Coincidentally, I am reading 'Scale' by Geoffrey West where this concept of impedence matching is discussed (amongst many other things). It is fascinating how impedence matching was arrived at in biological systems viq evolutionary pressure to optimize energy usage.
> On a larger scale, we can think of atmospheric carbon dioxide as an undesired impedance matcher, coupling the infrared light waves of the sun into the planet. Someday, we may decide to cool our earth by adding tiny particles of dust to our stratosphere, tuning the optical surface to reflect away a tiny portion the infrared waves coming from the sun. The impedance mismatch between the atmosphere and sunlight would create a kind of half-silvered mirror to keep us cooler by reflecting away the unwanted energy flowing into our planet.
Good old geoengineering. The principle has been shown to work - in 536 AD [1], volcanic ashes and/or a cosmic impact event caused decades worth of cooling, causing or contributing to millions of deaths, pest spreads and massive migration movements.
The problem is... if we screw it up and overhit our target, we're in for a repeat, just this time with billions of deaths.
The question is... aren't we in for the same if we let human-caused climate change run its course anyway, just with us frying ourselves to death?
IMO it's a very questionable solution anyway. Either you have to constantly replenish this dust, causing huge economic costs, or you have to engineer it in a way that keeps the dust airborne for long times, likely causing all kinds of health effects when breathing it and making it very difficult to remove it from the atmosphere in any significant amounts on short notice.
All of these side effects just disappear if we were to engineer this dust to emit a lot of radiation outside of the absorption spectra of water vapour and CO2, absorb a lot of light in the the absorption spectra of water and CO2, mix it as pigment into paint, rooftiles, road surfaces, and so on.
That way absorbed direct radiation gets its climate change contribution cut about in half and probably much more for diffuse radiation.
We could also biologically engineer e.g. grasses to have similar effects.
I'm a huge fan of engineering various plants to emit light in specific wavelengths anyway, and making sure that e.g. insects pollinate and birds spread them much more preferentially. That way you can outcompete or naturally cross invasive species with them and then you'll just look from satellites were the stuff you dislike is spreading and send in automated drones to highly selectively spray anything that has weirdly glowing pollen stuck to it. And after repeating that a few times, you get rid of your trojan-glowies.
Would tiny airborne particles be safe for our lungs ?
Would they cool earth in such a way that it would offset carbon dioxide uniformly or would it lead to even more change ? Climate change is undesirable, wether or not Climate warming is invloved.
From your link, global temperature anomaly were -0,4°C. We are at +1,5°C. We would need something like 9 very big volcano injecting tons of sulfure in the upper atmosphere to cancel out the recent global warming.
As someone familiar with electrical impedance, I don't like this article. It's trying too hard to sound smart.
Coincidentally, I am reading 'Scale' by Geoffrey West where this concept of impedence matching is discussed (amongst many other things). It is fascinating how impedence matching was arrived at in biological systems viq evolutionary pressure to optimize energy usage.
Whatever happened to Edge? They haven't really published since 2018
Speculation, but Edge was John Brockman’s thing and he was heavily connected to Epstein, so probably has become a bit toxic for potential contributors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brockman_(literary_agent)...
> On a larger scale, we can think of atmospheric carbon dioxide as an undesired impedance matcher, coupling the infrared light waves of the sun into the planet. Someday, we may decide to cool our earth by adding tiny particles of dust to our stratosphere, tuning the optical surface to reflect away a tiny portion the infrared waves coming from the sun. The impedance mismatch between the atmosphere and sunlight would create a kind of half-silvered mirror to keep us cooler by reflecting away the unwanted energy flowing into our planet.
Good old geoengineering. The principle has been shown to work - in 536 AD [1], volcanic ashes and/or a cosmic impact event caused decades worth of cooling, causing or contributing to millions of deaths, pest spreads and massive migration movements.
The problem is... if we screw it up and overhit our target, we're in for a repeat, just this time with billions of deaths.
The question is... aren't we in for the same if we let human-caused climate change run its course anyway, just with us frying ourselves to death?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536
IMO it's a very questionable solution anyway. Either you have to constantly replenish this dust, causing huge economic costs, or you have to engineer it in a way that keeps the dust airborne for long times, likely causing all kinds of health effects when breathing it and making it very difficult to remove it from the atmosphere in any significant amounts on short notice.
All of these side effects just disappear if we were to engineer this dust to emit a lot of radiation outside of the absorption spectra of water vapour and CO2, absorb a lot of light in the the absorption spectra of water and CO2, mix it as pigment into paint, rooftiles, road surfaces, and so on.
That way absorbed direct radiation gets its climate change contribution cut about in half and probably much more for diffuse radiation.
We could also biologically engineer e.g. grasses to have similar effects.
I'm a huge fan of engineering various plants to emit light in specific wavelengths anyway, and making sure that e.g. insects pollinate and birds spread them much more preferentially. That way you can outcompete or naturally cross invasive species with them and then you'll just look from satellites were the stuff you dislike is spreading and send in automated drones to highly selectively spray anything that has weirdly glowing pollen stuck to it. And after repeating that a few times, you get rid of your trojan-glowies.
Would tiny airborne particles be safe for our lungs ?
Would they cool earth in such a way that it would offset carbon dioxide uniformly or would it lead to even more change ? Climate change is undesirable, wether or not Climate warming is invloved.
From your link, global temperature anomaly were -0,4°C. We are at +1,5°C. We would need something like 9 very big volcano injecting tons of sulfure in the upper atmosphere to cancel out the recent global warming.
And probably 3 meteor impact.
who'd be in charge of the thermostat? if this followed my offices practices we'd be in ww3 before any heating/cooling had a chance to kill anyone