I'm sitting here looking up stratospheric aerosol injection and the Storm of the Century. I remember reading in Scientific American (at the time! I was that kid!) that Mt. Pinatubo had likely set global warming back ten years. Ever since then I've been firmly at "I will happily trade a big goddamn volcano for ten years of diminished global warming." What it's gonna take, of course, is less fucking energy use. BUT. Hey am_Unition. hurry up on that fusion.
Your second plot is log vs. linear, so it implies things like "If you want to move from Hungary/Uruguay/Costa Rica levels of 'social progress' (~80) to U.S. levels (~85), it'll take somewhere around 10x as much energy consumption." Talk about diminishing returns. That said, if we're only ~85 (whatever that means), yikes, that's still not high enough, maybe we're underestimating the value of and need for social progress. That said, social well-being is like some weird cultural beast that evolves outside of all reason and most attempted influencings. Good luck scaling it numerically. Turns out plasma fusion is hard, and I'm increasingly convinced that solar is The Way, in combination with better battery tech. Still, I think magnetic confinement fusion has its place in our hierarchy of energy needs, especially for the human-occupied spacecraft of the future. But yeah, if that's true, I might opt to switch industries in a few years to press back on our most pressing problems. Edit: Uhhh. OK. OK so imagine... imagine if we built some sort of fraction of a Dyson shield (around the Earth)? Like we had some honeycomb shell architecture orbiting in LEO, which, for a while, was going at LEO orbit speeds, but was then maybe de-spun. Like for a few years you'd just get split-second solar eclipses semi-randomly every few minutes before they de-spin. After the de-spin, water is stored in the shadows. Maybe it could get that batshit to block the sun. Mirror arrays put into orbit and despun. Edit2: This would not work well for big (>~1 km diameter, I guess?) honeycomb mirrors, the turbulence near the edges of the shadows would create crazy winds... unless that was intentional..? Thanks, it won't get quite that batshit, but thanks again We may not be able to count on a volcanic event within 2100, and if the event is large enough to meaningfully curb global warming, it might be a detrimental event for the planet on its own, maybe even equivalent to the cumulative ill effects of climate change at the time.
Yeah it also says things like "Mexico is further on the 'social progress index' than Russia despite using a tenth as much energy" so I think we can point to the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait on there. I'm a much bigger fan of solar than "inventing new breakthrough technologies" myself (and have been) but I also know that solar has been incremental for seventy years while you yourself have pointed out that fusion research has been under-funded for nearly that long. I also know that 70 years means three generations of physicists and electrical engineers have been taking incremental whacks at it which means it's an incremental science at this point full of people really good at increments and that's not your jam, dawg. ಠ_ಠ So look. 2 of about 17,000,000 t (19,000,000 short tons) being injected – the largest volume ever recorded by modern instruments (see chart and figure). Satellite measurements of ash and aerosol emissions from Mount Pinatubo This very large stratospheric injection resulted in a reduction in the normal amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface by roughly 10% (see figure). This led to a decrease in Northern Hemisphere average temperatures of 0.5–0.6 °C (0.9–1.1 °F) and a global fall of about 0.4 °C (0.7 °F). At the same time, the temperature in the stratosphere rose to several degrees higher than normal, due to absorption of radiation by the aerosol. The stratospheric cloud from the eruption persisted in the atmosphere for three years after the eruption. While not directly responsible, the eruption may have played a part in the formation of the 1993 Storm of the Century. We're trying to keep global warming down to less than a degree, degree and a half, right? We've been at 0.1 degree per decade since the '70s, which sucks, but if you're willing to go "I want a Dyson Egg-beater whooshing around in orbit" I'm willing to go "get in the plane, Smithers": Let's just redneck it. A 787 has a service ceiling of 43,000 ft, and flies at 39,000 feet all the time. That's troposphere for mid-latitudes. Its MTOW is 254t with an empty weight of 132t - I can put that sucker up with 120t of goo. 5 million tons is 42,000 flights is an average of 114 flights a day for a year. Let's say I can do two flights a day per plane and I'm at 60 planes. Southwest owns 736 planes right now. And yeah "storm of the century" and "ozone layer" and all that but you know what? there are many increments between "a few flights" and "60 planes spewing goo twice a day for a year". Note that I DON'T want to do this instead of using less energy, switching to solar, and cutting carbon dioxide emissions. But if it buys us time?Your second plot is log vs. linear, so it implies shit like "If you want to move from Hungary/Uruguay/Costa Rica levels of 'social progress' (80) to U.S. levels (85), it'll take somewhere around 10x as much energy consumption."
Edit: Uhhh. OK. OK so imagine... imagine if we built some sort of fraction of a Dyson shield (around the Earth)?
