Acid Rain is also a bad thing with bad consequences.
While I'm not necessarily that opposed to cautious attempts at some geoengineering, I don't think "scale up the sulfate emissions" is a viable solution.
Acid Rain is also a bad thing with bad consequences.
While I'm not necessarily that opposed to cautious attempts at some geoengineering, I don't think "scale up the sulfate emissions" is a viable solution.
I'm not pretending that cooling via sulfur emissions is without costs -- but e.g. if living at 2018 levels of sulfur emissions (which were already 90% down from peak) can give us 0.5C of cooling, that's a deal I'm willing to take, especially in light of how hard it is proving to reduce carbon emissions. It especially seems like we're hitting a number of tipping points with warming, and if sulfur emissions (or any other albedo-increasing intervention) can keep us from crossing those lines, we should, in my view. Would we be better off with 2014-level sulfur emissions? 2008? At _some_ point, trading sulfur emissions for cooling becomes a bad deal, and we shouldn't scale up without limit. But is it a good direction to move from where we are now? I think so.
[1] https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/07/09/whatever-happened-acid-...
The point is that the earth is a really complex systems, and it's not always clear what technical fixes to use, Let alone getting the political will to implement them.