Yes, Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute now appears to be willing to admit that climate change is a going concern.
But rather than tackle the intertwined problems of energy consumption, energy supply, global conflicts, and a fast-growing developing world, Steven Hayward offers this solution (and I'm not kidding):
(Image source
NASA)
... we should consider climate modification. If humanity is powerful enough to disrupt the climate negatively, we might also be able to change it for the better. On a theoretical level, doing so is relatively simple: we need to reduce the earth's absorption of solar radiation. A few scientists have suggested we could accomplish this by using orbiting mirrors to rebalance the amounts of solar radiation different parts of the earth receive. Right now this idea sounds as fanciful as Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative seemed in 1983, but look what that led to. New York University physicist Martin Hoffert points out that the interval between the Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk and Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon was a mere sixty-six years. It is entirely reasonable to expect vast changes in our technical capacity before the century is out.
OH ... MY ... GOD.
Let's see, to reduce insolent radiation by, say, 10%, would require that something on the order of 5-10% of the equatorial land area between 30 S and 30 N be covered by mirrors ...
... from space.
To minimize penumbras -- those half-shadows that surround the full shadows cast by objects due to the very large size of the Sun -- the mirrors would have to be solid sheets stretching over enormous areas. And at an orbital altitude of at least 400 miles, this massive, unbroken mirror would require an area of at least 6 million square miles (assuming a 3936 mile Earth radius, and 5% coverage of the area between 30 S and 30 N).
Light weight reflective mylar weighs about 50 tons per square mile. Forgetting for the moment that the Space Shuttle's maximum payload weight is only 25 tons, an effective mirror would require over 300 million tons of mylar, and therefore about 10 million space shuttle launches.
And don't forget space junk. The only reason the shuttle doesn't get hit is because it's small. A 6 million square mile mirror is another story.
Finally, Ronald Reagan's SDI? Please.
Hayward's piece just goes to show: AEI folks have no sense of scale.
UPDATE: I made a serious boo-boo. I calculated area as 4 pi R^3, rather than 4 pi R^2. All corrections are reflected above. The mylar would cost about $400 billion dollars, assuming a 99% volume discount from standard commercial prices. Thanks to phillies for catching the error. I knew something didn't add up.