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When I am in the right sort of contrary mood I like to do a little mustache twirl and boldly proclaim. We worked hard to get the sulfur compounds out of our fu

• shagie 2y ago
  > We worked hard to get the sulfur compounds out of our fuels... What if that was a long term mistake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/ 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-helping-make-the-planet-warmer 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 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.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• ruined 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus
• aaroninsf 2y ago
  The what-if premise of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel) is: 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.
• BurningFrog 2y ago
  The much better solution is injecting it into the stratosphere, where it will have the full reflective effect, while having orders of magnitude less acid rain 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.
  • llamaimperative 2y ago
    Is it "inability to consider tradeoffs" or "humility in the face of our repeated failure to engineer biological systems the way we intend to?" You have very little idea what will happen if we inject sulfur into the stratosphere.
    • BurningFrog 2y ago
      What happens when sulfur enters the stratosphere is quite well known, since we have studied what happens when volcanoes do it. 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-of-mount-pinatubo https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1510/global-effects...
      • llamaimperative 2y ago
        Errrr, we know what happens when you put a roughly Pinatubo plume-sized mixture of Pinatubo plume composition in the vicinity of Pinatubo in 1991. Everything from there is a generalization and abstraction which is very hard to do with complex systems like meteorological ones.
  • tzs 2y ago
    One serious issue with that is that injected sulfides do not stay around long. If we use them to cause cooling or to stop warming before we have started reducing CO2 emissions or at least are firmly and irrevocably on a reasonable path to doing so we'll have to keep injecting sulfides. 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.
• graemep 2y ago
  > Acid rain was not that bad... was it? 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.