US considers 'sun blocking' to cool the Earth: What is it and does it really work?

So we've reached "bargaining". Good to know.

We will do literally anything to avoid changing our ways huh
Next month:
Europe considers sacrificing babies to Satan
- I was reading about how carbon capture from the air is going to be a trillion dollar industry. Just SMH. It’s so much easier to not emit than it is to recapture. But since we’ll never get China and India off of coal, I guess we have to do something.
  
  But since we’ll never get China and India off of coal, I guess we have to do something.
  This is a bad and uninformed take.
  Per person, emissions in both China and India are still substantially lower than almost all developed countries. India’s per person emissions are less than one-quarter of the global average, and roughly one-tenth of those of the US. Close to a quarter of all carbon emissions come from manufacturing products which are exported and consumed in other countries. Textiles and clothes exported from India and south Asia account for over 4% of global emissions.
  Labelling India and China as the chief villains of COP26 is a convenient narrative. The financial aid which rich countries promised yet failed to deliver as part of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015 was supposed to help developing countries dump coal for cleaner sources of energy. And while the world berated India and China for weakening the Glasgow Climate Pact’s coal resolution, few questioned the fossil fuel projects being floated in developed nations, like the UK’s Cambo oilfield and the Line 3 oil pipeline between Canada and the US.
  Source
  And that's without even going back to look at imperialism and its impacts on those countries, and why they're now having to play catch up with the west (who not only did our fair share of polluting during our own industrial revolutions, but still continue to do so pretty much freely), mostly to provide for the west.
  This, like the overpopulation myth, are nothing more than racist distractions created by the rich and powerful to get us to blame "others" rather than look for who is really at fault - them (Edit to clarify: and by them I mean all obscenely rich and the governments they control, faux communists included).
  
  It's difficult to get China and India off coal because they're doing most of the world's manufacturing and some processes are currently impossible without it. But 'we' exported manufacturing to Asia and 'we' buy the products the coal is used for. 'We' don't get to wriggle out of responsibility by pretending that a couple of low and middle income countries are somehow responsible for 'our' excessive consumption.
  
  China's usage of coal is huge, but it's proportiojn has dropped from 75+% in 1990 to around 55%. It's slow progress - it may accelerate. The problem is the rest of the world exports so much of its manufacturing requirements to China.
  
  Western countries are just as guilty, if not more. We contributed terribly for several hundred years, and still today net carbon use is still increasing in developed countries. It's just not increasing quite as much as before.
  
  Not emitting is not that easy. We are in a transition period at the moment. Electric vehicles are here but we don't have all the infrastructure needed to support them. Let alone the fact that battery tech is not developing as fast as we need it to.
  Right now liquid fuels still have the advantage of greater energy density. If we could move to hydrogen fuels that would be cool, and we could repurpose existing petroleum facilities.
  But who knows which way the tech is going to go. The only sure thing is that we are in for a wild ride one way or the other.
  
  Other problems with your post aside, you think it's good enough to emit less but not worth it to actively invest in getting the excess carbons out? The problems they are solving overlap, but they are not the same set of problems.
  
  Heres the reference about carbon capture, with all the graphs you need to support this fact, for arguing with people later.
  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10842-5
  Chatterjee, S., & Huang, K. W. (2020). Unrealistic energy and materials requirement for direct air capture in deep mitigation pathways. Nature communications, 11(1), 3287.
  
  The vast majority of pollution is from agriculture. Are you gonna quit eating meat anytime soon?
- The entire world runs on fossil fuels.
  They power the machines used to gather materials. They power the machines that move those materials around the world to be turned into goods. They power moving those goods around the world to be sold. They power moving them again once they’ve been sold. And if we’re really lucky, they won’t use any more at that point.
  The electricity you use. The gas in your car. The gas you use to heat your home or cook. The gas the Amazon van uses to get stuff from the warehouse to your door. The gas used by the semi truck to move stuff from one warehouse to another. The gas used by the cargo vessel to move stuff across the sea. The gas used for the mining equipment for the raw materials to make stuff. The gas used in the machines to turn materials into stuff.
  Hell, the gas used to harvest crops and move them around and keep them cool, if need be.
  Yes, we can and should be working on ways to divest from fossil fuels at every opportunity, but even if everyone was perfectly on board it wouldn’t happen overnight. It’ll take a few lifetimes at best.
  
  We could have started in the 70s or 80s or 90s and maybe we'd be a significant way into those lifetimes, instead of just thinking about starting now.
  
