New: SANGAM Talk on Reversing Global Warming. 40-min presentation + Q&A
- Are these in Space? No. We emphasize that Glitter Belt reflectors are NOT in Space: they are around 30.5km (100,000 ft) above the Earth’s surface. Anywhere from 80,000 to 120,000 ft without changing the design.
“Space” is officially “Beyond the von Karman Limit” of 100 km, which is over 300,000 ft. To stay in Space orbit without coming down fast due to aerodynamic drag, one must be above around 250+km, typically 400+ km.
Being in the atmosphere allows us to float at 10m/s instead of 7500 m/s. Big difference.
2. Are you going to BLOCK THE SUN? Recent news media hoopla about the Sweden objections to the Harvard-US National Academy of Sciences experiment, keep repeating this scary phrase.
NO. Consider this. A big cloud such as a volcanic or other chemical cloud, will be large and continuous over hundreds of square kilometers. Such a cloud will indeed partially BLOCK sunlight to the extent that you may experience a deep shadow on the ground. The cloud may also stay over a given region for hours or days. Our Glitter Belt Reflectors on the other hand are (a) small and separated from each other so that light passes in between them. (b) The shadows caused by each will only be felt a few hundred meters below each at most: and these are at 30,000 meters above the ground. The Physics phenomenon of Diffraction is what causes “every cloud has a Silver Lining”: the edges serve as Sources of light, and the light rays from the edges converge, ending the shadow region. Otherwise, every time an airplane passes over your house, it will be like night for a second! Nothing of the sort happens. In fact, you will not even be able to see Glitter Belt sheets from the ground: they are above the light-scattering Blue Sky. Just as you don’t see stars in the daytime, (and those actually put out light!) you will not see the black undersides of the GB sheets against the black sky. At night, perhaps, navigation lights required on each vehicle MAY be visible with telescopes from down below. (c) Our GB sheets keep moving, so the tiny effect of each is distributed over the planet over time. They do not hang around over any one place. (d) Our Summer Follower algorithm ensures that any heat reduction is only on the hottest days of summer. (e) At least until the data are well established and vehicle reliability is high enough, we plan to keep these over the remote oceans (South Indian Ocean and the Pacific, then the Atlantic and Arctic). After all, 75% of our Planet’s surface area is covered by oceans, there is really no particular need to come over land except for takeoff and landing.
2. Isn’t there uncertainly about Climate Change? Aren’t the causes of climate phenomena controversial?
Many aspects have uncertainty and the UN’s Reports phrase all their data and conclusions with degrees of probability. However, today it is undeniable that there is NET heat being retained in the lower atmosphere, oceans and land. Causality of phenomena is not so clear (or relevant) at this stage because there are highly nonlinear interactions now.
But for all the uncertainty about cause and effect, the ONE “independent variable” in the equation that we CAN influence independent of everything else, is the amount of sunlight coming in. Which is our proposal. A mirror will reflect. Laws of Physics. Therefore the amount of solar heat coming in can be reduced using our reflectors.
3. Can Glitter Belt be used to INCREASE sunlight coming in?
Absolutely, yes if it ever becomes necessary to do so: Turn the sheets upside down and tilt the sheets. Lower surface reflecting, upper surface absorbing. At least evening and morning light and heat can be directed inwards. If Earth goes into deep Global Cooling (see below why that might occur) we can definitely help by capturing sunlight that would otherwise escape, into the atmosphere.
But any change that we can do is very small (think 1% realistically). Nothing sudden or drastic.
4. What is the life of your sheets? Will you let them stay up until they disintegrate, or do you have to bring them down frequently, like every day?
Estimated life: Our aim is to design for 30 years of continuous operation if possible. No they will not be brought down at night. They must survive night-time glide and stay up continuously. Initially we will try to achieve 1-year life, to drift all the way south and north over 1 year, then bring down and examine for UV damage, high-energy particle damage etc. But 30 year life has been demonstrated with Aluminized Mylar balloons used as spacecraft radio reflectors in Space since the 1960s.
This helps with system cost a lot. We want production and launches to focus on growing the system, not replacing it, for the first few years at least.
5. NASA and ESA have not shown continuous operation of solar-powered vehicles at high altitude for more than a few months. Why can you?
