Geoengineering for Climate Change

We need to blow up the atmosphere to save the earth!

Well, geoengineering is not that extreme but it is a very important conversation topic.

Geoengineering (literally meaning “Earth-engineering”) is the currently fashionable term being used for making large-scale interventions in how the planet works to reverse the effects of climate change.

This topic is very serious because our earth is dying. The longer we delay, the worst and wost our lives and the lives of animals will become.

Geoengineering is a very general term and can describe stuff like;

Afforestation, Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement, and Marine cloud brightening.

There are two main types of geoengineering. The first, “Solar Geoengineering”, is a technique to try to cool the planet by reducing the amount of incoming solar energy.

The second, “Carbon Geoengineering”, is to remove some of the atmospheric carbon dioxides and lock it away where we hope it won’t cause problems.

My thinking as well as the thinking of other scientists think that this idea is crazy and unsafe, but the idea of this is coming to reality because we are reaching the point of no return with climate change.

Solar Geoengineering:

We are all familiar with the saying that the sun powers our life, but are we getting too much sun?

This is the opinion of many climate activists. In one hour the earth gets more energy rayed down on it than humans use in one entire year.

This fact is astounding because if we had efficient solar panels we could power the earth’s energy production for one year in the time span of one hour.

At the moment our mechanisms of harnessing solar energy are inefficient. Only 15% of all sun rayed down on solar panels is converted into energy.

We should relentlessly work to make stuff like solar panels and wind turbines more efficient but at the same time, work towards developing more up and coming methods like fussion and fusion energy.

With us not being able to use all this energy, we might as well block out or thin out some of the suns.

Scientists have created ways to make it so that we can thin out the sun, which would help us slow climate change.

The process has been theorized many times, and they have come to this conclusion: After seeing the impact of Mount Pinatubo and the amount of H₂SO₄ (sulfuric acid) that the volcano sent into the atmosphere, and just how much solar radiation was veered away from earth. Scientists noticed that this single eruption cooled the average global temperature by 0.5 degrees Celsius.

It took three years to get back to the same temperature after the eruption. They theorized that if we spent $8 billion dollars a year, which is minuscule compared to the cost of climate change, a scientist could send a small fleet of drones up into the atmosphere and release between 8–10mt of H₂SO₄ particles into the atmosphere. Releasing this into the atmosphere could give humanity decades of more time to reduce the use of fossil fuels and save the world!

A good example of this is you sleeping on a cold night. When you sleep, the air between you and your blanket is warm from your body heat but outside that blanket, the air is freezing.

This would be an example of well-isolated earth where the sun’s solar radiation would not be able to penetrate the O-zone layer.

Right now with global warming, our planet is very similar to the situation above but with the room already being hot.

The sun’s radiation is shining down on earth, in the room, we can pretend that there is a big heater. As the air temperature rises in the room, the temperature in the blanket(O-zone layer) gradually increases.

The same situation on earth in this process is called global warming.

Now, this theory is not perfect, and serious dangers are a reality. One is that we could destroy rainfall patterns. If we do this we could cause droughts, food depressions, and in the worst-case affect billions of people.

The worst effect though is that the stratosphere could heat up significantly. If we keep all the hot air out of the atmosphere then where would it go? The answer is the stratosphere, all the heat would be stored there and one day it could seep back into the atmosphere and make the problem with climate change exponentially worse.

Another major problem is that politicians would use this as an excuse to continue farming oil and making a profit. Politicians would claim that it's all ok and would farm oil, continuing to release CO2 while they would be making a lot of money from oil farms.

Carbon geoengineering:

Carbon geoengineering is somewhat more sustainable and humane of an option. The process of carbon geoengineering is when we try to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it someplace else.

This process is incredibly difficult because CO2 is not the easiest gas to handle. Before we figure out a solution to how we are going to do this, we must figure out where we are going to put the CO2. We could send it to space, bury it underground, or put it in toxic waste containers to go untouched.

We could modify smokestacks (chimneys) with built-in “scrubbers,” which would trap the waste CO2 and condensate it into a highly compressed liquid that could be stored safely out of the way.

You’ll hear this idea referred to as carbon capture and storage. It sounds good in theory, but it doesn’t solve our immediate problem. Even if we do this, our world will keep warming just at a slightly more lackadaisical pace.

As of now, there aren’t serious problems with doing this. You may ask: why haven’t we done this then? The answer lies in the cost.

This process would cost trillions of dollars and would require extensive research in scientific fields that humanity has yet to explore.

To follow the examples given above, this process is like removing the heat from your blanket. If your room is hot, under your blanket will also be hot. Carbon geoengineering is focusing on removing the heat (CO2) from under the blanket The problem is that you may be able to remove some heat from under the blanket but the heat source(heater) continues to ray down waves of heat at you and at any moment, it could all seep back in.

Opinion

I think that these techniques should not be used. The risks are far too serious to even consider. Even if we could figure out how to put a vast amount of H₂SO₄ in the atmosphere, we would only be making a massive ticking time bomb.

Imagine if, at some point, we couldn’t get H₂SO₄ up to the atmosphere and the heat and radiation came back down to earth. We would essentially be making the earth worse than it would have been before.

The earth would be exposed to all that stored energy and heat at once, and the average temperature on earth would skyrocket. If we take the approach of removing CO2 from the air then we could have a more sustainable path.

The best possible solution would be a combination of the two. If we combined the two we could not only remove CO2 from the air but also stop heat from entering the atmosphere, but the combo would still do its damages.

Not only would there be downsides to do with the environment, but there would also be the potential of wars breaking out.

One country would state that they should have control over the system until another country rebels and this could lead to rebellions and coups happening in regions all over the world.

There would be no way to decide, for example; The US has the biggest economy, but Russia has the most land, but China has the biggest population; but countries like the UAE, Kiribati, Manila, Yemen, and Haiti are the countries most affected.

These options should be kept close but we should not pull the trigger on them, because there are more sustainable methods.

There are many reasons why climate change will affect us greatly in the coming years but these geoengineering options listed today aren’t the answer.

In the coming decades, we need more innovative ideas as well as scientists trying to develop new and better options.