Scientists have calculated that injecting 8 to 16 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere each year, similar to the output of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, could cool the Earth's temperature by 1 degree Celsius. Simulations over Antarctica show that this method, known as stratospheric aerosol injection, could lower global temperatures by 0.5 degrees Celsius over 20 years. However, there would be a trade-off as this method would also reduce the ozone layer to its 1990 levels, which is only a third of its pre-human impact state.

The following submission statement was provided by /u/Rear-gunner:

Scientists have calculated that injecting 8 to 16 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere each year, similar to the output of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, could cool the Earth's temperature by 1 degree Celsius. Simulations over Antarctica show that this method, known as stratospheric aerosol injection, could lower global temperatures by 0.5 degrees Celsius over 20 years. However, there would be a trade-off as this method would also reduce the ozone layer to its 1990 levels, which is only a third of its pre-human impact state.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1085n05/controversial_proposal_to_reduce_global_warming/j3qafb8/

Yeah the article peaks at unexpectedly hope-giving, then descends into bleak dark-futurism.

Honestly it seems to be worth it considering the impacts of global warming

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Ahhh, clearly the answer of someone who doesn't have to live under intense UV of the sunlight in Australia.

hahahahaha Australia?

come to semiarid region of Brazil to know what is intense UV

I highly recommend this scifi book by Neal Stevenson where someone builds a cannon to seed the upper atmosphere with sulfur.

https://www.nealstephenson.com/news/2021/06/03/announcing-termination-shock/

The engineering and geopolitical fallout are spot on.

That's a problem with using sulfur dioxide, but using calcite particles instead would actually help repair the ozone layer.

i remember when we were supposed to be entering into an ice age in the 80's. they freaked out then and nothing ever happened, i think they are freaking out for nothing again.

Solar Blocking is probably going to be necessary so just get off your high horses and figure out the best way to pull it off. Particulate based blocking is just one option and sulfur is only one option of those options, either way you probably have no choice but to figure out how to block out a fraction of sunlight and we know volcanos can do it rather easily and without huge consequences compared to 3-4C increase by 2100 and mass drought and loss of fresh water supplies.

The fears around solar blocking are unfounded BS compared to the daily destruction of the biosphere, so lets stop pretending known volcanic cooling events are some dire threat to the ozone layer. We know they aren't or humanity would be dead long ago.

Maybe you can pick a better particle, maybe you do space based solar blocking, but you're not going to get out of this with just emissions reduction and pretty much every model that isn't 100% wishful thinking says that.

They've add Co2 removal to some models, but that just doesn't have much impact compared to solar blocking because you can't load EVERYTHING up on just adjust CO2 levels and have anywhere near as much control as lowering CO2 and adjusting energy input into the CO2 insulation layer.

For long term human survivability you have control the climate. You can't just let the natural cycles play out or most/all of humanity has to die off and that's with or without human pollution/industrialization.

The peak of every Interglacial Period is naturally too warm for modern humans and that would naturally be followed by a geologically huge and rapid drop in temps to kick off the Glacial Period. The planet definitely wants to kill us all just like it killed 99% of the life before us. Just reducing and hoping for the best is not a real plan when the stakes are this high.

You need to treat this more like a giant meteor headed toward Earth with the mindset that you may as well try whatever the fuck you possibly can before it hits... not this BS where you preach doomsday for the planet but then solar blocking is too risky.

You can't preach doomsday constantly about global warming AND also hold the position that solar blocking is too risky and reduction and minimalism is the only option. That's more like you just gave up before you even tried.

There's no controversy, it's really a bad idea and everyone knows that. It's almost like the flat earth idea that keep getting pushed onto mainstream

I remember it well. At the time, people were saying that we were lucky that pollution kept the temperature up.

Still, currently, it is a fact that the world is getting hotter, but the cause is disputed. Mind you. Another good argument is that an increase in temperature would benefit mankind.

That was the same climate deniers we're fighting now taking a tiny seed of valid science from a small minority of papers that were a decade old and where most of the scientists had changed their minds and using it to spread fud. You can't use your own bullshit to try and discredit people who know what they're doing.

"People" here being fossil fuel propagandists. You don't get to use your own lies to try and claim the truth is a lie. And there's no legitimate argument on the cause or that higher temperature would be good. The consensus wasn't overwhelming in the 70s but it was by far the majority position since the late 60s

https://miro.medium.com/max/1100/1*jcmooyqbb8mt0qUhRBtwYQ.webp

https://dpiepgrass.medium.com/1970s-agw-consensus-3123a34e5105

I don’t understand, do you think pollution just doesn’t exist?

