Headline, August 13 2024/ ''' COOLING. EARTH COOINGS '''

''' COOLING EARTH

 COOINGS '''

'' A RISKY IDEA FOR COOLING EARTH. '' SCIENTISTS want to spray a pollutant into the sky. There is a growing interest.

Dr. David Keith leads the Climate Systems Engineering initiative at the University of Chicago. He believes that releasing sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere could lower temperatures worldwide.

David Keith was a graduate student in 1991 when a volcano erupted in the Philippines, sending a cloud of ash toward the edge of space.

Seventeen million tons of sulfur dioxide released from Mount Pinatubo spread across the atmosphere, reflecting some of the sun's energy away from Earth. The result was a drop in average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere by roughly one degree Fahrenheit [ about 0.5 Celsius ] in the year that followed.

Today, Dr. Keith sites that event as validation of an idea that has become his life's work : He believes that intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere would make it possible to lower temperatures worldwide, blunting global warming.

Such radical interventions are increasingly being taken seriously, as the effects of climate change grow more intense. Global temperatures have hit record high for 13 months in a row, unleashing violent weather and raising sea levels.

Scientists expect the heat to keep climbing for decades. The main driver of the warming, the burning of fossil fuels, continues more or less unabated. Against this backdrop, there is a growing interest in efforts to intentionally alter the Earth's climate, a field known as  geoengineering.

Already, major corporations are operating enormous facilities to vacuum up the carbon dioxide that's heating up the atmosphere and bury it underground. Some scientists are performing experiments designed to brighten clouds, another way to bounce some solar radiation back to space.

Others are working on efforts to make oceans and plants absorb more carbon dioxide. But of all these ideas, it is stratospheric solar geoengineering that elicits the greatest hope and the greatest fear.

Proponents see it as a relatively cheap and fast way to reduce temperatures well before the world has stopped burning fossil fuels.

Harvard University has a solar geoengineering program that has received grants from the. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

It's being studied by the Environmental Defense Fund along with the Climate Research Program, an international scientific effort. The European Union called last year for a thorough analysis of the risks of geoengineering and said countries should discuss how to regulate an eventual deployment of the technology.

But many scientists and environmentalists fear that it could result in unpredictable calamities.

Because it would be used in the stratosphere and not limited to a particular area, solar geoengineering could affect the whole world,  possibly scrambling natural systems, for instance creating rains in one arid region while drying out the monsoon season elsewhere.

Opponents worry it would distract from the urgent work of transitioning away from fossil fuels.

They object to intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide, a pollutant that would eventually move from the stratosphere to ground level, where it can irritate the skin, eyes, nose and throat and can cause respiratory problems.

And they fear that once begun, a solar geoengineering program would be difficult to stop.

'' The whole notion of spraying sulfur compounds to reflect sunlight is arrogant and simplistic,'' the Canadian environmentalist  David Suzuki said. '' There are unintended consequences of powerful technologies like these, and we have no idea what they will be,''

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Climate Change, Solutions and the Future of Mankind continues.  The World Students Society thanks David Gelles.

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