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Controversial Spraying, Sun-Dimming Method Aims To Curb Global Warming (cbsnews.com)
Scientists are proposing an ingenious but as-yet-unproven way to tackle climate change: spraying sun-dimming chemicals into the Earth's atmosphere. From a report: A fleet of 100 planes making 4,000 worldwide missions per year could help save the world from climate change. Also, it may be relatively cheap. That's the conclusion of a new peer-reviewed study in Environmental Research Letters. It's the stuff of science fiction. Planes spraying tiny sulphate particulates into the lower stratosphere, around 60,000 feet up. The idea is to help shield the Earth from just enough sunlight to help keep temperatures low. The researchers examined how practical and costly a hypothetical solar geoengineering project would be beginning 15 years from now. The aim would be to half the temperature increase caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases. This method would mimic what large volcanoes do. In 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines. It was the second largest eruption of the 20th century, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). In total, the eruption injected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide aerosols into the stratosphere. USGS said the Earth's lower atmosphere temperature dropped by approximately 1-degree Fahrenheit. The effect only lasted a couple of years because the sulfates eventually fell to Earth.
Ever heard of ACID RAIN?
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
"We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky."
--Morpheus
I can't be the only person thinking this... but I think we humans have hit a point where we can safely say injecting -more- chemicals into the environment should, at best, be a very last resort. Preferably, not on the table at all, ever.
It's called a hack. Rather than fix the root problem, just work around it. With enough hacks, you arrive at an unmaintainable legacy system. The you have to build a new one.
If you post it, they will read.
Did you look at this? They said 4000 flights per year in the first year, increasing to 60,000 flights per year in year 14.
Yow.
...and, yes, I'm not sure what other impacts of 1.5 million tons of sulfur burned into the upper atmosphere per year will be, but "acid rain" is the first thing that comes to mind.
The problem is there's a very vocal and politically active group which opposes the one power generation solution we already have which solves the problem - nuclear power.
Environmentalists suffer from what I call Just Right-itis. The insistence that there is just the right amount of global warming occurring. Enough that mankind is in mortal danger, so we have to take drastic action quickly. But not so much that we need to switch to a different power source ASAP. Instead there's just the right amount of global warming so that we can spend decades developing completely new power sources, meanwhile continuing to burn fossil fuels thus exacerbating the problem.
It's like finding out a asteroid will hit the Earth in a few decades and wipe out all life on it. But then staunchly opposing deflecting the asteroid using existing technology which is already capable of dealing with it, and instead insisting that completely new technology be developed to deal with the asteroid. This reasoning only makes sense if you value your pet technology over the survival of life on Earth. Their primary goal isn't stopping and arresting global warming. It's using it as a vehicle to drive the transition to renewable power, even if that means risking all life on Earth.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be the end game. The #1 priority should be getting off fossil fuels. We can do that with nuclear, buying ourselves decades if not centuries to develop renewables and batteries until they're in a state which can handle base load. Then we can switch from nuclear to renewables. If you oppose this most rational course of action, then you force us to start coming up with more and more desperate ideas to stave off disaster, like polluting the atmosphere in order to save it.
We have a hugely complex system that we don't really nderstand. Some people think that human activity may be influencing that system, although absolutely none of the predictive models we have actually work. So...the answer to a non-understood influence on a non-understood system is: muck with the system some more.
How about we first invest in climate monitoring, and try to understand the whole system? If global warming is such an important issue, why is the number of monitoring stations monotonically decreasing, especially in regions like the Arctic?
So, if you were in a car which was heading towards a concrete wall, and someone said "Hit the brakes!", you'd say "No, first we need to be sure which part of the wall we're going to hit"?
I mean, yes, we don't have 100% precise models for climate change. That doesn't mean we should immediately give up. We don't have 100% precise models of how a commercial airline will fly from LAX to EWR, and yet dozens of planes manage to complete that route each day. Crazy, isn't it? It's almost like we could just work on the biggest emitters up front, and assume that in the future someone will figure out how to deal with the more subtle sources.
My usual warning: be careful with amelioration efforts lest you accidentally induce another ice age, which will kill billions in a few years, not cause mild difficulties moving in from the coasts over a century.
Ice ages can come on in a year or two -- you just nee enough snow and cool temps so the snow pack doesn't melt in summer one year.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.