Essay by Eric Worrall
According to MIT researchers, blowing bubbles in space to block sunlight might be the solution to our climate woes. But MIT, like all the others, are ignoring a fundamental flaw with solar geoengineering schemes. Plants need sunlight.
MIT Scientists Propose Space Bubbles to Reverse the Worst of Climate Change
Angely Mercado
Published 2 days ago: June 17, 2022 at 4:48 amA team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe that we can mitigate the worst of climate change with… space bubbles. They’ve outlined a strategy in which a huge raft of bubbles, carefully positioned between Earth and the Sun, would deflect sunlight (and thus heat) to stop further global warming.
“Geoengineering might be our final and only option. Yet, most geoengineering proposals are earth-bound, which poses tremendous risks to our living ecosystem,” a web page dedicated to the solution reads. “If we deflect 1.8% of incident solar radiation before it hits our planet, we could fully reverse today’s global warming.”
The bubble array would be made of inflatable shields of thin silicon or another suitable material, according to the team. The bubble cluster would be placed in outer space at a Lagrange Point, where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravitational pulls create a stable orbit. The researchers also said that if the plan becomes a reality in the future, the completed array would be roughly the size of Brazil.
They admitted that one of the main concerns with their proposal would be the logistics of fabricating a large film, transporting it into space, and then unfolding it to form the bubble raft. They suggested fabricating the spheres in outer space to minimise shipping costs.
…
Read more: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2022/06/mit-scientists-propose-space-bubbles-to-reverse-the-worst-of-climate-change/
The main project website is available here.
This project seems more fun than other geoengineering favourites, like blowing sulphuric acid or lime dust into the stratosphere. But aside from immense cost, all these geoengineering fantasies suffer a fatal flaw.
If ever implemented, solar geoengineering could cause a global famine.
Estimating global agricultural effects of geoengineering using volcanic eruptions
Jonathan Proctor, Solomon Hsiang, Jennifer Burney, Marshall Burke & Wolfram Schlenker
Abstract
Solar radiation management is increasingly considered to be an option for managing global temperatures1,2, yet the economic effects of ameliorating climatic changes by scattering sunlight back to space remain largely unknown3. Although solar radiation management may increase crop yields by reducing heat stress4, the effects of concomitant changes in available sunlight have never been empirically estimated. Here we use the volcanic eruptions that inspired modern solar radiation management proposals as natural experiments to provide the first estimates, to our knowledge, of how the stratospheric sulfate aerosols created by the eruptions of El Chichón and Mount Pinatubo altered the quantity and quality of global sunlight, and how these changes in sunlight affected global crop yields. We find that the sunlight-mediated effect of stratospheric sulfate aerosols on yields is negative for both C4 (maize) and C3 (soy, rice and wheat) crops. Applying our yield model to a solar radiation management scenario based on stratospheric sulfate aerosols, we find that projected mid-twenty-first century damages due to scattering sunlight caused by solar radiation management are roughly equal in magnitude to benefits from cooling. This suggests that solar radiation management—if deployed using stratospheric sulfate aerosols similar to those emitted by the volcanic eruptions it seeks to mimic—would, on net, attenuate little of the global agricultural damage from climate change. Our approach could be extended to study the effects of solar radiation management on other global systems, such as human health or ecosystem function.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0417-3
The reality is there is no remotely plausible level of global warming which would make it worth taking the risk of attempting to reflect sunlight to cool the Earth.
Even if the conditions of the Early Eocene (5-8C warmer than today) returned, tropical conditions most of the way to the Arctic and Antarctic, plants would still grow, and farms would still be productive. Almost certainly more productive than today.
Our primitive primate ancestors dominated and prospered during the extreme warmth of the Early Eocene, with populations of primates exploding across Africa, Europe and Asia. So we have strong paleo evidence that warm weather is no threat to primates. We also know from today’s world, the Earth’s tropics are some of the most productive regions in the world.
