this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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The Incredibly Risky Scheme that Bill Gates Keeps Pushing [geoengineering] (buttondown.email)
submitted 8 months ago by silence7 to c/climate
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[–] silence7 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Because they're going to fail and drift out of position over time.

Remember here: we don't have any real history of maintaining stuff up there. It goes up, and is used until it fails, and then replaced. There are a couple exceptions in low earth orbit, but that's it.

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

These things are by definition light sails that can move around just by tilting by a tenth of a degree, they wouldn’t use fuel for station keeping.

Even then, docking to a dead spacecraft and towing it to a nearby repair facility isn’t exactly a great feat beyond our imagination, even if haveing the cubesats slowly return to the station for repair after one gyro fails but before the other redundant ones do fails. Building such an array in the first place requires the sort of space infrastructure necessary to maintain it.

Moreover I find the appeal to having never tried something before to be a silly argument to bring into a climate discussion. After all, we don’t have any real history of running a large scale grid on renewables like solar and wind, so why bother testing or even researching it? Better to stick to powering things with coal and natural gas.

[–] GBU_28@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago

Don't bother, this guy is going to keep nickel and diming your clearly hypothetical topic. Obviously if we all tried, we could achieve your plan even if there are failures and ongoing work to maintain it.