💾 Archived View for gemlog.blue › users › verachell › 1645223518.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 17:18:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-03-01)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Note: This post is a Gemini space version of my post originally published on March 25, 2021
Solar geoengineering is the idea of limiting the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth, with the aim of limiting global warming.
Here I will show 3 reasons why it's a really bad idea:
Photosynthesis is one of the very few ways we have to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
[https] Photosynthesis, National Geographic Resource Library
As an added bonus it's done automatically by plants, requiring no effort on our part. It requires light in order to work. To do it, plants take in sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, and they produce oxygen. These plants are literally removing carbon dioxide from our atmosphere, but they require light for it to work.
We should not do anything that could possibly limit the amount of photosynthesis occurring; limiting the amount of light hitting the planet is likely to decrease photosynthesis.
Solar electricity is also one of our pathways to sharply decarbonize the electricity grid by generating power that does not produce carbon dioxide. But solar geoengineering would mean less sunlight, resulting in less solar power.
In terms of nutrition, we don't want crop growth to be impacted. Too little sunlight means crops might not grow so well.
Above are 3 reasons why solar geoengineering is a bad idea. They are reasons which are understandable to everyone. In particular, solar geoengineering will decrease the ability of two of the very few things humanity has in its toolkit to solving global warming: photosynthesis and solar power. Any idea which decreases those two things is, quite simply put, a very bad idea.
It does not matter who first came up with solar geoengineering, how smart they are, or how many other people are for it. If it will negatively impact photosynthesis and solar power, we shouldn't even be considering it.
I myself hold a PhD in biochemistry, and as a scientist myself, I stand firmly and publicly against solar geoengineering.
What should we do instead? We need to decrease emissions and increase the amount of plants.
Solar geoengineering could quite possibly decrease temperatures, but will have the terrible side effect of taking along with it two of our most promising ways of causing a net decrease in carbon dioxide level: photosynthesis and solar power generation. Solar geoengineering is a little bit like saying "let's solve global warming by having a nuclear war - the resultant nuclear winter will cause decreased temperatures." Yes, but at what cost?