Solar geoengineering by contrast has the potential to mess up the entire ecosystem, and cause widespread starvation and crop failures. Not just because cool periods are less productive, but also because plants suffer immensely if they are deprived of sunlight – so much so, even a mild volcanic perturbation is enough to produce a noticeable dip in production.
Attempting to tamper with the amount of sunlight Earth receives in my opinion would be far more dangerous than any remotely plausible negative consequences of global warming itself.
Obviously this is a worst case scenario. The odds are negligible of a solar geoengineering project like this ever advancing sufficiently to be a threat to the global ecosystem. But given the evidence of negative consequences, in my opinion MIT scientists shouldn’t even be making the attempt to promote this lunacy.
So, what’s normally referred to as silicone is a polymer of dimethylsiloxane. On earth, sourced in China the monomer costs $7-10/kg with a specific gravity of 0.965 (slightly less dense than water).
What thickness of film will be needed? Times 8.5 million square kilometers! Assuming that you manufacture it in situ from (what? Asteroid mining?), how much does it cost just for the silicone material alone?
Each 0.1 mm thick x 8.5 km^2 film would cost about $8.2 trillion dollars for the dimethyl siloxane monomer alone, assuming that the necessary feedstocks can be sourced off earth and brought to a space factory for the same costs as in China. You’ll need at least two layers to make “bubble wrap”, so $16.4 trillion for raw materials. Then it needs to be polymerized and fabricated, inflated and sealed into “bubbles”. And stabilized in place somehow.
Doubtful that it can be done at all, but certainly not for less than $100 trillion. Could it be repaired, or how many months useful life before it needs to be replaced?
Truly absurd.
But but but…we only have 12 years to live..we must do something…..lol
8 yrs 10 months and 24 days
MIT won’t get any funding if they don’t prop up the “global warming” lie.
Poor MIT. You used to have respect. Now you’re just a joke, serving the Judaic push for global control. Disgusting.
And their faculty will gladly fill them with gas or hot-air for free. Actually, they would probably want a giant grant for a multi-year study first.
I like the space bubble idea. It’s not really controlling the climate. It’s controlling the weather, which sounds like a good thing to me. Also, I don’t particularly like Russel Seitz, but I like his idea of shiny ocean bubbles too.
“I like the space bubble idea. It’s not really controlling the climate. It’s controlling the weather, which sounds like a good thing to me.”
Ahh, NO. The “space bubble idea” is about controlling sunlight falling on Earth. Weather is determined by many factors other than just incoming sunlight.
I know, I know, I know! We can fill the bubbles with cow farts and burps and get a real twofer.
here’s the solution to global warming — air pollution.
Everyone should burn fossil fuels and disconnect the pollution controls.
Remember that global cooling from 1940 ti 1975 as CO2 levels rose?
Remember how the cooling was blamed on air pollution?
That excuse worked for a long time.
But then a global warming trend started in 1975.
So the Climate Howlers had to say the air pollution was gone,
it fell out of the sky in 1975.
Some people would not believe that claim, because it actually
took about 25 years to reduce air pollution.
The Climate Howlers then “revised” the global cooling
from 1940 to 1975 — it has disappeared from the record books.
In 1975 NCAR had been reporting the decline from the peak month
to the trough month within that period (Not January 1940 to December 1975)
was almost -0.6 degrees C. A big change — not a rounding error.
A few scientists had been predicting a global cooling crisis in 1974 and 1975
based on that global warming trend.
Now the official records show no global cooling at all.
Science fraud.
What a wonderful idea. Plants need sunlight and CO². Do they want to turn the Earth into Mars?
Man can freeze or stop all man-made climate change engines or pollution production and yet it will continue…
Why?
Climate change is caused by automatic natural and spiritual judgments incurred by man’s sins against God and man.
Why the down votes? You know in your hearts it’s true…
A: Science and religion don’t mix . . .at least not with good consequences.
As Mark Twain wisely observed:
“No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.”
The only bubbles worth anything are the tiny ones in your wine.
Wha . . . wha . . . ummm . . . wha bout champagne? . . . ya know, that fizzy stuff?
