Scientists want to block out the sun. How worried should we be?

23 comments

1. Very

2. >How worried should we be?

   about how 10 years ago the same scientists we’re mostly just thinking about it.. and now they running experiments?

3. Id think you’re crazy to NOT consider drastic measures at this point. Unchecked emmsions that trigger irreversablable tipping points is as bad as it gets. Anything to extend those events is all that matters now.

4. We would rather block the sun than curb emissions.

5. Wasn’t this a Simpsons episode?

6. Would prob rather have global warming than this.

   Rather die in the open than live in a cave… Sorry 

7. Seattle checking in, what’s a ‘sun’?

8. Would this not be terrible for plant life?

9. If we block out the sun. That means we’ll have to make more energy and sell light sources. That will be good for utilities and industrials.

   That would increase our economic output and increase our GDP.

   You see crisis, I see business opportunities, we are not the same.

10. cut meat (your, mine grandmas used to have meat once a week)

    localize production (not global for sake of (lower)price; only when needed like exotic fruits)

    workers, class unity

    better ways to do agro (best local too)

    technooptimism (last resort) to mitigate CC – way to make “green sand/concrete/steel” etc. w/o need for bigger harm (ecological ways, new materials, – to fight/stop CC)

    -then everything else, e.g. clouds or dust or reflective space blankets…

11. Very. It is terminally stupid.

12. Do scientists, or is it the C-suite that does?

13. Idiotic idea.

14. I’d say we could do it a lot easier by setting bombs off underground to force yellow stone to erupt

15. Let’s be clear and honest here, it’s not scientists who want to geoengineering the climate, it’s venture capitalists and CEOs of corporations that rely on keeping things as they are.

16. termination shock by neal stephenson.

17. It didn’t work out so well when we did it as a desperate measure to deprive Agent Smith and his friends of solar power.

18. If it was what most comments here appear to assume, very worried. But the reality would be a 1 to 2 percent decrease in solar energy, an amount you probably couldn’t detect with your eyes, but potentially saving life on earth, so not worried.

19. This is not something most serious scientists — who study volcanoes and their impact on humans through history — actually want.

    There are one or two loud voices like Keith, while everyone else says no.

    Also, this statement is factually incorrect « After months of these manned missions, global temperatures drop by around one degree—as they did when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in June 1991, naturally spewing vast amounts of white ash and sulphates into the stratosphere. »

    The 1991 Pinatubo eruption decreased temperature by half a degree Celsius (this is a UK magazine, so that’s the correct unit and the magazine is wrong).

    There is another commenter here who says « it only makes radiation drop by like 1 or 2%, you wouldn’t notice w your eyes ». This is also factually incorrect. Ever seen that photo Scream? 1883 Krakatoa was a similar magnitude as 1991 Pinatubo, and people noticed all over the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa?wprov=sfti1#Global_optical_effects

    Perhaps it would be better context to say that the optical depth of the atmosphere is 0.6, and 1991 Pinatubo added on 0.15 to that. So the context of that comment is also intentionally misleading. The optical depth of the atmosphere got thicker by 25%.

    The Making Sunsets bros got themselves banned from Baja. And they started shopping around for someone to study what they were doing only after they were doing it. They « shopped » by making random posts to listserves.

    NSF tried to convene a panel on this topic a year ago – and they did last fall – but the follow up and report due out this spring got shutdown.

    In closing – « scientists » don’t want this.

20. Lets get the venetian blind rocket set up and ready to go

21. Modern science always produces “solutions” that manage the symptoms but not solve the underlying problem.

22. The question should be, how worried are scientists to even suggest a plan like this?

23. At last we have created the sun blocking machine from the classic Simpsons episode “the guy who made the sun blocking machine gets shot”

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