> 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.