Save Earth from warming by using pollution?

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Save Earth from warming by using pollution?

solonavi

19 November 2006

Climate, Global Warming, Technology

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Associated Press

If the sun warms the Earth too dangerously, the time may come to draw the shade. The “shade” would be a layer of pollution deliberately spewed into the atmosphere to help cool the planet. This over-the-top idea comes from prominent scientists, among them a Nobel laureate. The reaction here at the U.N. conference on climate change is a mix of caution, curiosity and some resignation to such “massive and drastic” operations, as the chief U.N. climatologist describes them.

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist who first made the proposal is himself “not enthusiastic about it.”

“It was meant to startle the policy makers,” said Paul J. Crutzen, of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. “If they don’t take action much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this.”

When he published his proposal in the journal Climatic Change in August, Crutzen cited a “grossly disappointing international political response” to warming.

The Dutch climatologist, awarded a 1995 Nobel in chemistry for his work uncovering the threat to Earth’s atmospheric ozone layer, suggested that balloons bearing heavy guns be used to carry sulfates high aloft and fire them into the stratosphere.

While carbon dioxide keeps heat from escaping Earth, substances such as sulfur dioxide, a common air pollutant, reflect solar radiation, helping cool the planet.

Wigley ran scenarios of stratospheric sulfate injection – on the scale of Pinatubo’s estimated 10 million tons of sulfur – through supercomputer models of the climate, and reported that Crutzen’s idea would, indeed, seem to work. Even half that amount per year would help, he wrote.

A massive dissemination of pollutants would be needed every year or two, as the sulfates precipitate from the atmosphere in acid rain.

Wigley said a temporary shield would give political leaders more time to reduce human dependence on fossil fuels – the main source of greenhouse gases. He said experts must more closely study the feasibility of the idea and its possible effects on stratospheric chemistry.

Nairobi conference participants agreed.

Philip Clapp, a veteran campaigner for emissions controls to curb warming, also sounded a nervous note, saying, “We are already engaged in an uncontrolled experiment by injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”

But Clapp, president of the U.S. group National Environmental Trust, said, “I certainly don’t disagree with the urgency.”

In past years scientists have scoffed at the idea of air pollution as a solution for global warming, saying that the kind of sulfate haze that would be needed is deadly to people. Last month, the World Heath Organization said air pollution kills about 2 million people worldwide each year and that reducing large soot-like particles from sulfates in cities could save 300,000 lives annually.

NASA said this weekend’s conference will examine “methods to ameliorate the likelihood of progressively rising temperatures over the next decades.” Other such U.S. government-sponsored events are scheduled to follow.