After the film ‘Don’t Look up’, everyone is talking about climate change again and climate researchers like Peter Kalmus are calling on the community to rethink things and allow experiments. I want to follow the thought of a possible hostage situation of the weather a little:
In 2009 I organized a photovoltaics conference in Bulgaria in order to be able to push through a feed-in tariff for photovoltaics there. At that time I was baited with a possible commission from the oligarch Ivo Prokopiev in Bulgaria. However, he took his solar company SolarPro public and I never received a commission.
These people have a lot of gray capital, raw materials and land at their disposal. You can quickly build some solar glass factories and photovoltaic power plants. Lawyers can also be commissioned with this money to draft a FIT law and with a few invitations a few speakers on photovoltaics can be won, and the PV business model for Bulgaria was complete. It wasn’t that easy after all, the fossil energy owners got cold feet and pushed photovoltaics back.
Now it’s 2022 and we continue to have rising CO2 and methane levels and little sign of turning things around. We will have to deal with really extreme weather events.
Of course, the owners of gray capital also know this and try to use this development to their own advantage. There will be temperature deviations of + 16°C, as we are currently experiencing in Siberia, so it will be around 50°C for days in Berlin! A heat wave deadly for millions of animals and plants. Cities will simply no longer be habitable. Politicians will have to react and then these people will create clouds over the cities with their aerosol kites or balloons for a lot of power and money and thus cool entire cities with the albedo of the clouds. Cities make themselves so open to blackmail.
It is therefore imperative to discuss terrestrial adaptive thermal mitigation strategies early on. This means highly reflective facades, asphalt and roof colors that cool the city by dissipating the energy into space. I have already presented these democratic techniques, as the PV is, here in the Berlin week. Sounds a lot like a climate science fiction novel and if you want to know more, feel free to contact me.
Addendum to the mirror article on dimming
The cloud brightening shown here in a mockup can happen with sulfates and other chemicals. But there is also the possibility of normalizing natural cloud formations or creating them where they no longer exist. For example, we know that a colder Indian Ocean could lead to more precipitation in North Africa. Therefore, there is the idea of getting cold and nutrient-rich water with pipes from the depths (possibly brighten the water surface with light water at the same time).
We are probably destroying the mixing of the oceans with the warmer oceans and thus less salt water is emitted into the atmosphere. Cloud formation suffers and clouds also become darker. Should we compensate for this fact with artificial saltwater aerosols?
Forests are becoming drier and therefore mushrooms and flowers suffer. The spores and pollen aerosols decrease and therefore cloud formation suffers and it becomes even drier. Should we compensate for these missing aerosols with artificial fungal spores and pollen aerosols? Or should we cool the forests terrestrially with mirrors or gold etc on the ground.
The production of algae in the seas has suffered greatly due to pollution. As a result, aerosols from algae decrease and the (light) cloud formation suffers as a result. At the same time, ships have become cleaner and emit less aerosols. Should we substitute these aerosols with cultured algae enzymes or aerosols? Can we use cultivated algae enzymes to keep the snowfall going? To slow sea level rise, for example?
We haven’t clarified so many questions yet, but to now call for a ban on solar radiation management is strange, as I also express in my comment in Der Spiegel .
Fiction examples of solar geoengineering
Time of golden Skies: Interesting approach to shooting non-toxic gold into the atmosphere. A bit religious but the idea of converting an ancient building into a volcano is interesting.
Termination Shock : From a Bestselling Author. SO2 is shot into the stratosphere with cannons. Podcast on where the author cites albedo changes from indigenous creation of the North American prairies as early solar geoengineering.
Wet-Bulb Temperature Calculator
