/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9930564
That is correct, you would need a shade (or more accurately a giant collection of smaller shades, that do some fancy solar sail/ion drive tricks to reach L1 & station keeping) that size, at an estimated 20 million tons, but if the BFR hits its goal launch cost of $7 million, and needs 133,333 launches (at 150 tons per launch) the total launch cost for such a swarm would be less than $1 trillion.

Add in $500 billion for the costs of building the shades, and the total project cost would be $1.5 trillion, or $75 billion a year for 20 years. As I said, expensive, but something that the US, EU, or China could afford on their own, or some sort of joint project could be done.

Some of the other methods would be even cheaper; the lower end estimates for using sulfur aerosols put the price at $10 billion a year; that is at the point where Brazil or Indonesia could fund & implemented it if they wanted.

Invest in sulfur futures? Seriously though, picture related is estimated to be able to block any plausible warming effect for ~$20 billion a year. Not a perfect fix, since it does nothing for ocean acidification, and there would still be some changes in weather patterns, but overall blunts the negative effects of global warming enough to make the fear-mongering in that article look stupid.

Worst case we will just have to block out the sun. Picture related - for an estimated $20 billion a year any plausible warming effect could be blocked. There are a variety of other proposals as well, like marine cloud brightening. I have little doubt that the Chinese will start doing this if there coastal cities are threatened.

Of course, that leads to the issue of countries fighting over what the global thermostat should be set at. I imagine India & Russia might have very different preferences there, for example.

Don't get too worried, OP. Worst case is that we will have to break out the geoengineering methods to keep things cool, but there will be no great climate change related collapse.

Picture related could block any plausible warming effects for an estimated $20 billion a year, and do so quickly. There is also marine cloud brightening, which would use automated wind powered barges to spray sea salt and increase cloud formation; that could also completely block the warming effect for about the same costs, give or take. While not perfect fixes, they would be much cheaper than dealing with unrestricted global warming.

Of course the real fun will start when different countries disagree on what the global thermostat should be set at. Russia and India might have very different ideas as to what the worlds temperatures should be, for example. And marine cloud brightening could be used to adjust weather patterns on a more local scale, which could be weaponized.

Climate engineering is something we (well, any decent sized government) could do right now; picture related require no new technologies and could theoretically block any plausible global warming for $15 to $20 billion a year or so.

And desalination is also a well understood technology, with large scale usage. It is just energy intensive, so the only places that use it widely are the Gulf oil states.

http://workshop.caltech.edu/geoengineering/presentations/09_keith_final.pdf

Feasibility study conducted into geo-engineering solutions to global warming come up $3.5 billion price tag to end all temperate change using existing technology and methods.

http://geoengineering.environment.harvard.edu

That glacier shit is stupid. If you want stop global warming you just need to block out the sun. Picture related could stop any plausible anthropogenic warming effect for $20 billion a year or so.

Another proposal, called Marine cloud brightening, which would use automated wind powered ships to spray fine mist into the air to increase cloud formation could also probably stop all warming for a similar price.

But we can stop all global warming; most estimates predict that using sulfur aerosols like picture related could stop any plausible warming effect in less than a year, at a cost of ~$20 billion annually. Granted, there would still be weather shifts, and this process would need to be continued for as long as there is excess CO2 in the air, since the aerosols wash out in six months or so. And there are other methods like sea brightening that would have a similar effect.

I fully expect the chinks to start doing this if their coastal cities are threaten by sufficiently serious flooding.

There are cheaper, more controllable methods of counter-acting global warming that don't involve nuclear fallout. Take a look at sulfur aerosols or sea-brightening proposals.

If it looks like coastal cities are going to be flooded, I fully expect China or India to say "fuck it" and start spraying sulfur aerosols into the upper atmosphere. This fixes the entire warming issue for $20 billion a year or so. Granted it has some other side effects, but is much more manageable than trying to move hundreds of millions inland.

If it looks like their coastal cities were seriously threatened by rising sea levels, the Chinese and/or Indians would have no qualms about dumping sulfur aerosols into the upper atmosphere; this fixes the global warming issue entirely for $10-$20 billion a year, vastly cheaper than trying to move all those people inland, and the side effects are minor enough that the chinks & poos won't care.