In February 2000, Paul Crutzen rose to speak at the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme in Mexico. And when he spoke, people took notice. He was then one of the world’s most cited scientists, a Nobel laureate working on huge-scale problems – the ozone hole, the effects of a nuclear winter.
So little wonder that a word he improvised took hold and spread widely: this was the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological epoch, representing an Earth transformed by the effects of industrialised humanity.
The idea of an entirely new and human-created geological epoch is a sobering scenario as context for the current UN climate summit, COP28. The impact of decisions made at these and other similar conferences will be felt not just beyond our own lives and those of our children, but perhaps beyond the life of human society as we know it.
I think solar occlusion is the way to go; you could harvest solar power 24/7 and beam it back via microwave; you could directly occlude the amount of sunlight impacting the earth, enabling fine and localized changes, and it wouldn’t require pumping unknowns into the atmosphere and hoping there isn’t some kind of whiplash effect down the road.
it’s just expensive as fuck due to the amount of material; a lunar manufacturing operation is a must.
That’s magnitudes more expensive than stopping fossils right now. Not to mention the impact on ecosystems worldwide.
Oh no - I in no way advocated that - fossil fuels must be stopped. Period. I just worry that in the short term - 100-200 years - it won’t make much of a difference to the heat running out of control. And in order to ‘stop’ fossil fuels takes time - even with a ruthless implementation. We’re going to be lucky to stop the world from exploration of fossil fuels and not burning the already known shit - but also, I suspect mass deaths from heat will galvanize enough of the world population to see it through.
Meantime, an automated construction system on the moon that lofts sections of wafer thin occluder panels into position gradually building a system described in my post… might actually prevent the worst parts of runaway heating by stopping a small but significant percentage day after day when needed.