  For sure. I 100% agree. But I am also 100% against severely economically and entropically unviable ways to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.
  
  Inactivist baloney. The first four are under your direct control and can be changed in weeks. The fifth and sixth will change themselves within 5 years as diesel will be uncompetitive. Half of international shipping is just fossil fuels, and half of what remains is short enough range that currently commercialising battery tech is sufficient. Mining equipment is already going solar because flying diesel to remote sites is ludicrously expensive.
  Most of the remaining emissions can be eliminated by the global top 10% being ever so slightly less craven and greedy, 99% of red meat is nutritionally unnecessary and accounts for the majority of agricultural emissions and crops.
  We can and must get most of the way there in a decade, and the only obstacles for doing so are people like you.

The Simpsons isn't just an animated sitcom. It's a documentary about the future:
- I knew i saw this idea somewhere. I just couldn't decide if it was futurama or the Simpson
- Their staff is full of masons, lol.

Reduction of fossil fuels
Literally block out the sun
we’re fucked
- Even if we stopped all use of fossil fuels overnight, there’s a lot of ‘baked in’ warming. This isn’t ‘instead of’ it’s ‘in addition to’ when it comes to halting warming.
  
  Yep, it takes about 30 years to see the effects, what we're dealing with right now is the 1993 emissions, if we stopped using all fossil fuels right this instant things would continue to get worse well into the 2050s.
- I call this enemy... the sun

Won't help with ocean acidification. Stop using fossil fuels, leave it in the ground.
- Yeah, I saw a link to a study that modeled outcomes within the next fre decades where acidification kills enough marine life and favors the reproduction of other microbes. Something about either low oxygen in the oceans and/or the atmosphere, or maybe a dangerous increase in stmospheric toxins resulting from that.
  Maybe I'll try and find it to verify.

Growing evidence that governments/corporations would sooner give up seeing the goddamn sun than get off even a fraction of fossil fuel usage
- to be fair, they'll probably make it block only infrared light, so the visible luminosity stays the same at first..
  Then they will be selling ad space on the sunshield! Remember this tweet.

Will they use diamondium or diamondillium?
- WERNSTROM!!!!!
  
  I just watched this episode lol.

Given much of the transition to renewable energy is planned to be solar this may be counterproductive. China is rolling out monumental amounts of solar at the moment, we can't just block the sun since it's part of the solution.
- Unless we block the sun with a big solar panel!
- That’s a feature, not a bug. Using geo-engineering will take the pressure off of fossil fuel reduction policies. So why use solar power when you can happily continue burning coal and oil?
- Sun Power Beaming
  https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/news/2022-09-solar-power-beams-a-step-towards-cleaner-energy
  https://www.space.com/space-solar-power-satellite-beams-energy-1st-time
  This is the scifi future baby! Everything going up from now on 🚀
  
  They lit an LED with a radio and a rectifier. Nothing futuristic involved at all.

Literally what happened in the Matrix.
- This is the world that you know: the world as it was at the end of the 20th century. It exists now only as a part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix… We have only bits and pieces of information, but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration.
  We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI: a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power, and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.
- Which was really sooooo dumb. “At the time they were reliant on solar power…” as if we aren’t 🙄
  I love those movies but their joke thermodynamics are simply atrocious.
  
  The original plot of the movie was that humans were not an energy source but the computing substrate; that all those brains were networked together as a meat-based platform for the AIs to run on, which is why Neo was able to change reality in the Matrix, because he was able to override the programming for the chunk running on him at any given time, just by thinking it.
  But the fucking mouthbreathers they got in for their focus groups didn't get the concept, so they had to rewrite it, demoting humans to freaking lemon-batteries and making a mockery of the whole thing.
  Yes I'm bitter.
  
  Because clearly stacking people in buckets of gloop is the most efficient energy source available.
  
  Wasn't that specifically in reference to the machines? So the viewer knows that they weren't relying on fossil fuels and access to sunlight would be their weakness.

What could ever go wrong
- Literally the deranged plot that got Mr Burns shot in the Simpsons
  
  I thought it was because he stole Maggie's lollypop

Truly the age of social media.
"The Sun is killing us!"
"Just block him, bro."

Has no one seen The Matrix/Animatrix?!
- I saw it on Futurama It's all fun and games till a tiny asteroid pachinks the side of it and it burns a hole through Kyoto, Anagram lover's Tokyo.
- We

This is what I call a "hotfix" .

