Space Ring Could Shade Earth and Stop Global Warming

Space Ring Could Shade Earth and Stop Global Warming
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Writer
posted: 27 June 2005
02:14 pm ET



A wild idea to combat global warming suggests creating an artificial ring of small particles or spacecrafts around Earth to shade the tropics and moderate climate extremes.

There would be side effects, proponents admit. An effective sunlight-scattering particle ring would illuminate our night sky as much as the full Moon, for example.

And the price tag would knock the socks off even a big-budget agency like NASA: $6 trillion to $200 trillion for the particle approach. Deploying tiny spacecraft would come at a relative bargain: a mere $500 billion tops.

But the idea, detailed today in the online version of the journal Acta Astronautica, illustrates that climate change can be battled with new technologies, according to one scientist not involved in the new work.


[link to www.livescience.com]

Ahhhh - now there is a solution akin to western medicine. Treat the symptoms and not the cause

Heh. Slashdot ran this story earlier, and one of the comments is along a similar line of thought as 15479´s post:

"Wouldn´t it be cheaper, easier, and more effective to, I don´t know, build energy systems that don´t release carbon? Just a thought."

The "space ring" is a cool idea... for sci-fi. There are plenty of more reasonable and feasible methods.

Their using particulates already, just putting them in the atmosphere.

Yeah, and just when they´re done, the next ice age will start...