The NASA SOLAR PATHFINDER or HELIOS or the new ESA solar airplanes are all basically flying wings. They have high “aspect ratio” which means a long span and short chord. But their surface area is not so great, so the “wing loading” is not extremely low. They must use batteries or fuel cells to run their propellers during the night. This limits life: batteries wear out, and fuel cells use up fuel (hydrogen). Having these also means a lot more weight, and that weights occur at discrete points. This can trigger bending/torsion oscillations and failure.
In our case, the sheets which are the Payload, themselves contribute 90% of the lift, so we can survive night-time glide. Our Wing Loading (weight per unit lifting area) is extremely low. These sheets are only deployed once the vehicles get up to the very calm upper atmosphere, far above turbulence and dense atmosphere.
6. Can you use these reflectors to regulate energy to Earth? At present the reflectors are conceived as pure reflectors, to bounce as much sunlight as possible back into Space. Area coverage is extremely small, so no real-time “regulation” is possible. With balloon-supported reflectors it may be possible to influence specific areas (Polar ice-cap edge) but because of interactions, this has to be done carefully. Still, only a tiny change.
7. Why not put solar cells on the sheets, convert and beam electric power down? Won’t that provide clean electricity and help pay for the system?
No. We have a few solar cells to provide energy for the propellers, but no intention of trying to use this for Solar Power. Space solar power on a large scale is simply not viable today, for several reasons. Here solar cells are fundamentally absorbers of solar energy, not reflectors. They can convert perhaps 20% of sunlight to electric power as DC current, but the rest gets radiated or convected into the atmosphere. Solar cells are much heavier per unit area than our ultra-light reflector sheets, so putting large areas “up there” is far more difficult. Converting the DC current to something that can be beamed down is also not efficient, and atmospheric transmission loses even more (absorbed into the atmosphere. The receivers have to be large and costly, and again losses are encountered. So what can be put into the grid is perhaps 50%of the 20%, or a maximum of 10% of solar power, with the other 90% absorbed. Though “stratospheric platforms” have been proposed for some limited applications, such things are not at all economically viable to really scale up to Power Plant level, particularly since ground-based solar photovoltaics and solar thermal powerplants are now so much cheaper and easier. Remember that all said and done, these atmospheric reflectors only work during the day: to “follow the Sun” day-night, takes supersonic speed. There ARE other interesting uses, such as as floating antennae, but we have yet to explore those.
8. Reflector sheets do not reduce Carbon Dioxide or other Greenhouse gases so why are they good to reduce Global Warming?
There are several aspects to Global Warming. Heat comes into the atmosphere. From the Sun above, from radiated energy from the Earth, and emissions from various sources. Of these, “anthropogenic” sources are the most controversial, and take various forms.
Industrialization rides on machinery, of which most can be described as ‘Heat Engines’: machines that convert Heat into Useful Work. Heat in this context could be released from chemical reactions such as burning fuel. What about electric machines? They run on electric power, which is generated by Heat Engines in Power Plants. Yes, even nuclear plants are heat engines, they take heat released in nuclear reactions from radioactive substances that were peacefully sleeping underground, and use that to generate superheated steam that drives turbines attached to electrical generators. Hydroelectric or Ocean Wave power? I can’t think of how to classify those as Heat Engines except that the rain and the waves also came eventually from solar-driven winds and evaporation, but so far, hydroelectric is a tiny percent of our power sources. When electricity drives a machine, it again does not convert 100%, so a substantial part goes as waste heat. Motors can “overheat” as you know, which means that convected heat transfer is not enough.
Thermodynamic Reality: All heat engines are less than 100% efficient. Worse, some of the conversion is “irreversible”. Even solar PV cells are “heat engines”: only about 10-20% efficient for most of us. In other words, they cannot convert all heat input to useful work, they always release “waste heat”. In the case of power plants, the “waste heat” is still at a high enough temperature to run secondary and even tertiary work generation cycles (weight is not such an issue as on airplanes and spacecraft). But there is still waste heat at the end. A good power plant may hit 40% efficiency so over 60% of the heat is emitted (often via “cooling water”) if not directly into the air. Air conditioners also emit heat.
Automobiles and other vehicles reach only about 35% overall efficiency; the rest is emitted.
Focus on GHG: Carbon dioxide and other Greenhouse Gases (GHG) raise concern because they absorb Infrared (IR) Radiation far more than an equivalent mass of air. And retain that, without allowing it to radiate out through the atmosphere into Space. Some 42% of the solar spectrum (remember Physics experiments?) is IR, and after the atmosphere takes out most of the UV, some 45% of remaining sunlight is IR.