The great Pacific garbage patch has grown to the size of Texas, micro plastics are being detected in fetuses, Afghanistan is underwater, Mississippi river is dry in several parts, the Great Salt lake is about to dry up and release arsenic dust across the state, amount of insects has fallen by half. Does all of that just not have any effect on the wider environment?

You do realise that Australia is mostly desert, and that since both Australia and Brazil are on similar latitudes they have similar uv index to each other. Within reason for where exactly in each country you are.

The White House is also doing their research on this. It’s alarming that multiple entities, including the USA government are choosing SAI’s of sulfur dioxide around the same time.

“Some of the techniques, such as spraying sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, are known to have harmful effects on the environment and human health. But scientists and climate leaders who are concerned that humanity will overshoot its emissions targets say research is important to figure out how best to balance these risks against a possibly catastrophic rise in the Earth's temperature.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/what-is-solar-geoengineering-sunlight-reflection-risks-and-benefits.html

1. almost no one lives in the desert
2. the populated area of australia and the region i was talking about from Brazil are in very different latitudes, australia bellow the capricorn tropic and Brazil very close to the equator

This makes me think of the scoetchig of the sky via the Animatrix.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand what your trying to say here.

First, of course not many people live in the desert.

It's a fucking desert! And we have a massive coastline to live on instead.

But your second point is where I'm confused.

Are you comparing the part of Australia below the tropic of Capricorn with Brazil closest point to the equator.

Bit disingenuous don't you think.

And before you try to say but everyone in Australia live below the tropic of Capricorn. No we don't.

Our largest city's below it, sure. But plenty of people still live in that area.

I agree that there is no legimate argument on the cause of global warming.

I personally would prefer my city to be hotter and think that would be good as we would have more time for the beach and going outdoors. So here you have a legimate argument why hotter would be good.

Your own chart shows that in 1971, global cooling was more popular than global warming as a theory.

No! There are other better ways! We need solar radiation for life on earth its the HEAT we have a problem with

A single year of increased attention does not a global consensus make -- especially when your set of papers includes one where the author was talking about both warming from CO2 and cooling from aerosols and changed his mind as to which was larger after seeing more evidence. That's almost as stupid a stretch as including any article that contains the word cooling. And I guarantee you don't want the famines, global instability, snap freezes, and storms that go with your wish.

On top of that the 'hur durr them fought it was gunna get cuuld' argument is utterly morally bankrupt anyway.

Both effects are real. Both effects were fairly widely agreed to be significant since the 60s.

Not knowing which was bigger or more permanent and which way fossil fuels were going to fuck everyone isn't a reason that 'stop using fossil fuels' hasn't been the objectively scientifically correct position for the better part of 70 years.

Any sane society would have started the renewable transition in the 40s when wind turbines were first proven viable (or paid attention to the firstcommercial solar panel in 1906) as the risks of aerosols were fairly universally accepted even if CO2 was still up in the air.

Climate deniers think that gases just vanish out of existence when emitted.

The media carried that narrative forward from a study that iirc was retracted because it made some significant math errors.

IT was not my set of papers but yours. How do you see famine in a hotter world, hotter world=more food production.

> IT was not my set of papers but yours

And it demonstrates the opposite of what you are claiming on multiple levels.

> How do you see famine in a hotter world, hotter world=more food production.

Because desertification, mass floods and giant storms never disrupt food production.

You're clearly not interested in truth or logic here.

Fyi, solar radiation is converted to heat in earth.

This wouldn't eliminate the earth receiving solar radiation, it would just reduce the amount we receive.

There is no significant dissent that humans are the cause of the majority of warming since the 1950's. The latest IPCC report puts the certainty at over 99%.

There's no other explanation that can account for the current amount of warming other than human forcing.

We can use the solar radiation and expel heat more efficiently. We should not block out life giving sun light

This doesn't follow. If you capture the light, you generate heat proportional to the energy captured.

If you don't want the heat, you have to prevent the light from reaching the surface.

Heat allowing plants to grow faster reaches a max pretty quickly followed by a significant drop in efficiency due to moisture loss in the leaves via the stomata (stomata are the small pores in leaves that open to take in C02 and expel O2)

Too hot and the leaves need to become smaller and reduce the amount of CO2 they absorb or else they lose too much water to the air and dry out.

