Moondust for mitigating climate change

[LunaSea]

Astronomers are exploring solutions to mitigate climate change, one of humanity's biggest challenges, by using some tiny players — dust particles.

In recent research, they propose mining, scooping and blasting dust from the moon's surface and placing it between Earth and the sun, where the newly placed clouds would shade our planet for a few days before solar wind and radiation pressure dispersed them. In a year, researchers say, such dust shields could reduce Earth-bound sunlight by 1.8%, which falls within the range needed to slow our planet's rising temperature.

Creating such a shade would require 22 billion pounds (10 billion kilograms) of dust per year, which is "roughly 100 times more mass than humans have sent into space to date," the authors wrote in their study.

tinyurl.com/2kufbm2b

[NNadir]

1. It might be simpler and cheaper, not to mention safer, to stop...

...using fossil fuels.

These extreme proposals generate more wishful thinking than actual results.

[1WorldHope]

6. Doh! nt

[Wicked Blue]

2. I might have enough dust underneath my furniture

[1WorldHope]

7. Hahahaha, would dog hair help? nt

[Wicked Blue]

10. We have plenty of dog fur too

[NCjack]

3. May be cheaper to inject methyl sulfide gas into the stratosphere. It will be

oxidized and will form submicrometric sulfuric acid droplets that will reflect sunlight away from Earth.

[NNadir]

5. We've been injecting sulfates into the atmosphere for generations.

It's called "air pollution." It is well understood that some of this air pollution in the form of sulfates does, in fact, reduce the solar flux, but it also makes our rivers and lakes into acid pits.

The solution to climate change is not ever more fantastic bizarre schemes to tear the shit out of our natural spaces with wind turbines, solar cells, moon dust and the precursor to sulfuric acid. It's to stop using fossil fuels entirely, for which there is one, and only one, approach that will work: Going nuclear against climate change.

The planet in our solar system that has the most sulfates, in the form of sulfuric acid and sulfur oxides is Venus. It has a high albedo, lots of CO2, and surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead.

I hear these things and I can hardly believe I'm doing so. Seriously, Chernobyl was worse than blowing up the moon and turning all of our lakes and rivers into battery acid and all our wilderness into industrial parks?

How about we just burn all our forests and cover the planet with a cloud of smoke? Would that work?

We really, really, really need to get serious. None of this science fiction stuff is even close to being so.

[NCjack]

8. Seriously, injection of sulfide gases may be our best approach.

In the 1980s, I recall that discussions within the the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarded injection of aerosols into the upper stratosphere to have the most favorable potential for stabilizing and bring down global warming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection]

The injection of methyl sulfide is a convenient approach to use a gas as a precusor to the fomation of submicrometer droplets to scatter sunlight away from the Earth. Methyl sulfide (or other sulfide gases) can be transferred by aircraft and titrated in sequential doses over periods of years to allow the benefit to be steadly approached. The small sulfuric acid droplets would have a half-life of about 1 year, ultimately falling out of the stratosphere. The quantify of sulfur (as sulfate) added to the troposphere and ultamately depositing on the Earh's surface is tiny compared to sulfur injected from anthropogenic sources into the lower troposhere.

Still, to this day, injection of sulfide gases into the upper stratosphere is a leading candidate for gradually reducing global warming with the most reliable control of the rate.

[NNadir]

9. Seriously, it's a terrible idea.

The best idea, the easiest, the cleanest, and the only decent approach to climate change is to stop using dangerous fossil fuels, including dangerous fossil fuels used to power aircraft.

There is a technical solution to climate change, but it does not follow that it is one that is even close to being embraced.

If one reads IPCC reports, one can hear all about how so called "renewable energy" will help address climate change, all of it in the form of soothsaying. Same thing with IEA World Energy Outlooks, year after year, scenario after scenario. The scenario that always comes to pass boils down to doing nothing meaningful and avoiding the obvious.

But the numbers don't lie.

Here they are:

March 02: 422.49 ppm
March 01: 422.45 ppm
February 28: 422.88 ppm
February 27: 421.62 ppm
February 26: 421.23 ppm
Last Updated: March 3, 2023

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2|Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

Trillions of dollars later spent on this very, very, very bad reactionary idea, the rate of degradation of the atmosphere is accelerating.

By the way, I don't get my information from Wikipedia in general, although I sometimes for convenience post graphics from it. I read the primary scientific literature.

As it happens, I have spent a lot of time studying the chemistry of sulfuric acid because it is a key intermediate in the Sulfur Iodine cycle, a key fluid phased (potentially continuous) technology that suggests the feasibility, as opposed to the likelihood of saving the world. The biggest problem with the SI cycle, one which I believe is being and can be addressed, is that sulfuric acid eats away pretty much everything it touches, under special controlled conditions.

There's nothing "controlled" about ramping up the already problematic acidification of the world.

One of the things I note about discussions of climate change is all the "out there" approaches that will clearly make things worse, just as the fantasies that solar and wind energy would save the day made things worse faster than they were worsening before we embraced that one. Acidifying the planet because we can't give up fossil fuels falls squarely in that category:

Worse, faster.

[MayReasonRule]

4. Moon loses 22 billion pounds... What is the effect on our tides, orbit, life on earth?

Inquiring minds want to know...

... and remember...

You better try to have fun, no matter what you do...
"Cause nothing compares to you!

Laissez bon temps rouler!

[Warpy]

11. Yeah, and as soon as they complete that harebrained scheme

Yellowstone will blow up. Or a space rock we never saw because it came from the sunward side smacks into us.

Minimizing fossil fuel use is a better idea.