What about solar shades? Seems like a relatively quick and easy way to regulate solar input. It's nice too because you can quickly remove it if necessary.

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tremon 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How long would a single cargo-load of shades have to be operational just to offset the amount of CO2 emitted by its launch?

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teamonkey 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What percentage of the 128-million-square-km cross-sectional area of the earth are you proposing to shade?

	▲	jpadkins 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		kinda obvious, the wealthy parts?

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ACCount37 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Only becomes viable if you have things like Starship online and fully operational, with launch rates at the level of Falcon 9 today. At the minimum.

Still a more viable option than bringing greenhouse gas emissions into the negatives globally, by the way. But that's a low bar. Nuking the ocean floor is probably a better call.

	▲	casey2 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm confident that pushing everyone involved with Starship into the ocean would be a better and faster and more ethical green transition.

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post-it 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Reducing sunlight to the surface means we lose solar power effectiveness and we need to use more power for artificial lighting to grow plants.

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ACCount37 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not to a significant degree.

Preventing 1% of sunlight from hitting Earth is more than enough to offset climate change heating. It's not enough to make agriculture or photovoltaics uneconomical. In many regions, it might make agriculture more viable on the net, not less - by reducing climate risks.

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altruios 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Most of the surface of the earth is covered with water...

What if we cover the ice caps, and cover parts of the ocean instead of messing with grow cycles of plants on land...

No reduction in solar power, no artificial lights to grow plants. What effects might that have on ocean life? (below a certain depth - probably nothing, so surface ocean life is what we need to look at).

Just my two cents... we got plenty of surface area we can cover and potentially not affect much at all for day to day for animals, plants, and humans.

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post-it 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Plankton in the ocean produce our oxygen via photosynthesis.

	▲	altruios 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yep, and those need sunlight, silly oversight.