American arrogance at its best.
- The EU is also thinking about the same exact measures:
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-26/eu-looks-into-blocking-out-the-sun-as-climate-efforts-falter
  This is human hubris just like how the Holocene extinction is human hubris, we don't need to pin things on any single national entity.
  
  I think it's a combination of hubris and desperation. Hubris because it could still go very wrong and serve us a frozen extinction instead of a boiling one. Desperation because those who acknowledge what's happening know that something probably needs to be done to not only stop but reverse this but the corporations might be more likely to burn it all down protecting their interests than cooperate.
  The "easy" solutions will likely lead to war and might not even help anything at this point. The promising technologies still need to be scaled up (also in a way that makes sure we don't overshoot the cooling targets or remove so much CO2 that plants die out).
  The more I think of it, the more I like this desperate idea. If it does work too well, we can always just send more rockets to move whatever it is out of the way. Which we should have built and ready to go shortly after the blocker is deployed. Preferably sitting in orbit to minimize the chances of it screwing up if desperately needed.
  Hmm sunlight is also a carbon reducer since it drives photosynthesis. But desperate times...
- I mean this is just saying the US is open to researching the possibility. They aren't even committing to researching it.
  "However, the report also clarifies that no decision has been made to "establish a comprehensive research programme focused on solar radiation modification.""
  It's a very prudent decision to study it. We can determine and quantify the risks this way.
- taxing the rich properly would (blasphem alert) help redistribute wealth among workers and decrease inflation, and also make the world colder, since we dont have to work as much. but i guess we would be stripped from our daily dose of uv light soon. yea who needs vitamin b3 anyway ?

Re-engineering our space program towards space manufacturing, mineral extraction, and building permanent residences in space sufficient enough to support the people that would be needed to build and maintain space-based infrastructure like a reflector would be an undertaking I'm not sure humanity currently has the drive for.
Science and futurism YouTuber Isaac Arthur is going to love this. Giant aluminum reflectors are a huge part of future space infrastructure and he is happy to point this out quite often.
- I believe they're trying to chemically blocking the sun (using sulfur dioxide) rather than physically blocking it.
  It is obvious we're not gonna fix this by changing our habits, so I'm all for a technological solution. It will have unforeseen consequences and we will deal with those, too. Humankind is nothing but adaptable.

Isn't this part of the plot of Snowpiercer? At least the movie.
- I immediately thought the same thing. We need Wilford to hurry up with his train.
  
  You meam Charlie?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yqi0FabHHs&t=1467s
Great the solar roadways of climate change fixes.

Who decides on the thermostat settings? How fast can we reverse if we dial back too far?
- Isn't that like the whole premise of snowpiercer? Humanity tried to cool the atmosphere but fucked up and went too far in reverse?

Has no one seen highlander 2?!

Wasnt this the start of Highlander 2?
- You must be confused. The first Highlander movie was followed up with Highlander 3. There was no Highlander 2.

I did not vote for Lord Ruler
- The mist protects us.

Idk the impact of how reflective this site is but I assume it's more than anything man made yet US is destroying it:
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-nasa-opposes-lithium-tabletop-flat.html
Instead of creating new solutions why not protect existing ones?

The best part is you can dual purpose the shades to collect solar power and microwave beam it wherever you want.

Cen we not? We could always try other more sane methods that are available

The industrial revolution was a mistake. Convenience and comfort have proven to not be worth the cost of complete ecological destruction. Total deindustrialization is the only solution, and it will not happen. We're going to kill ourselves off, or nearly, and the world will be a better place for it in the long run.
- The agricultural revolution was a mistake. The industrial revolution was just the logical fallout from it.
- Man, we've been destroying our ecosystems long before industrialization.
  
  And we've been doing exponentially more so since. If you think there's even a remotely close comparison to be made, you're very poorly informed.

The UN Environmental Program's recent report into SRM concludes that it is not currently a realistic or wise plan.
"UNEP concurs with the panel that, at present, large-scale, or operational deployment of SRM technologies is not necessary, viable, prudent or sufficiently safe, given the limited scientific understanding and uncertainty about the potential impacts and unintended consequences," says UNEP’s Chief Scientist Andrea Hinwood.
"The review concludes that SRM cannot replace reducing greenhouse gas emissions."
Nonetheless, the body doesn't rule out the method altogether, with the report concluding that their assessment of the technique "may change should climate action remain insufficient".