Geophysically, there are 3 pillars to climate stabilization:
1. Emitting fewer greenhouse gasses. Need to do that more than ever, but we are now in overshoot so…
2. Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started.
3. Shade Earth. Not regions, The whole globe. There are two ways to do that:
a. Stratospheric aerosols
b. Planetary sunshades in space, at Sun-Earth L1.
That’s the whole solution space, conceptually. As long as we continue to fail within that space, we will suffer compounding effects of unmitigated climate change.
> Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started.
I once did the math, assuming we have enough resources to build a lot of solar panels. Assuming current efficiency levels of solar panels and current commercial feasible levels of direct air carbon capture (DAC), if we annually allocated an amount equal to our current annual solar panel production to building large solar farms dedicated to powering DAC plants, in about 150ish years those plants would be capturing each year an amount about equal to our current total annual emissions.
If we keep expanding solar panel production we could shorten that timeline and build more than just enough to breakeven. The area for those solar farms would be about 1/15th the area of the 5 largest subtropical deserts.
What would we do with all the carbon extracted? That's not really a problem. If we can't think of a good use for it, just mount the solar panels powering the DAC plants a few meters off the ground, convert the carbon to graphite, and dump it under the solar panels. Spread evenly it would only be a few mm thick.
Two of these things will definitely work. One of them is completely untested, poorly understood and with potentially massive consequences for the climate and food production.
Philosophically, this looks like breaking the training data limit in the same way that humans do: by using an internally consistent view of the world to imagine new scenarios and integrate them into an updated worldview.
Considering climate was generally defined as a 30 year window when I took earth sciences classes in the early 2000s I don’t think it’s a sleight of hand. Pretending that every minor outlier year in the span of 200 out of tens of thousands of years is an Armageddon-signalling catastrophe in order to secure more funding is far less genuine.
1. Emitting fewer greenhouse gasses. Need to do that more than ever, but we are now in overshoot so…
2. Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started.
3. Shade Earth. Not regions, The whole globe. There are two ways to do that:
a. Stratospheric aerosols b. Planetary sunshades in space, at Sun-Earth L1.
That’s the whole solution space, conceptually. As long as we continue to fail within that space, we will suffer compounding effects of unmitigated climate change.
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