Inject Sulfur into Air to Battle Global Warming
I tend to be more interested in technological ways that humanity can gain control over global climate than I am in anti-technological cut backs, so this caught my eye.
One way to curb global warming is to purposely shoot sulfur into the atmosphere, a scientist suggested today.The burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. It also releases sulfur that cools the planet by reflecting solar radiation away from Earth.
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What makes Earth habitable? This LiveScience original video explores the science of global warming and explains how, for now, conditions here are just right.Most researchers say the warming effect has been winning in recent decades.
Injecting sulfur into the second atmospheric layer closest to Earth would reflect more sunlight back to space and offset greenhouse gas warming, according to Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego.
Crutzen suggests carrying sulfur into the atmosphere via balloons and using artillery guns to release it, where the particles would stay for up to two years. The results could be seen in six months.
It seems fairly certain to me that regardless of the current global warming controversy, the earths climate will at some point change to be much less hospitalble unless we learn to regulate global climate. I doubt that their will be a simple solution to this problem, climate is a complex system and therefore changing one peice of the equation will always have complex and unexpected results. While difficult though, I don’t think it is impossible.
(hat tip: Volokh Conspiracy)
