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jaggednad | 6 years ago

While halting warming is important, a Solar shade is an absolutely terrible way to do that. Shading out 2% of the light has obvious implications for global crop yields and for non crop plants that all rely on solar energy. It would also obviously reduce efficiency of solar electric power collectors, impeding their ability to replace fossil fuels. Global warming is a big problem, but a global food crisis is an even bigger one. A solar shade would buy time on the global warming problem while also creating a much bigger problem.

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avmich|6 years ago

> A solar shade would buy time on the global warming problem while also creating a much bigger problem.

It had been pointed out that the main reason for warming, advanced level of CO2, leads to bigger agricultural growth, so here we have to opposite trends.

We'd prefer of course to have the shield controllable, and shadow only a small (like, 10%) fraction of solar energy. More, the shield likely won't be ready all at once, so we can have early indication for how it works being partially deployed.