Don’t know why I keep seeing this “it’s better for plants” nonsense. Like claiming a flood is good because it provides everyone water… before drowning them

Also, famine is what you went for? We produce more than enough food right now, it’s distribution that’s the problem. Or will hotter temps allow for easier food distribution?

Edit: To add, it doesn’t matter what the world was like millions of years ago or how animals will adapt… we are adapted for the unusually stable climate of the last few thousand years. Our entire civilization; food production, population distribution, etc; is all based on the current climate. As the climate changes the cost of adapting will become untenable. If the 2 million refugees of the Syrian war was bad, what do you imagine a billion+ climate refugees will be like. There are already population migrations because of climate change, megacities running out of water (dependent on no-longer predictable rains or melted glaciers) rising coastlines, declining seafood stocks, etc. This isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but it will probably be your children and children’s children that will really start to feel its impact

We will adapt, we’re the most adaptable creature that has ever lived, but without doing something now to combat climate change the costs will be unimaginable.

And this may seem doom and gloom… but that’s because it is! We’ve known definitively about this for 50 years and have done nothing. The oil companies themselves discovered this, but chose to bury it and spend billions on misinformation.

You oversimplify. We can reject heat at a more efficient rate by aiming for the absorption gap in the infra red spectrum. Heat at that frequency best escapes earth, moving heat in this manner can give us better efficiency.

How do you figure a hotter world improved food production?

The science showes that under increasing CO2, plants prefer decreasing temperature to grow more biomass. Under both increasing temperature and CO2, plants show no increase, or even a decreased growth of biomass.

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Lol, I didn't over simplify, you did.

How do you plan to covert the earth's heat to a specific IR wavelength?

And how do you plan to do that in a way that's more efficient than simply blocking high energy UV or visible light from passing through the atmosphere to begin with?

By using the heat conductive properties of water I will pull heat out of the oceans and beam it into space. This may not be as efficient but it doesn't require changing our atmospheric chemistry and change the energy that supports the bottom of our food chain.

It takes a certain amount of energy to create.heat, the amount of energy it takes to MOVE that heat is a fraction of that, and depending on how you collect and reject energy you can get efficiency better than 1.

This means we could COOL the oceans with a tiny fraction of the energy it took to HEAT it to the same degree.

I am already having this argument with other redditors so forgive my exhaustion on the subject.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/105rqkt/the_pacific_oceans_oxygenstarved_omz_is_growing/j3rmi3r?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

The earth receives far more sunlight than plants or animals need to survive and thrive. Reducing solar insolation by a few percent will have zero impact on life.

You didn't address my question.

I'm aware that heat pumps exist. I asked you how you plan to change the IR frequency of that heat.

Nano textured materials. It has to be the right "color" NM infra red, then it will expell heat at the wavelength frequency that best escapes the absorbtion spectrum.

If you are aware of heat pumps having efficiency over 1, then you know that while the sunlight would be able to heat 1 unit per calorie, if we could move 50 calories with the 1 unit of power.

The same 1 unit of power moving heat more efficiently means we don't have to alter our light spectrum or jeopardize our atmosphere. We are trying to get nature to do something it ALREADY wants to do, like pushing a ball downhill or getting cold water to sink.

If we oxygenate the dead zones we can u do so.eof the damage already caused to our ecosystem. If we make it so plankton breeds better, and stabilize plankton ecosystems, they will process more co2 out of the atmosphere, if we have more plankton we can use curre t dead zones escapes to expand mariculture and feed people... the synergistic benefits make it a better option than blocking our own life giving sun.

Can you link me to a nanotexture material that increases the wavelength of IR light just by passing the light through it?

Heat pumps have efficiencies greater than 1 when moving heat on Earth, not into space.

You moved heat from one place to another (and generated some heat to do it), cool, now what?

Heat pumps don't produce light, they heat up a radiator and then blow air over the radiator, so you have to find a way to extract ambient heat from the radiator (energy intensive), then convert the light to a different wavelength (I'm assuming using some kind of stimulated emission process - again, energy intensive - which might help you with the next challenge), and then release that light directly out toward the atmosphere, probably with a laser. Plus you can't do it on cloudy days because of the broader IR absorption/reflection.

And you have to do all that more efficiently than just reflecting UV and visible light back into space.

I look forward to your Nobel prize winning research as you're either a genius in your field of physics, or you have no idea the technological challenges of your idea.

