This Global Warming Fix Stinks
By Elizabeth Svoboda| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Aug, 21, 2006
In the infamous “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” episode of The Simpsons, Mr. Burns designs a giant sun-blocking disc to ensure the town's dependence on nuclear power. A Nobel laureate has proposed a similar strategy with a nobler purpose: stopping global warming.
Scientists agree that the planet is getting warmer because excess carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere acts like a pane of glass, trapping heat from solar radiation. Using less electricity and driving less are often recommended by climatologists to reduce carbon emissions.
But Paul Crutzen, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, has a very different idea: He recommends injecting massive amounts of sulfur into the upper atmosphere so less sun will penetrate it.
Stanford ecologist Ken Caldeira, who has investigated similar climate-modification strategies, thinks Crutzen's clout will drive this seemingly off-the-wall project forward. Efforts to manipulate the environment fall under a category known as geoengineering, which "lived in a shadowy netherworld, just beyond what was considered politically acceptable," Caldeira said. "Crutzen's paper is important because it shines a light on geoengineering, bringing it out of that netherworld."
Crutzen published his proposal in the August issue of Climatic Change. He won the 1995 Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on the ozone layer.
When sulfur particles are released into the Earth's atmosphere, they reflect solar radiation back into space much as large ice sheets in the Arctic do. Crutzen envisions lofting sulfur into the stratosphere on small balloon crafts, which will use artillery guns to release their smelly payload.
It's a response, Crutzen writes, to the failure of international political efforts to establish carbon emission limits. "The preferred way to resolve this dilemma is to lower the emissions of greenhouse gases," he said in the Climatic Change editorial. "However, so far, attempts in that direction have been grossly unsuccessful."
Crutzen's idea might sound surreal, but it was inspired by a natural event. When Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, it sprayed millions of tons of sulfur into the atmosphere. Much to scientists' surprise, the sulfur reflected so much sun that the Earth’s surface cooled by almost one full degree Fahrenheit in the year following the eruption.
Because sulfur can achieve such immediate cooling effects, some scientists think Crutzen's plan could lower global temperatures even as more carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere.
"It's a short-term fix to a long-term problem," said Stephen Schwartz, an atmospheric scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. "Our entire energy economy is dependent on burning fossil fuel, and that's not going to stop anytime soon. We need a stopgap solution."
But Schwartz cautions that sulfur-spraying would not enable the international community to shelve measures like the Kyoto Protocol.
The sulfur solution would not be permanent, since the element lingers in the atmosphere for only a couple of years. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, stays around for more than a century.
In addition, says John Latham, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the ecological domino effect of shooting sulfur into the stratosphere is unpredictable.
"Many species of plants, for instance, depend on specific amounts of sunlight to complete their normal growth cycles," he said. "If sulfur clouds blot this light out, even slightly, the ecosystems these plants belong to could be irrevocably altered."
Still, Latham believes the consequences of doing nothing could be grave. A few years ago, he proposed his own artificial global-warming fix: Spray droplets of ocean water into the air to encourage formation of clouds that would bounce solar rays back into space.
"Among the major oil-burning countries, there's very little sign that we're going to limit our consumption of fossil fuels," he said. "Because of that, it's good for our future that someone of Crutzen's distinction has come into the arena."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0, ... wn_index_1
Oh and turn down the volume on your posts - you write like a poor conspiracy theorist.
