Sun Shade Proposed for Global Warming Emergency

What happens if we don’t bring global warming under control and it becomes evident that catastrophic climate change is perhaps only a decade or so away? University of Arizona professor Roger Angel, an optics expert, thinks he may have the answer. His solution is described at physorg.com. Angel proposes that we launch trillions of small transparent free-flying discs, each about 2 feet in diameter and only 1/5000 of an inch thick, to form a 60,000 mile long cylindrical cloud several thousand miles in diameter situated lengthwise between the Earth and sun in the L-1 orbit which is an obit aligned with the sun. To get these objects up there Angel proposes using 20 electromagnetic launchers to launch the objects in stacks of one million at a time. Stacks would be launched every 5 minutes for 10 years. Once in orbit the discs should divert enough sunlight to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by about 2 percent which would produce enough cooling to counter the heating effects of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. This proposal will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It appears that the threat of global warming has now reached the point where serious people are taking proposals like Angel’s seriously.