Page 225 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

7.3 Mikhail Aleksandrovich
Gorodskiy’s plan for launching
a Saturn-like ring of reflective
particles into Earth orbit to
warm the Arctic. (rusin and
flit, man versus climate)

metallic potassium particles that were highly reflective, lightweight, and rela-
tively inexpensive. Gorodskiy wanted the ring turned full face to the Sun in
summer and oriented on edge in the winter, but his back-of-the-envelope cal-
culations provided no details on the coherence or lifetime of the ring or how
to shift its orientation. He imagined, however, that the ring would increase
o
o
shortwave radiation between 55 and 90 N to values up to 50 percent greater
than those at the equator! Permafrost would disappear, polar ice would melt,
the cities of Siberia would flourish, and the entire planet would warm consid-
erably (figure 7.3).
Another Soviet engineer, Valentin Cherenkov, proposed a much smaller orbit-
ing cloud, formed from only 1 ton of opaque particles, that would direct the Sun’s
rays earthward (63–65). He estimated that the cloud would yield 1,300 billion
kilowatts of power, the equivalent of about 500,000 large conventional power
stations. This amount of energy could heat the Arctic and provide sky illumina-
tion of more than 500 lux, basically eliminating the long polar night. It would
also eliminate the differences among the seasons and between the climate at the
poles and that at the equator. Counterproposals existed at the time to cool the
o
o
planet by positioning a sunshade over the equator between 30 N and 30 S—this
about forty-five years before the current batch of proposals to manage solar radi-
ation (chapter 8).

208 | fearS, fantaSieS, and PoSSibilitieS of Control