This is a pretty amazing story with all kinds of repercussions including giving earth-rapists another excuse to continue driving their massive SUV's and to continue killing millions of people every year despite pollution's health effects. So, please, this is NOT an excuse to revert to unadulterated earth-raping but rather a possible emergency mechanism to save mankind from ourselves.
This theory, with some data to back it up, is extremely intriguing (despite how Republicans will use this to justify their rapacious attitudes). It's especially intriguing for people like me who recently had a child and who are willing to look at anything that will reverse the bleak future in store for for the next generations:
Nobel Prize laureate Paul Crutzen says he has new data supporting his controversial theory that injecting the common pollutant sulphur into the atmosphere would cancel out the greenhouse effect. [snip]
The Dutch meteorologist showed what he calls the positive cooling effect of adding a layer of sulphates to the atmosphere at a global warming conference at the Porter School for Environmental Studies in Tel Aviv.
http://www.alertnet.org/...
As the article mentions, this controversial theory has been around for awhile and had been dismissed by scientists, that is until Crutzen got involved. Here's the crux of his plan:
"Our calculations using the best models available have shown that injecting 1 million tonnes of sulphur a year would cool down the climate so the greenhouse effect is wiped out," Crutzen told Reuters.
An added layer of sulphates in the stratosphere, some 10 miles (16 km) above the earth, would reflect sunlight into space and reduce solar radiation reaching the earth's surface, Crutzen said.
The article goes on to explain how volcano eruptions, which spew sulphur into the atmosphere, has the same cooling effect.
Of course as with anything, for every action, there is a reaction: sulphur causes acid rain.
[Update: Jerome a Paris provided a link to a diary at European Tribune on this.... important excerpts include:
- Creating an SO2 sunscreen appears to be low-harm and low-risk
Adding SO2 to the stratosphere would later increase the precipitation of SO2. The increase, however, would be a few percent of current human SO2 emissions (which total about 80 million tons per year). Since human SO2 emissions have recently been decreasing by a few percent per year, maintaining an SO2 sunscreen in the stratosphere would do no more than temporarily slow the decline of SO2 in the lower atmosphere. The SO2 sunscreen fix would add a small amount of a natural substance to the environment. By reasonable standards, it can be considered clean.
And...
- The main problem with the sunscreen option?
The sunscreen option will, of course, undermine efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, and CO2 emissions have effects other than warming. For one, increasing CO2 lowers ocean pH, with unknown but possibly enormous ecological effects. For another, although screening sunlight can reduce global mean temperature, the geographic distribution of heat input and loss would still change, hence some degree and kind of climate change would still occur. Adding an SO2 sunscreen isn't equivalent to reducing CO2 levels, but it can keep the polar ice caps from melting.