CO2 – Friend or Foe?

CO₂ is the enemy, or so we’re told to believe. This narrative has become so pervasive that we’ve now reached a point where any alternative view or even questioning of the net-zero agenda is actually seen as being evil, with sceptics being branded as climate change deniers. Of course this is intended to put the sceptics in the same class as holocaust deniers, to wear their scepticism with shame, as a mark of Cain.

Let’s play devil’s advocate. Before deciding how to view CO₂, let’s start with a problem statement. Here, every sane person agrees that what we’re really trying to prevent is a significant rise in global temperature, because if we don’t, we have to deal with downstream disasters like rising sea levels, leading to the flooding and loss of our coastal cities and island nations, the displacement of billions of people, and countless other horrors.

The current religion is that the only way to manage temperature is by reducing CO₂, and any questioning of this is branded as heresy. But is there another way? As ever, I believe we’ve let the media and politicians capture our attention and polarise us, using fear and shame to trick us to believe that their anointed solution is the only way.

I’ve long thought that one of the problems of current climate change strategy is that it’s simply too short term. We’re putting all the focus on human related activities and forgetting that the world’s climate has been cycling through ice ages and tropical periods since the beginning of time. We’re currently coming out of an ice age and the sea levels have been rising slowly but consistently for the last 10,000 years – long before we humans could possibly have been to blame. All the civilisation we know has happened in this golden period and there is good reason for us to want to preserve it.

If we go further back in time to about 20,000 years ago, we were at the glacial maximum of the most recent ice age and the sea levels were 120 – 130m lower than they are today. Going still further back to the most recent interglacial period about 120,000 years ago, sea levels were about 9m higher than they are now. Such a rise today would absolutely ravage our coastlines and devastate countless cities including New York, London, Tokyo, and Shanghai. It’s too horrific to even contemplate. With or without CO₂ and other effects of human activity, we have similar cycles ahead if we look far enough into the future.

The switch in thinking that I think we need to make is from the current “CO₂ emissions are causing temperatures to rise so we need to cut emissions”, to “the climate is going to change with or without human activity and emissions, so what’s the best way to manage it”. This switch in thinking leads to the answer that if we want to restrict climate change and preserve current temperatures and sea levels, we really have no choice other than to find a way to actively manage climate.

Once we’ve agreed that climate management or climate engineering is a necessary part of our future, the next step is to decide how best to do this. Bear in mind that whatever solution we choose needs to be capable of both cooling and warming the earth when needed to counter the effects of human activity and natural cycles.

My Eureka moment came after I read an article in the New York Times a while back, which explored the idea of building a parasol in space to block out a fraction of the sun’s radiation. The article is behind a paywall, but you can read it for free by pasting the link into https://archive.is. This shield would only need to block out about 2% of the sun and would be completely invisible to the eye, because the remaining 98% of the sun would still be visible. Think of it like a giant sunspot – we wouldn’t be able to see it with the naked eye, just as we can’t see sunspots with the naked eye. It would need to orbit the sun in perfect sync with the earth, so that it always remained directly between the earth and the sun.  There’s actually a point in space between the earth and sun called the Lagrange point where the gravitational forces of the earth and sun combine to make this orbit possible without propulsion – it’s about 1.5 million kilometres from earth, or about 4 times further than the moon.  Interestingly, there’s another Lagrange point on the other side of the earth in the shadow of the sun, and that’s where the James Webb Space Telescope is!

The idea as a concept is actually not a new one and goes back at least a hundred years, but the idea of actually building what would need to be a gigantic structure in space would have been lunacy until recently. The NYT article goes on to discuss a prototype project, led by Yoram Rozen, a physics professor and director of the Asher Space Research Institute at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, to build and position a small 100 square meter shield at the Lagrange point as a proof of concept.

But just how big would a real shield at the Lagrange point need to be to block out the required 2% of the sun’s radiation? Well, pretty big – about the size of Argentina! Ever the curious engineer, I set off to do some calculations…

One of the great things about space is that it’s inert – so one doesn’t need to deal with wind or weathering which would easily destroy a flimsy structure on earth.  Another bonus is that there’s no gravity, so whatever structure is designed doesn’t need to support its own weight. If you took a huge sheet of super thin film, it would just float in space, folded or flat, exactly as you left it. We can easily fabricate aluminium foil down to 1 micron thickness, and foil that thickness would weigh 2.7 tons per square kilometre. Argentina is about 2.8 million square kilometres, so if we could use 1 micron aluminium foil, the total weight of a sheet the size of Argentina would be about 7.5 million tons.  Of course we couldn’t have a single sheet that size and whatever we built would need to be modular, on some kind of structure. If we double the foil weight as an estimate to cater for the weight of the structural components, we get to a rough total mass estimate of 15 million tons.