The injection of aerosols into the stratosphere is thought to have been the largest since the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, with a total mass of SO
Early studies suggest that stratospheric aerosol injection might have relatively low direct cost. The annual cost of delivering 5 million tons of an albedo enhancing aerosol (sufficient to offset the expected warming over the next century) to an altitude of 20 to 30 km is estimated at US$2 billion to 8 billion.
The semi-Dyson shield isn't a serious proposal, it's just a fun thought experiment. Certainly, though, any aggressive aerosol'ing could have some relatively serious unforeseen side effects. Nothing as dramatic as accidental re-entry of mile-wide mirror, but yeah, slap a couple of antipodal equatorial space elevators onto the hex framework and, baby, you got a sci-fi backdrop goin'.
Wow, only conceived of in 1979? Boggles the mind. On the other end of things, the "How the hell did they know at the time?" end, Chapman-Ferraro had the basics of geomagnetic storms worked out in 1931.
What I've been wondering a lot is what is stopping some eccentric billionaire with a God complex from building an aerosol contraption right now? Like if you're Elon and you make every last bullshit laden breath about how you want to combat climate change, why haven't you already bought a private island from which you are trying to build some sort of aerosol chimney?
Bezos does this awesome thing where he says 'I'm a big fan of X, but the law doesn't protect X so I'm going to do my libertarian best to abuse X as hard as I fucking can in the name of reform'. Using padded mailers that can only be recycled if you take them to Amazon is an excellent example. So are his wretched monopoly policies. So is his patent and copyright infringement.
Has anybody modeled the impact of a Mount Rainier eruption on global warming? Here’s a question: how do you reduce per capital energy use without: A) an external factor such as a world war B) sparking a civil war
I think there are enough unknowns in the average volcanic eruption that nobody wants to touch it. Pinatubo was a surprise; as I recall, the composition of its output was something no one predicted. The quantity of ash kicked out by St. Helens was also something new. Let's talk energy tho and let's get WanderingEng in here because while I can speculate with the best of 'em, he's got the training and experience. According to the EIA, the industrial sector uses 31e12 BTU per year. 6e12 BTU of that is straight losses. Efficiency losses for residential and commercial sectors? Frickin' 17e12 BTU. A bright spot: our energy use has actually stayed relatively constant. What if we could make that grid ten percent more efficient? That'd be 3e12 BTU. That alone would get us back to 2010 levels. Now try and tell me that PG&E can't find 10%. So what do we use the energy for? Fun fact: Intalco used to brag on tours that they use more electricity than LOS ANGELES. During the Enron shenanigans they cut capacity by like 50% so that there was capacity in the US power grid. Mark Reisner makes the point in Cadillac Desert that the United States won WWII not with the atomic bomb but with the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams - the US had three times as much electricity generation capacity as it needed when Hoover went online and we turned around and used it to power smelters and centrifuges. Aircraft were aluminum and aluminum was American. Germany made 90,000 planes during WWII. America made 300,000. That's just the 14% in "industrial." That 22% "chemical production?" How much of that do you think is fertilizer? I'll bet it's a lot. How 'bout transportation? That graphic is so old its EV is a Tesla roadster. Here's a companion: WE CAN DO THIS. This is the thing that bugs me about the global warming discussion - It's ALWAYS apocalyptic. But I'm old enough to remember when Weekly Reader told me I was going to die of either acid rain or ozone depletion, assuming nuclear war didn't wipe me out first. The fact that the overwhelming increase in greenhouse gasses has occurred since then tells me that the momentum is an illusion and the inertia is a choice. Aaron Bastani made the point that the "crisis of our time" in the 1890s was literally horse shit. Henry Ford solved that one - 1894 was the year the Times of London decried manure piles nine feet deep and the first run of the Benz Velo. Bastani also makes the point that solar panels on the roof and an electric car in the garage are basically your own microgrid and if you're running a microgrid, you're saving at least 5% in energy transmission alone. But microgrids mostly work with solar. I think everything that can be said has been said... except the part where we can fix things. The problem is, it will involve changing incentives which involves changing industries and we've been lamenting that fucking coal miner since LBJ. That fucking coal miner gave me a 108 degree day this week. I'm over his ass.
I hate being a pessimist, but motherfuckers can't even figure out how to agree on fixing a building that was vey clearly and obviously on the verge of collapse. The only way to get people to fix anything is to make it more expensive in the short term to not fix it. So then the question becomes how to monetize energy waste. Jimmy Carter tried that in the 70s and was booted out of office for it (but at least we got Sammy Hagar's timeless anthem...One foot on the brake and one on the gas...). His problem was that he looked for a technical solution without regard to the political solution of consensus building.I think everything that can be said has been said... except the part where we can fix things.
Half of Tesla's 2020 revenue was carbon swaps. Carter tried to lower speed limits because American car manufacturers had absolutely no fucking idea how to make an efficient vehicle. Obama launched Cash for Clunkers and everyone bought a new car.