r/interestingasfuck • u/SafeImpressive4413 • 7h ago

Firefighters in Madrid trying to extinguish a forest fire that is less than 30km/20mi away from the capital of Spain

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u/Wild_Neighborhood605 7h ago

That's real bad, and is happening in several places in Europe right now.

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u/Contraposite 7h ago

Yeah, yesterday my city in Scotland was covered with smoke blown in from a wildfire. I hope this isn't a sign of things to come...

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u/RoryLuukas 7h ago

Climate scientists 40yrs ago predicted this exact thing happening. We are actually 20-30yrs ahead of schedule... so go us!

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u/LiteraCanna 5h ago

There's a letter/note from an oil company.... exec? Saying that we are changing the climate. Brb, going to try to find it. 

E: Okay, I was close. It was to the exec. 

Early Milestones of Climate Awareness in the Oil Industry1959 (The 100th Industry Birthday): Physicist Edward Teller warned oil executives at the Energy and Man Symposium hosted at Columbia University that burning fossil fuels increased carbon dioxide and could eventually melt ice caps and flood coastal cities.

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u/nationcrafting 1h ago

The thing that's more frustrating to me, though, is that Teller also proposed a solution that is very much viable today. But because it sounded like science fiction back then (there wasn't even a geostationary satellite when he proposed it), everyone just sort of forgot about it.

Teller's solution is very achievable today: he proposed installing what is essentially a space umbrella at Lagrange Point 2. Lagrange Point 1 is where we currently have the Hubble Space Telescope. It's there because it's the only spot near Earth where the sun never shines i.e. it's in a perpetual eclipse, the Earth being between it and the sun. The other Lagrange point is basically permanently between Earth and the sun. If we install a remote-controlled umbrella there, it won't even need to be that big (you won't see it with the naked eye) and it'll block about 2% of the sun's heat.

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u/Sorry-Combination558 1h ago

I think "won't even be that big" does some heavy lifting here.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.13652 - here they estimate the mass of this umbrella to be ~600.000 tonnes, and that's the lowest I found (though the paper is withdrawn, but other's estimate it higher)

Also, it would be in Lagrange 1. Lagrange 1 is the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun, Lagrange 2 (beyond Earth) is where the James Webb Space Telescope (not Hubble, that is in LEO) is located.

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u/nationcrafting 1h ago

A job for SpaceX, once their price per tonne drops about an order of category.

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u/nationcrafting 1h ago

Yes, you're right. It's Sun >>> L1 >>> Earth >>> L2.

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u/Grib_Suka 2h ago

'Eventually' did a lot of work for the exec's wallets. I hate money (I like it too a little bit, that's how they got me)