Yes, but we're rapidly approaching a point where the planet's own greenhouse gases take us several degrees further even if we stop emissions entirely. A sunshade could head that off, and give us time to pull CO2 back out of the atmosphere.
I think if there are not short term economic consequences to global warming then there will not be any solutions that get resources. This isn’t a wild speculation so much as it is the status quo.
Russia will benefit greatly by global warming, it also relies on oil exports, also benefit vy weakening Europe with an inflow of climatic reffugees, has incredible incentives to actively make it happen.
On the other hand a fractured/weak Europe means higher gas prices, no medling in russian affairs, less pressure by russian citizens drooling over the fence with their eyes fixed on european stability and wellfare, free hand to do as Russia pleases in ex Soviet states and so on.
* that good black chernozem soul which makes up the Russian breadbasket would turn into desert in south of this region, while in the north the soil is too poor
* mass forest fires would choke the air
* melting permafrost would destroy existing badly maintained infrastructure and cities
If Russia is hoping for positives out of climate change they are in for a surprise
Maybe I was just regurgitating what the youtube channel Caspian Report was saying, but I think he suggested that Russia could just do agriculture up north and it would have the northern ocean open for sailing all year long and acces to hidrocarbons there.
Thinking deeply about it, would it actually lead to better outcomes for Russia?
Risks
1) Social destabilization driven by collapse of southern agricultural communities and their migration northward. Keep in mind that already the northern communities are being heavily impacted by the thaw of the permafrost that many cities and towns are built on - to establish more infrastructure means building on a growing swamp. To be able to get crops to market, it means building very long roads on a growing swamp as well - remember that Russia suffers from a lack of internal rivers to convey agricultural products throughout it's vast geography.
2) Consequences of disturbances to fish stocks for northern communities - who are dependent on either fish directly, or seals and other species indirectly
3) Limited societal benefit of new hydrocarbon resources given the existing klepto-oligarchy - it's unlikely that new resources will be used to stabilise the broader community or social fabric.
4) Possibility that they cannot exploit said hydrocarbons due to global moratoriums or increased uptake in alternative energy sources
5) Broader geopolitical implications of social collapse of soviet satellites; some of which are currently heavily dependent on current rainfall patterns for cotton, wheat and other grains - Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, etc - if these countries go to the wall - what does that mean for the Russian state? It's likely that Russia would have to invest aggressively in shoring up the southern borders.
6) China; the eastern regions of Russia could be a tempting acquisition for China looking for new agricultural land or control of northern ports such as vladivostok as ice coverage decreases- further exacerbating pressures on the central Russian government.
There may be a point where such a project is appropriate, I'm just saying we're nowhere near that point. Such a risk is not something to be done preemptively, no matter how imminent.
Comments like this sound like "global warming isn't really a serious problem yet, so the only acceptable way to deal with it is to agree to my demands unconditionally - those alternatives are just too risky" to me.
The problem is, I can look at the risks of something like this, or olivine beaches with Project Vesta [0], or sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere - and the worst cases there are still incomparable to the expected case for climate change. Like, the "I don't know how you would do this deliberately"-tier worst case for Project Vesta would be killing all sea life within 100km of the relevant islands, and that would suck! But with ocean acidification, that's going to happen anyways, and not just around those islands. And that sort of analysis makes me think that either
1. the alternate proposals won't work (at all, which seems unlikely)
2. the expected case for climate change isn't actually as bad as people are saying it is
or
3. people don't actually care about climate change as much as they care about using climate change to push their own agendas
Personally, I lean towards #3. But that still doesn't make me very happy with climate activists.
Sadly I think #3 is true of many activists. Actual climate scientists are another matter; I've seen many of them advocate both geoengineering and nuclear power.
Not all that much risk, since the shade could be eliminated almost immediately by simply rotating each element ninety degrees.
The plan also requires a certain amount of stationkeeping, probably with solar sails, and if you can do that then you can also move the elements out of the way of the sun entirely, with a little time.
1) That assumes complexity not accounted for in cost, weight, or deployability. It's one thing to deploy a bunch of dumb disks. It's entirely another to deploy trillions of steerable drones. It's several orders of magnitude beyond what was suggested.
2) It sort of misses the point- that might address the known-unknowns of the primary effect (solar radiation hitting Earth). It does nothing to address unknown-unknowns or even secondary or tertiary effects.
The mere presence of the shields might block solar wind, distort Earth's magnetic field, reflect / refocus cosmic radiation, amplify affect of solar flares, interfere with radio or satellite communication...
We just don't know. And the stakes are too big, even compared to worst case global warming.
The bigger the potential impact a project has, the better prepared you should be to undo or mitigate it, before it causes problems worse than the ones it's meant to fix. I don't see that here.
If you look at the link in the original comment, you'll see the whole thing doesn't work at all unless the individual elements are steerable. So that is in fact what was suggested.
All the "mights" you mention can be easily evaluated by straightforward physics.
I did, but it's not realistic. Maybe passively "aimed", but not actively steered, and not commandable. And even passive aiming is unrealistic at that price, active steering increases costs by several orders of magnitude.
You can't possibly think that it's straightforward to model all those physical aspects for 16 trillion objects. We don't even have the 3-body solution solved; just predicting the gravitational behavior is unbelievably complex and chaotic. That many degrees of freedom is simply unsolvable (without quantum computing).
It's hubris to believe we can predict even basic behavior and interference of such a project, let alone intended or unintended side effects, whether known or unknown.
