We worked hard to get the sulfur compounds out of our fuels... What if that was a long term mistake. Perhaps we should be putting extra sulfur in our jet fuels.
Acid rain was not that bad... was it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
> Stratospheric aerosol injection is a proposed method of solar geoengineering (or solar radiation modification) to reduce global warming. This would introduce aerosols into the stratosphere to create a cooling effect via global dimming and increased albedo, which occurs naturally from volcanic winter.
Also read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/ (you can find snippets of the NOVA program about)
> Perhaps we should be putting extra sulfur in our jet fuels.
Kind of... though it's an interesting thing. https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-airplane-contrails-are-he...
I recall a suggestion that jets should "run rich" which would increase the water vapor in the exhaust and create more contrails in combination with eliminating redeye flights so that contrails aren't formed at night (allowing more radiative escape)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
> Marine cloud brightening also known as marine cloud seeding and marine cloud engineering is a proposed solar radiation management climate engineering technique that would make clouds brighter, reflecting a small fraction of incoming sunlight back into space in order to offset anthropogenic global warming. Along with stratospheric aerosol injection, it is one of the two solar radiation management methods that may most feasibly have a substantial climate impact.
> Acid rain was not that bad... was it?
My least favorite property of environmentalism is the inability to consider tradeoffs.
If asked to choose between acid rain and global warming, the typical environmentalist will just refuse.
You have very little idea what will happen if we inject sulfur into the stratosphere.
Unless you think "natural" sulphur from volcanoes behaves different than "artificial" sulphur, maybe because it is blessed by Gaia, of course.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1510/global-effects...
Everything from there is a generalization and abstraction which is very hard to do with complex systems like meteorological ones.
If we use the sulfides to mitigate the effects of warming without addressing the causes and then stop with the sulfides all the warming that was countered by the sulfides happens over a short period.
That would probably be much worse than having not used the sulfides at all. If you get some particular amount of warming spread over 20 years that's probably easier to adapt to than if you get that same amount of warming over 2 years after 18 years of no warming.
To me, this is one of the best features! Because if, by some unforeseen anomaly, it turns out to actually have bad net effects, you can just wait 1-2 years, and it goes away by itself!
The reality is that even if we stop CO₂ emissions cold today, CO₂ levels will stay the same, not go back to preindustrial levels for at least several centuries.
So the best practical plan I know is this:
- Learn how to spray SO₂ in the stratosphere so it cools down Earth to desirable levels.
- Figure out large scale CO₂ sequestration, to bring CO₂ levels back down. My guess is this takes ~50 years.
- As CO₂ levels go down, we can tamper down the SO₂ injections, and get the planet back to a healthy state.
What if an enterprising billionaire got tired of waiting for meaningful action to mitigate climate change,
and undertook to put sulfur back into the atmosphere, on the cheap?
"Taken from tomorrow's headlines..." perhaps. There are no international conventions or bodies currently prepared to regulate cowboy geoengineering, let alone capable of coercion.
On a huge scale it would be.
A huge (and often overlooked) effect of higher CO2 is ocean acidification and this will come on top of that.