Is it even possible to move this kind of mass to space? Until recently not, but Starship can carry about 100 tons per launch, so that would mean about 150,000 launches, or about 20 per day for 20 years. But wouldn’t the cost make it impossible? The cost of the material for the shield itself would be insignificant, and of course it would be assembled robotically in space. The real cost would be getting it to space. SpaceX’s goal is to get Starship payload cost to orbit down to $10 per kg, which would be $150 billion for 15 million tons. Of course it’s going to be more expensive because the Lagrange point is a lot further than low earth orbit, but even if it’s 10x more expensive, it’s still $1.5 trillion. By comparison, I read an article recently that claimed that the estimated global cost of moving towards net-zero is currently about $2 trillion annually.

The beauty of engineering climate using a sun-shield is that it’s completely non-destructive from a planetary perspective, and it’s reversible and extendable. Need more heat? Turn the shield sideways to block less sunlight. Need more cooling? Turn the shield perpendicular to block more sunlight or even extend it to make it larger.

If we were to have a shield like this, how would we view CO₂ – would it still be public enemy #1 as it is today? Absolutely not. We can cool the earth as much as we want with a shield, but there’s a limit to the amount of heating we can do because we can’t let through more than 100% of the sunlight. The real climate danger would be another ice age, which will inevitably happen as part of natural climate cycles. The wonderful thing about CO₂, apart from the fact that plants and trees love it, is that it would be helping to warm the planet and fend off an ice age when we need it most!

Although I’m sure there may need to be some adjustments to my rough calculations, I have little doubt that it would be possible to design and construct a solar shield to help us manage earth’s climate in the long term, and that the cost and societal impact would be a tiny fraction of that of todays net-zero agenda.  But if this is true, then why is this solution not getting more attention and why are we so fixated on net-zero as the only way to mitigate climate change?  As ever, I believe that the politician’s old tools of fear and shame to divide and rule, are the culprits.

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. ~ Hermann Goering

Through the ages, it doesn’t really matter whether the enemy is the enemy is Zionists (Jews), a virus, or CO₂. As long as an enemy can be identified, a narrative can be established and those who question or challenge the narrative can be attacked and shamed. Climate sceptics become climate deniers, just as lockdown sceptics became granny killers and vaccine hesitant become anti-vaxxers. In this way, society is carved up, polarised, and every significant issue becomes political.

For the most part, I think most people concerned about climate change are simply unaware that there might be other or better alternatives to net-zero. The vilification and shaming of sceptics or anyone who dares question the CO₂ climate religion is sufficient to discourage the few who would otherwise be open minded or do their own research. This was certainly the case for me. But apart from ignorance, I’m increasingly concerned that there are forces behind the net-zero movement that are more motivated by power and control than by any of the risks of climate change itself. Forces driven by what seems to be a fundamentally elitist and anti-human set of values. One set of rules of thee and another for me, where all people are equal but some are more equal than others. While many people may not be aware about the specifics of what exactly net-zero entails, a recent report by government funded UK FIRES published a helpful and revealing infographic roadmap to net-zero 2050. Although it shows, for example, that there will be no flights or shipping by 2050, you can be sure that’s only for the proles, and the Davos class will be unaffected.

For me, one of the tragic outcomes of the net-zero movement has been the capture and corruption environmentalism and other ethical activist causes. Old school vegetarians made their choices because they didn’t want to be associated with animal suffering. Bizarrely, today many shun animal products to reduce their carbon footprint instead. In the past, environmentalists and activist organisations like Greenpeace would have been horrified at the thought of huge wind farms decimating landscapes and putting threatened birds or whales at risk. Today all is overlooked and any sacrifice is acceptable as long as it’s to appease the climate gods. I don’t know about you, but I’ll take old school environmentalism and activism any day and I’d far rather invest my energy in preserving nature and habitats for their own sake than to fit some cooked-up second order effect where even the science is in dispute.

For my own part, I’ve moved away from being fixated on my carbon footprint and the amount of fossil fuel I burn – as far as I’m concerned, if we can extract oil or gas with little impact or risk to natural habitats and ecosystems, that’s fine by me. At the same time, I’m as pro-renewables as ever, just not at any cost. I’ve found this change in attitude has assuaged the guilt I once felt and helped make me a happier person – now my main concern when filling up my car is the price on the pump!