In February 2000, Paul Crutzen rose to speak at the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme in Mexico. And when he spoke, people took notice. He was then one of the world’s most cited scientists, a Nobel laureate working on huge-scale problems – the ozone hole, the effects of a nuclear winter.
So little wonder that a word he improvised took hold and spread widely: this was the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological epoch, representing an Earth transformed by the effects of industrialised humanity.
The idea of an entirely new and human-created geological epoch is a sobering scenario as context for the current UN climate summit, COP28. The impact of decisions made at these and other similar conferences will be felt not just beyond our own lives and those of our children, but perhaps beyond the life of human society as we know it.
This is fantasyland. This demonstrates that its easier to come up with a detached sci fi solution than it is to part with fossil fuels and capitalism. Let’s say we do solar shades, there are enormous ramifications in messing with the source of energy for plants and algae. Large scale geoengineering may be worse than the original problem
Um, in what part did I say that this was in any way easier than parting with fossil fuels or capitalism. Indeed solar shades wouldn’t be compatible with continuing emissions, but would only represent a pathway to returning the climate to pre industrial temperatures.
The main reason I suggested solar shades pver most forms of geoengineering is precisely because it’s vanishing unlikely to have large scale unintended consequences. Solar output already slightly varies throughout both the year and solar cycles, shades would be able to just keep it at those lower outputs. It might still have consequences, but it’s vanishing unlikely they’ll be worse than climate change.
Also, cubesats with a big sheet of tin foil taped to them arn’t all that sifi, and the biggest tech leap would be making that tin foil out of lunar regolith. It also wouldn’t be a very capitalist solution because it is overtly non-profitable, but tech wise we could have done it in the 90s if we really wanted to, and have already built satellite constellations of similar scale.