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Practically, the planet is very big and injecting reflective material into the stratosphere would be a ridiculously expensive proposition, with little or no imm

Practically, the planet is very big and injecting reflective material into the stratosphere would be a ridiculously expensive proposition, with little or no immediate economic reward for those carrying it out. Now, when Pinatubo blew in the early 1990s, it produced about a decade-long cooling effect relative to what otherwise would have happened, but that effect faded. So, you'd have to have a plan to inject a Pinatubo-scale amount of material into the atmosphere at least once a decade, and underneath that, the fossil CO2 and CH4 emissions would steadily be increasing in the atmosphere, so if the project was ever paused, you'd have a rapid heating period which would probably be worse in immediate effect than if you'd just allow the warming to progress more steadily. Those are the practical reasons I think it's a nonsensical proposal, along the lines of parking a sunshade in space (getting that much material out to Lagrange 1 would be so costly as to be unimaginable). It's far cheaper just to replace, say, 1-3% of fossil fuel production per year with equivalent wind/solar/storage.

tablespoon 4y ago
> Those are the practical reasons I think it's a nonsensical proposal, along the lines of parking a sunshade in space (getting that much material out to Lagrange 1 would be so costly as to be unimaginable). But it's sci-fi nonsense, so full speed ahead because I believe in science!
mrpf1ster 4y ago
Kurzgesagt covered this in one of their videos, it is not as hard as you make it out to be: https://youtu.be/dSu5sXmsur4 https://youtu.be/dSu5sXmsur4
sidewndr46 4y ago
I imagine the "inject a Pinatubo-scale amount of material" idea gets many folks excited around the possibility of bringing back Project Plowshare.
DennisP 4y ago
Cheaper, and insufficient. We've got less than 30 years to reduce our emissions to zero. Replace a little more than 3% of fossil plants annually and you decarbonize the grid in that time, but there's also transportation. You'll need way more electricity for electric cars, and then there's ships and airplanes, for which we'll need some kind of carbon-neutral liquid fuel. We have to replace all the steel plants, and figure out some kind of carbon-neutral cement, and somehow stop all the emissions from agriculture, and do something about all the high-temperature industrial processes that burn their own fossil. Meanwhile, our energy usage is increasing by a couple percent a year, which is why with all the wind/solar/storage we've built so far, we haven't made a dent in decreasing emissions.
kaashif 4y ago
Without having actually done the research the White House is now funding, we can't just draw these conclusions and dismiss the ideas as impractical. Funding the research is good. Maybe there is a relatively cheap (can be funded by one nation) and reversible way to do this, don't we have to at least try to find it? There is no rational reason to be against gathering more information. > It's far cheaper just to replace, say, 1-3% of fossil fuel production per year with equivalent wind/solar/storage. But this isn't going to happen, and even if it were, it's too little too late to stop climate change, a lot of which is already locked in due to past emissions.

tablespoon 4y ago

> Those are the practical reasons I think it's a nonsensical proposal, along the lines of parking a sunshade in space (getting that much material out to Lagrange 1 would be so costly as to be unimaginable). But it's sci-fi nonsense, so full speed ahead because I believe in science!

mrpf1ster 4y ago

Kurzgesagt covered this in one of their videos, it is not as hard as you make it out to be: https://youtu.be/dSu5sXmsur4 https://youtu.be/dSu5sXmsur4

sidewndr46 4y ago

I imagine the "inject a Pinatubo-scale amount of material" idea gets many folks excited around the possibility of bringing back Project Plowshare.

DennisP 4y ago

Cheaper, and insufficient. We've got less than 30 years to reduce our emissions to zero. Replace a little more than 3% of fossil plants annually and you decarbonize the grid in that time, but there's also transportation. You'll need way more electricity for electric cars, and then there's ships and airplanes, for which we'll need some kind of carbon-neutral liquid fuel. We have to replace all the steel plants, and figure out some kind of carbon-neutral cement, and somehow stop all the emissions from agriculture, and do something about all the high-temperature industrial processes that burn their own fossil. Meanwhile, our energy usage is increasing by a couple percent a year, which is why with all the wind/solar/storage we've built so far, we haven't made a dent in decreasing emissions.

kaashif 4y ago

Without having actually done the research the White House is now funding, we can't just draw these conclusions and dismiss the ideas as impractical. Funding the research is good. Maybe there is a relatively cheap (can be funded by one nation) and reversible way to do this, don't we have to at least try to find it? There is no rational reason to be against gathering more information. > It's far cheaper just to replace, say, 1-3% of fossil fuel production per year with equivalent wind/solar/storage. But this isn't going to happen, and even if it were, it's too little too late to stop climate change, a lot of which is already locked in due to past emissions.