Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Smog is made of up several things, but some of it is only stable over relatively short time frames. Move that to the upper atmosphere and it does not nessisarily end up in anyone's back yard.

EX: Ozone is not heathy, but it's useful in the upper atmosphere. It's formed in part from Nox compounds, but they both end up as N2 and O2 the two main components of the atmosphere. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_oxide

PS: This seems unlikely to work well. However, one option to break up the heat inversion might be to change surface coloration over a relatively large area to create large updrafts / downdrafts.

View on HN

The jet engine idea is absurd. Why not build a taller stack that pokes through the inversion layer? Non-trivial to engineer, but guaranteed to work if constructed.

In the end using coal is probably a super bad idea. Hopefully other methods come online soon.

> In the end using coal is probably a super bad idea. Hopefully other methods come online soon.

The only use of coal is for electricity in the power plants already there. Coal makes the majority of the fuels used to power India.

I'm from Poland and I would bet that majority of homes are still heated with coal every winter.

My guess is the inversion layer is thicker than a taller smokestack could be practically constructed.

Yes, we can build buildings almost 1km high, but that's not practical for every smoke stack in the city.

A jet engine is a much cheaper and quicker to deploy option, assuming it actually works.

Last time I checked, a jet engine doesn't quite blow smoke entirely across a tarmac.

Maybe hot air just rises anyway. Maybe kinetic influence matters less than boosting the thermal energy?

But inversion layers change with the weather, so even if this works once, it may not work every time. And a band-aid that fixes this now, may only encourage more runaway growth covered up by more band-aids.

Wouldn't want to actually change technologies though. Just blunder along and cobble together dust busters and blow torches and continue with business as usual.

I suppose I'd only expect roughly the same from my own town supervisor...

I have my doubts as well as to its effectiveness, and of course, it's just a band-aid, but if the band-aid stops the pain long enough to fix the underlying issue, then go for it.

Unfortunately, like many tech band-aids, once the pain goes away the problem is ignored until it flares up again.

In the UK 30+ years ago we had a scool trip to Cranfield university and they had been experimenting with using tall chimneys to fire giant smoke rings into the upper atmosphere to do something similar,

Reply on news.ycombinator.com