Yea, I’ll have another, plusheese.
grant money fishing
As quoted in the above article, Angely Mercado writes:
“The bubble cluster would be placed in outer space at a Lagrange Point, where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravitational pulls create a stable orbit.”
The ignorance, it burns!
Of the five Lagrangian points in the Sun-Earth system, only the L4 and L5 points are inherently stable . . . the remaining points L1, L2 and L3 are metastable, meaning that any small disturbance force, such as momentum of sunlight impinging on a hypothetical MIT-envisioned “space bubble”, will cause the object’s orbit to diverge from the Lagrangian point.
(Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point )
The only Lagrangian point that could possible serve as a location to block sunlight from reaching the Earth is L1. But again, it is a metastable position.
Thus, a means of actively maintaining orbital position of “space bubbles” at the L1 point would be needed for the proposed plan to have any semblance of feasibility.
No mention of such in this not-ready-for-prime-time, crackpot idea.
I also thought of the same problems – some muppet at MIT should have attended his lectures, he might have foreseen the issues. Perhaps, as a solution, they’ll suggest a very, very long monofilament cable anchored to the spinward and trailing rocks on L4 and 5? After all, what could possibly go wrong? sarc
A total eclipse of any connection with reality.
Jethro Bodine had a great idea. Drill large holes in the Hollywood hills and put large fans to blow smog out to sea. He is a super genius.
And here I thought people at MIT were smart
It seems like the entire academic world has thrown reality aside and is engaged in a perpetual role-playing game.
Well, as long as the article gets viewer clicks that’s all that matters in today’s world.
several large pipes in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans pumping seawater into the upper atmosphere during just the summer months to create clouds for summer cooling and overall planet cooling too. put one close to the S. Calif coast and maybe end the droughts?
Giant frisbee flingers throwing reflective discs out into the Pacific Ocean to raise albedo levels. Train schools of dolphins to retrieve them if they sink.
“Science”…does the M in MIT stand for “Moron”?
Change my mind.
Of course, this presupposes they don’t WANT to create a global famine – and that’s difficult to believe given what they are doing to the world right now! We are at best, a few months from people starving in their homes because food and energy are totally out of reach.
“Space Bubbles” to block the Sun?
That would be incredibly expensive.
We already have tons of nukes.
I vote we launch them all and create a nuclear winter!
(As long as I get to pick the targets.)
I’ve seen that movie. It did not end well…
And what form of magic will keep the radiation pressure from sending these bubbles off in the direction of Tau Ceti???
They are actually paying these idiots for this. Someone needs to be elected who is willing to severely cull the academic elite who gave up on real science decades ago.
Hey, I’d be ok with this as long as they rescinded the CO2 endangerment finding first and enacted policies to promote their use, including coal. However not a snowballs chance in…. Would they do that so NO! Very bad and stupid idea.
Agriculture has been with the human race for at least 10,000 years. Over all that
time a great many men spent a great many hours trying to grow the food necessary to maintain the human race. They worked day and night for lifetimes on end. And they learned a lot. And during that time, ideas have been offered by these men for the infinite variety of problems that they encountered along the way. These problems
included vermin, birds, flooding, drought, uneven water requirements for different
crops, winds, storms, lack of proper soil, depleted soil, snow, hale, temperatures
going too high or too low due to local weather conditions, insects — crawling and
flying, improper planting techniques, lack of fertilizer, too much fertilizing,
competition from other plants such as weeds, yes, even too much sun, and so much more. Guess what? After all that time, very few ever complained about lack of sunlight as a problem. Many plants can even grow indoors with just indirect sunlight, representing several orders of magnitude reduction of the direct solar lighting they would get outdoors. Why has sunlight almost never been represented as a limiting factor? Because the sun shines all day long, except for little periods of clouds or rain, and those periods give the plants precious water or reductions in heat stress and usually never last very long either (more accurately, if they did, the water itself could
prove their greatest enemy, not the lack of sunlight). Even when there’s haze in the
air, frequently the sunlight is more than enough and if the sunlight isn’t enough at a
certain latitude, farmers just have to go to a lower latitude or to better soil and —
magic — there is enough sunlight there to meet their (and their crops) needs.
