The issue of climate change is real. The rise in global average temperatures is the result of human-caused greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane.
Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may be too little and late. A group of people at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came up with the idea of bubbles in space.
There are bubbles in space.
Two areas of concern are the basis of the thinking. The damage we have already done from over a century of advanced industrialization has already set the course of the Earth's climate trajectory in a bad direction.
Even if we were to stop all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, we would still have to live with the effects of climate change for decades and even centuries to come, including rising sea levels, more extreme weather events, and disruptions to food-production.
One way to limit the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface is to release aerosols into the atmosphere.
Our climate system is so complex and dynamic that introducing artificial factors into the atmosphere can't be reversed, according to the team at MIT.
They are thinking space because of that. The idea is to make a raft of thin bubbles.
The sun's rays will be reflected or absorbed by those membranes. If we reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth by 1.5 percent, we could completely eliminate the effects of our greenhouse gas output.
I'm not sure if this idea is a good one. The team doesn't know what the bubbles will be made out of or how they will be sent to the target location near the first point of the Earth-Sun system.
They will need to balance the forces of the Earth, the Sun, and other planets in order to keep the raft stable. The constant rain of the solar wind and micrometeoroids will be a challenge for them.
It would take a raft thousands of miles wide to block a small portion of the Sun's output. There is an engineering challenge to make it work.
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