Space Mirrors and Ocean Dams: Drastic, Futuristic Ideas to Combat Climate Change

Human ingenuity has led to the creation of countless, amazing engineering feats.  Ancient pyramids, city skylines, The Great Wall of China, and spaceships are all examples of the technological marvels that humans have built.  Since humans have demonstrated throughout history an innate ability to solve problems by building incredible new inventions, can we solve climate change with drastic and extremely ambitious technological innovation?

There is no shortage of wild, hypothetical solutions to climate change that scientists around the world have already proposed.  One such proposal is the Northern European Enclosure Dam (NEED).  In a published paper a group of scientists have suggested that European countries should construct three massive dams in different parts of the North Sea as a way to prevent potentially catastrophic sea level rise in Europe.  The dams would stretch 90, 100, and 200 miles, respectively, across some of the deepest parts of the North Sea, making this arguably the most ambitious dam proposal in human history.  

An even more radical solution was suggested by Lowell Wood from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: launching a giant mirror into space to reflect a portion of sunlight from reaching earth.  Launching one giant mirror, or a series of smaller mirrors, into space could potentially slow global climate change by reflecting a portion of the sun’s rays away from earth.  Less solar radiation reaching Earth would, in theory, help cool the planet and mitigate global warming.  However, for the mirrors to have any effect, they would have to have a combined area over the size of Greenland, which makes scientists wonder if this project is even within the realms of today’s technology.  

Analysis: While ambitious engineering projects are intriguing, they should be treated as a last resort to solving climate change due to technological complications and potentially catastrophic consequences.  Instead, money and resources should be devoted to tangible climate change solutions.

Projects such as hundred-mile ocean dams or a fleet of giant mirrors in space are very intriguing.  These fascinating ideas are commonly mistaken as a one-size-fits-all solution to the global climate crisis, that a potential giant space mirror or ocean dam can instantly eradicate the problems humanity faces.  While these proposals seem like tantalizing solutions, they also present the risk of irreversible, calamitous repercussions to the environment.

• The potential damages of hypothetical projects might outweigh any benefits

There is no way to test the effectiveness of hundred-mile ocean dams or space mirrors in a laboratory, so scientists do not know all the potential consequences of these massive projects.  For example, a space mirror might have the intended effect of reducing solar radiation hitting earth, but the sudden reduction in solar radiation may irreversibly change the atmospheric climate.  Disturbing the balance of heat in the atmosphere could cause massive, prolonged droughts across continents or lead to flooding on others.  Giant dams may block important trading routes on oceans and creating new sources of freshwater, which would set off a litany of political disputes that could lead to war.  For any of these projects, scientists have no idea on how the secondary repercussions of these projects may harm billions of people.  With no way to test these projects in controlled settings, they are a massive risk to the future of humanity if they go wrong.

• The costs for any of these projects may be unfathomable

Simply stated, the biggest hurdle to any of these projects might not be the uncertain consequences but the astronomical costs it would require to complete said projects.  The NEED project is estimated to cost over 600 billion US dollars and a fleet of space mirrors could total over 750 billion dollars.  Those estimates are also preliminary and do not include secondary costs or potential additional costs that are not realized until construction begins.  Additionally, ocean dams or space mirrors would require an obscene amount of natural resources, which will only further the cries to destroy more previously pristine ecosystems to meet resource demand.  The costs and potential environmental degradation further increase the risk of any overly ambitious climate change engineering project.

• There are plenty of financially and technologically feasible climate change solutions with way less risk already in place

Even if one country or company were to hypothetically decide to invest almost a trillion dollars into a climate change solution, there is little incentive to choose a high-risk scientific proposal.  There are plenty of incredible scientific developments that are currently available that help mitigate climate change, with way less potentially catastrophic side effects.  Building thousands of solar panels and wind turbines for clean energy or planting millions of trees to reforest land and naturally capture carbon dioxide, would both cost a fraction compared to space mirrors or ocean dams.  Additionally, clean energy and planting trees do not have the potential negative detrimental consequences of more ambitious projects.

Conclusion

Overall, the ocean dams, space mirrors, and other large-scale geoengineering proposals to solve climate change are not worth the costs and the risks.  While these projects may be intriguing to conceptualize, these projects will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and cause potentially catastrophic consequences, both of which may cause irreversible harm to humanity.  

Humanity (probably) does not need ocean dams or space mirrors to save itself from climate change, but it does need technological innovation.  Scientists, engineers, and inventors need to continue to develop more efficient renewable energy technologies, electric vehicles, and carbon capture devices.  Human ingenuity can solve climate change, but it is best to keep projects such as space mirrors and ocean dams as hypotheticals for now. 

Bibliography 

Image Credit: Science Illustrated

Angel, Roger. “Feasibility of Cooling the Earth with a Cloud of Small Spacecraft near the Inner Lagrange Point (L1).” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, National Academy of Sciences, 14 Nov. 2006, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1859907/. 

Groeskamp, Sjoerd, and Joakim Kjellsson. “NEED: The Northern European Enclosure Dam for If Climate Change Mitigation Fails.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, vol. 101, no. 7, 2020, doi:10.1175/bams-d-19-0145.1. 

Kaufman, Rachel. “Could Space Mirrors Stop Global Warming?” LiveScience, Purch, 8 Aug. 2012, www.livescience.com/22202-space-mirrors-global-warming.html.