmare

20:10 / 29.01.07

The whole mirror technology could actually be a decent tool to develop because it can work both ways. Besides global warming there is going to be a large amount of natural variability in the future (i.e. Milankovitch cycles) and we are either going to have to adapt or control and in general we seem to prefer the controlling option...

But of course i don't think any countries would be trusting the US to run it itself. It's pretty easy to turn controlling sunlight into a military weapon.

12:03 / 30.01.07

If we're putting giant mirrors into space we should just put giant solar panels into space and beam the power down using microwaves. That would enable us to reduce emissions caused by generating electricity, which iirc is the largest source of greenhouse gases. It sounds insanely sci-fi, but it's doable if you have the capability for N.E.O. construction and cheap lift platform.
However the chances of that happening in the current political climate is so slim as to be just wishful thinking.

17:35 / 05.02.07

Yeah, this stuff is a puzzle, all right. I mean on the one hand, you've got the point of no return-ness thing going on, then you've got the redress the balance thing (which is the interesting thing - you wonder if there would then be any inclination to fix the earth-bound problem or to just throw up another couple of dozen mirrors), and then you've got the catastrophic side effects question - what actually would happen if a particular area of the globe got less heat than all of the others? Really weird weather effects?

At this point, I'm with the people who say that anything goes, within reason, just as long as we attack the problem from muliple directions and don't rely too much on any one. There was one suggestion I saw when I was in the US recently which was to ban the sale of normal lightbulbs and insist they be replaced by low energy flourescent ones that took the same power and worked in the same sockets. The amount of energy that could save could be enormous.

Phex: Dorset Doom

20:11 / 05.02.07

Another idea was to put particulate dust into the upper atmosphere so a tiny percentage of sunlight is reflected from the entire earth- which might in turn affect plants since they rely on sunlight, which might mean less carbon dioxide being recycled, which might mean more global warming, but that's okay because we can always pump some more dust into the atmosphere...
With mirrors there's the problem of where to put them- obviously they're not going to be popular floating above populated areas- so that's all of Earth's land mass out. There's the Arctic and Antarctic of course, but for half a year they receive no sunlight anyway. Then there's the ocean, but denying it sunlight is going to cause some vitamin E depleted fishermen and a die-off of the planet's algae, which produces 80% of the world's oxygen.