Geoegineering for aliens, in The Plan B Post of May 29, 2024
Your free weekly update about humanity's progress reducing carbon pollution and cooling the earth with geo-engineering.
Geoegineering. It’s not just for humans any more.
Forbes
Scientists propose searching for geoengineered planets as a way of discovering alien civilizations. The premise is that a geoengineered planet would give off identifiable markers for a longer period of time than, say, an alien planet’s short-lived high-pollution era. That would make them easier to find.
Turns out spraying water into the air isn't dangerous after all.
The New York Times
City officials in Alameda, California, have admitted that small scale tests of a device that sprays tiny sea salt particles into the air from the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier are not a health risk. But they still want the project to jump through some hoops, like setting up air quality monitors, limiting testing hours, and getting written approval from other authorities.
Yale expert says stratospheric aerosol injection is our only tool for cooling the earth quickly.
USA Today
Wake Smith, author of “Pandora’s Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention” and a lecturer at the Yale School of the Environment, said that stratospheric aerosol injection “could dramatically cool the earth quickly, which reducing emissions cannot do. It will take centuries after we reach net zero for the earth to cool down again. Carbon capture is probably a centuries-long process. But solar geoengineering could impact the planet quickly, and is the only intervention that could ameliorate temperatures if somehow we hit a tipping point and climate change is running out of control.”
Snopes reveals how conspiracy theorists smeared Bill Gates and geoengineering.
Snopes
Deceptive conspiracy theorists desperate to get attention waylayed an experiment involving 4.4 pounds of dust and a weather balloon and tangled Bill Gates into the mess, too. Snopes explains how.
St. Louis scientists win $1.5 million to find out which particles work best in strateospheric aerosol injection.
Washington University in St. Louis
“Think about it like a dish you are preparing,” said project lead Rajan Chakrabarty. “You have to consider what ingredients you’re putting in, and how those ingredients will interact in the final meal. For SAI, our ingredients are particles, and we need to know their light scattering and absorption properties, interaction with ozone, and what happens if there are manufacturing defects in individual particles. These factors will all impact what happens when we put these aerosols in the stratosphere.”
Biden Administration proposes a reform of carbon offset markets that will be worth $1 trillion per year by 2050.
Bloomberg
The Biden administration's new carbon offset framework aims to ensure real emissions cuts and market integrity. Effective carbon offset markets could be worth $1 trillion per year by 2050.