In other words, the real problem is the amount of heat getting into the atmosphere. Reducing CO2 would allow emitted heat to be radiated out into Space more. But reflecting sunlight out into Space reduces the heat input to the atmosphere, and so reduces the amount of heat in the atmosphere just as well. Perhaps better.
9. Is human activity responsible for all heat and GHG in the atmosphere?
Not at all! The interior of Earth stays hot due to gravity and radioactive decay (nuclear fission reactions). Occasionally some of that heat spills out, not just as steam and water shooting out of geysers (such as Yellowstone’s Old Faithful) but also as huge volcanic eruptions. Volcanoes dump sulfur dioxide and other toxic gases into the atmosphere, even at great heights. Sulfuric acid aerosols reflect sunlight quite nicely! They also do very bad things as you know. Forest fires are another huge source of heat getting into the atmosphere: they also dump immense amounts of Carbon DiOxide into the atmosphere. Methane, which is considered to be 76 times as bad as CO2 per unit mass in terms of absorbing Infared radiation, is emitted in copious amounts from decaying vegetation. The numbers vary. Methane is 72 to 80 times as bad as CO2 per unit mass in the short term after release. But being lighter than CO2 and oxygen and nitrogen, it rises and gets dissipated, and perhaps reacts and breaks down into CO2 and H2O over a long period (many years).
Trees breathe: during the night they breathe out CO2. But they do so much during the day, converting CO2 and water into hydrocarbons in the presence of sunlight (“Photo Synthesis”), and so “sequestering” CO2. When trees fall, the leaves may rot and emit methane, but the heavy trunks sink deeper and deeper into soil, and eventually harden under pressure, sometimes turning into hydrocarbon liquid (crude oil) and sometimes losing even the hydrogen and getting stored as carbon (coal).
Just this (2020) summer’s California wildfires ALONE (many other states also had wildfire) dumped over a whole year (my rough calculation: needs careful fact-check, sorry!) of emissions from all of India in CO2, soot and carcinogens. Oregon and other western states also had huge fires, so bad that lumber is in short supply in 2021. Australia had HUGE wildfires. Brazil has one still going. New Zealand has valleys that have toxic levels of methane because of sheep and cattle herds. Texas is a prime emitter of methane from the cattle herds, though there are few forests. The Siberian and Canadian tundra regions are now emitting huge amounts of methane from the decayed forests buried under what was “permafrost” but is now melting.
But “anthropogenic” emission of CO2 and methane is all that we have a hope of reducing, hence all the pressure to reduce those. But remember that heat emission is the real reason why heat is absorbed – and Glitter Belt reduces the heat part of that equation, right at the source: the Sunlight entering the top of the atmosphere.
10. How much would Glitter Belt cost?
No one should believe a Cost Estimate put out by the inventors of a new system. So we developed some metrics for you. In aerospace cost estimation, the crudest and first method is that cost is proportional to the mass that is launched, without regard to complexity, and all the other parameters. We looked at the TOTAL mass of all that we had to launch, for the absolutely extreme case: REVERSING Global Warming into Global Cooling, as fast as it is warming now. In other words, a net heat loss rate of 2.92 Watts per square meter of the Earth’s surface. We estimated that even with a system that we could build today, the total mass would be equivalent to fewer than 400 Space Shuttles, the huge launching rockets and all. With improvements such as using thinner sheets (such as those used for Solar Sails), the mass could be as small as that of 40 Space Shuttles.
Just the USA launched 135 Space Shuttles, so we estimate an extreme cost equivalent to 3 Space Shuttle Programs, divided between all the nations of the Earth and many years (say 20 years?) You figure it out. No one knows exactly how much the Space Shuttle program costs, but the consensus is around $2B per launch, which makes the total around $270B. Three times that is $810B. Much less than what governments had to put out in just this year – 2020 to survive the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We believe that the Glitter Belt is far, far less complicated than the Space Shuttle, and the highest heat reversal rate that we would even want to achieve may be only a tenth of what we described above. Most of the cost of Space Programs is the salary cost of the people employed. We don’t believe the Glitter Belt needs anywhere NEAR the complexity of the Shuttle, but it may involve a much larger number of nations.
