Man-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are the primary cause of an unprecedented increase in global average temperatures at a rate not seen in Earth’s geological record.
The problem has been described as so bad that any attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may be too little and too late. That’s why a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has proposed a radical new solution: bubbles in space.
The thinking hinges on two areas of concern: First, we have identified the damage done by more than a century of advanced industrialization as we seek to reduce or even eliminate future greenhouse gas emissions as long as can The world’s climate is bad.
And it could be so bad that even if we completely cut all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, we’ll have to live for decades or even centuries with the severe effects of climate change, including continued sea level rise, more extreme weather conditions. incidents and disruptions in food producing regions.
Another way to solve the problem is to sequester or remove carbon, or at least limit the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface, for example by releasing aerosols into the atmosphere.
The team at MIT argues that this is generally a bad idea because our climate system is so complex and dynamic that introducing artificial agents into the atmosphere is irreversible.
That’s why they think about space: the idea is to build a series of thin, bubble-like films.
These films reflect or absorb some of the sunlight that reaches Earth, literally blocking it. The team argues that if the amount of sunlight reaching Earth was reduced by just 1.5 percent, we could completely eliminate the effects of all greenhouse gases.
However, the team has yet to clarify exactly what these bubbles will do and how they will be sent to their target locations near the first Lagrangian point in the Earth-Sun system.
The Earth, the Sun, and possibly other planets have to keep the raft balanced by balancing gravitational forces. They will also have to deal with radiation pressure from the sun itself, not to mention the constant shower of solar winds and micrometeoroids.
It would take a raft thousands of miles across to block even one percent of the Sun’s output, making it the largest structure we’ve ever put into space. So there is a small amount of engineering challenge to make this thing work.
And although the MIT researchers claim that this space-based approach is completely reversible, it is only in a certain sense.
But Earth’s climate is a complex system with many complex feedback loops that we don’t fully understand – what is the total effect of blocking sunlight by 1 and a half percent over years, decades, and centuries? Is it the biosphere, the level of cloud cover, or the evaporation of the oceans? Or a thousand other considerations? Do we really think we have the technical and intellectual capacity to do it right?
Finally, developing a solution that reduces the amount of sunlight that hits the Earth will do nothing to solve the underlying problem that we are causing so much damage to the Earth’s climate and biosphere.
We need to fix these fundamental problems, not just unload them.
Source: Science Alert
Source: Arabic RT
