Republicans, Global Warming and Solar Shields

This idea seems a little far-fetched to me.

Putting up solar shields to cool the planet would be, not only a huge engineering challenge, but it seems to be that it would be very difficult to control.

For those who don’t wanna click on the link to find out what I’m on about, there’s this idea to put shields high above the Earth designed to block out solar radiation and cool the planet in an attempt to reduce the effects of global warming.

The idea was inspired from the fact that volcanic ash suspended in the atmosphere has a cooling effect on the planet. I guess they figure if it works with volcanoes, then why not put up some sun visors?

I guess at first glance the idea sounds ok, but I can easily imagine a scenario where the cooling starts to happen rapidly and then things get too cold, then we gotta raise the shields to warm things up again, then it’s starts getting too hot, then we lower the shields, etc…..

We can’t even control traffic for chrissake, how’re we gonna control this?

This just sounds too technologically tricky and implementing it would require global cooperation of the kind humanity has never, EVER demonstrated. We can’t even get together on the whole reducing carbon emissions thing, how can we expect cooperation on putting up something in orbit that would affect everyone?

Further, the global climate is a VERY complex system and we are still struggling to understand how our climate works, we just don’t know enough about the effects of such a system on the natural balance. Hell, we don’t fully understand the effects of carbon emissions on the global climate, how are we gonna understand this?

One more thing about this idea that I find annoying is that, even if we did manage to do this (by some miracle of global cooperation), it treats the symptoms and not the causes. This does nothing to prevent releasing more greenhouse gasses, we really, really, really should start there.

I loved this comment though:

So if you have the shield up there and it fails – or, for example, the Republicans put up a shield and then the Democrats come in to power and turn it down – then you effectively compress into a decade or two the warming that would have happened while the shield was up

Yah. The Republicans are going to put them up. Sure. (Hey! What’s this fairy doing in my ass?)

Personally, I think we should just turn the sun off for a couple of minutes each day.

Photo Credit: zakgollop

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