As an example, at times of the equinox (sun directly over the equator at 12:00 noon),
going from 25° latitude to 27° latitude, the reduction in the amount of sunlight
reaching the surface of the earth would be 1.7%, derived from simple trigonometry.
No solar geoengineering scheme would ever try to reduce sunlight more than this and, in any event, such a scheme would only be applied to the atmosphere near Earth’s equatorial areas, since any haze introduced would have much less effect on the cooling of the earth as a whole at higher latitudes. Thus, if anyone were so ignorant as to ever worry that the loss of sunlight caused by this geoengineering would represent a photosynthetic impediment, he could just move his super-sunlight-sensitive crop-growing 2° closer to the equator and he would be getting exactly the same sunlight as before. Of course, since, as I said, sunlight on earth is not the
limiting factor for photosynthesis, this would hardly be necessary, and MANY crops on earth are grown at much higher latitudes quite successfully. Since, as I said, such
man-directed geoengineering would never even affect these higher latitudes, it would
never represent even the smallest of problems there.
For the last 17 years, cosmic rays hitting earth’s upper atmosphere have been above
normal, and those rays have reduced overall sunlight hitting the surface of the entire
globe (not just the equatorial regions) by a small fraction, perhaps 1.7%. And yet
crop yields during the past 17 years haven’t been affected by this reduction
whatsoever. Nor would any serious person ever expect them to be. Photosynthesis
takes a very small fraction of the Sun’s total spectrum of electromagnetic radiation
to do its wonders. The rest is left over for the rest of us to see things, keep warm,
refresh our land water supplies, etc. Sunlight never was nor ever will be the limit
for photosynthesis unless we have a gigantic catastrophe happening when the next super volcano or large meteor hits. And if such events do happen, we’ll have a lot of other immediate things to worry about besides less sunlight for photosynthesis into the future.
And crop yields all over the Earth are probably 2 orders of magnitude greater now than they were before World War I — without any rise in sunlight at all during that time frame. Sunlight increase has had nothing to do with these spectacular rises in crop yields. The science of photosynthesis is not really necessary to understand these considerations, though maybe we would have to look to a different science to explain such worrying about them caused by solar geoengineering — that of abnormal
psychology.
Geoengineering, through the reduction of sunlight striking the surface of the earth by
the introduction of an upper atmospheric haze represents a golden alternative to the
lowering of the temperature of the earth compared to any and all other crackpot ideas
we are now being offered to effectuate that result by our crazy world. Of course the
MIT space bubble idea is insane, but other forms of this geoengineering, spectacularly inexpensive by comparison, would be perfectly rational.
David Solan
Having said all of that, why do you think the most productive agricultural areas of the world having planting and harvesting seasons?
Technical note: The L1 Lagrange point is not fully stable. Any deviation from the precise Lagrange point, or any perturbation in the plane perpendicular to a vector toward earth (or toward the sun), will slowly (and then more quickly) lead an object further away from the precise Lagrange point. I don’t know the expected hang time, but estimates for the Webb space telescope (at the L2 Lagrange point opposite earth from the sun) are that the telescope’s position is stable only on the order of one month, requiring a rocket-thrust nudge every few weeks to keep it in position.
The upshot is that we need not worry about being stuck with shades that aren’t needed. In a relatively brief time they will wander away.
By the way, around 15 years ago I read a piece, I think by Freeman Dyson, suggesting that railguns could shoot ‘umbrella’ objects to the L1 position.
Clarification: L1 is stable with respect to deviations along the vector, but not with respect to deviations along the perpendicular plane.
Your “clarification” states the same thing as your OP, and both are incorrect.
As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point clearly points out in text and graphic forms, it is the radial (i.e., along the Sun-Earth line, which of course is continuously rotating as Earth orbits the Sun) force disturbances that will cause objects to drift away from the metastable L1 point.