11. Sources of money to implement Glitter Belt?
Simply computing the value of the heat reflected, is a far better way to estimate the value of the Glitter Belt. Please ask someone how much it costs, to remove enough tons of CO2 from the atmosphere to reduce Net Heat Retention by x%. Then we can compare to the cost of getting Glitter Belt to achieve the same heat removal. Our 2018 AIAA paper shows the calculation and its results. We submit that the Glitter Belt is an eminently good “deal”. Much more on this in due course, but we are comfortable that this makes sense to do.
12. “Neutralizing cyclonic winds”.
Several people ask if a system such as the Glitter Belt could be used to “reduce” hurricanes/typhoons/cyclones. A topic of great interest, but we certainly want to stay FAR away from it in the context of the Glitter Belt. This is the biggest concern, and why we urgently need some friendly Simulation efforts: Nobody has a clue on all the interactions. A large-scale intervention may inadvertently push the Monsoon winds, or Polar ocean currents. Results could be catastrophic if done in a great hurry.
But Glitter Belt can provide extensive real-time data to make the honest Physics-based simulations much more accurate. So even a localized simulation can become much more effective.
The energy contained in weather phenomena, is simply too immense. People have suggested all sorts of schemes including focused sunlight, thermonuclear explosions, covering ocean surface with reflective particles, spraying sulfuric acid into the atmosphere etc. All best left to others, in our opinion.
Anyway because of the huge energy, the only way we see is to “destabilize”. Use the power of Nature itself to destroy the destructive phenomenon, in this case a buoyancy-driven vortex. This is the area of Flow control, where some tiny perturbation of an instability mode can be made to amplify. But as observed before, no one really has the ability to predict precisely the effect of such a modification. The best we can do is to provide detailed data using Glitter Belt so that Climate scientists can keep on improving their ability to predict, and become more and more sure that they can predict accurately.
Hurricanes (Cyclones/Typhoons) are actually part of the natural eco-system and contribute hugely to the water resources in some parts (such as Southeast USA where I live). So just evacuating with good roads/trains for a couple of days, and building residences in a smarter way is far superior to trying to fight Nature there.
In India’s Kerala (and Assom, Odisha and Bengal) for instance, houses in low-lying areas could be easily equipped with telescoping columns and floatation tanks so that the house (integral) foundation will rise like a boat but remain anchored in place, in case of flooding. Rest of the year the tanks can be used for compressed-air energy. We have a photo somewhere after a Pacific tsunami: the beach houses remain intact because they are on tall stilts. But that requires climbing stairs every day: the column idea is much better. Will be happy to work with you on that.
13. Did you say that Global Cooling is possible?
Yes. A glance at the history of Earth’s temperature profile over the past 400,000 years, says that the temperature goes up and down with a fairly predictable cycle. But even there, there is debate: some argue that we are on the upswing part, but other say no, we are actually OVERDUE for the onset of the next Ice Age, our “bad behavior” has been saving us and delaying the inevitable.
But there is a much more scary theory. The Earth is part of the Solar System. The Solar System is well inside the Milky Way Galaxy, and actually revolves around the center (now believed to be a SuperMassive Black Hole) at some speed. There are gas clouds in the Milky Way, and “we” are moving with respect to the local gas cloud.
The average “temperature” as defined by random motion of the hydrogen and other molecules of “Deep Space”, is around 6 Kelvins, or 6 above Absolute Zero. So the “speed of sound” for that temperature is not large. The relative motion between the Solar System and the Gas Cloud is thus supersonic. A bunch of objects with a Big One (the Sun) in the middle, zipping supersonic through a gas cloud will generate several Shock Waves, led by the Solar System Bow Shock. The Voyager spacecraft has actually crossed that, I believe. Well.. a shock wave raises the gas temperature sharply. And Earth is in that ‘hot’ region, which no doubt reduces the amount of heat radiated out from Earth.
So! What happens if and when, one day, the Solar System comes out of a denser part of this cloud, into clearer “Deep Space?” Sudden cooling. And not a thing that we can do about it, or is there?
Well.. we could burn the forests fast.
But much faster: we could just FLIP the sheets of the Glitter Belt. Reflective side Down, absorbing side Up. And even tilt to capture more of the sunlight that would otherwise escape the atmosphere.
Can a thin flat sheet with thin frame fly stably?
Please see this movie: powered flight of a thin Mylar Sheet with a carbon composite frame.