I'd read that book a few months before coming across my first Buc-ee's gas station. I drove into the place and thought, "it's T.R. Mick's!"

Geo engineering is likely the only way we prevent global warming from killing everything. To be fair this other way would probably kill us in some other unanticipated way too, as is usually the case with geo engineering

So... imagine a nano texture. The light it gives off Is the wavelengths of visible light let's say green. The texture is such that light reflected from it is the wavelength of the texture of the surface. The nano texture is shaped to bounce off 620 NM or deep red. Now we are going to change the texture and therefore the color. We space out the texture to the I frame red wavelength above 780 NM.

You were talking about emitting light, but it is already infra red light emitting from hot objects such as a condenser panel shedding heat. The idea I'd to shed heat to a synch that emits the light at that frequency that best escapes.

How do we controll nano texture?

Soundwave. Place sand on a amplifier and tune it to the right frequency and you can co troll the shape of the sand on top.

We are going smaller. We have to use a different gas mixture than air, and use harmonic resonance to make the particles in the top of a rapidly cooling metal "dance" Into self organized resonant patterns like the sand. We have to "tune" the resonance to the correct infra red "color" the cooling substance keeps this surface texture.

When we shine light through colored glass the light coming out the end matches the light of the glass. Infra red heat light will naturally expell through the texture at the correct wavelength like the light through the filter. Just as built up infra red heat builds up and expresses as actual visible light in "red hot" materials, so too does the nano textured material shine the infra red "color" brightly. The wavelengths vibrate most optimally through the atmosphere up into space.

We target the heat in the oceans because that water has already collected many joules of heat, and the heat transmission through water is much more efficient than through the air. We will likely push some of that heat Into the ambient air, but the main goal is to penetrate the atmosphere without exiting it more.

Vague term here significant dissent.

You fundamentally don't understand light emission, absorption, or reflection.

A material can't reflect light of a given wavelength if that wavelength is never hitting it. Reflection doesn't generate light, it just bounced the light that is there.

Emission generates light. To emit a wavelength higher than what the material is exposed to requires that heat be extracted from the material. This never happens except when a heat source is allowed to heat the material (which means you're emitting light from heat you created, not from ambient conditions) or as a result of a chemical reaction, like a glow stick.

To emit light of a lower frequency than what the material is exposed to requires vibrational relaxation, this is how heat becomes trapped on earth and means that less energy is being released from the material than it absorbed.

The earth can already release lower wavelength IR by covering it to radio waves through vibrational relaxation. You need to find a way to INCREASE the frequency of IR. How do you do that?

Sure, more than 90% of climate scientists agree that humans are the largest drivers of climate change and global warming.

Fine I'll use vanta white paint to reflect 99.99% of light on the condenser unit and make it out of marble which is below ambient temp anyways,

I know you also agree. Couldn't find the other video that explained how the radiant infrared panels... already exist. This one mentions them, and other power free cooling with aero gel.

https://youtu.be/oLt-X13CgQc

Here is a short one on the panels existing ... 9 years old.

https://youtu.be/O8XMi6Q-oW0

And another!

https://youtu.be/N3bJnKmeNJY

Hey its like this Info is easily available!

https://youtu.be/WSTNLvvD_-U

https://youtu.be/O8XMi6Q-oW0

Oh the original video I was looking for an embarassment of riches!

https://youtu.be/pq8xDXkbXZs

If you feel like you're being picked on or something, I apologize, that's not my intent. I'm trying to provide you information to help you learn. I think you're fundamentally not understanding how these things work. For example, you said:

>reflect 99.99% of light on the condenser unit

The radiator - what I assume you meant - is emitting only a very tiny fraction of the overall heat as IR. Most of that heat is being transferred to the air via vibrations. This is because electrons much MUCH prefer to share their energy by bumping into things than by emitting light.

Let's take a step back.

"Temperature" is a measure of the total motion of the particles in an atom, especially the electrons where the vast majority of the motion is happening. So when we talk about "heat" and "temperature" what we really mean is "how much energy the electrons have."

Quantum mechanics gets it's name because electrons can't absorb just any energy. They have to absorb specific amounts of energy. When we talk about the energy that an electron can absorb as being non-continuous (IE. not any amount, only specific amounts) we refer to this is "quantizing." We are quantizing the amount of energy an electron can absorb, and saying that any quantities not of these specific quantities won't be absorbed.

That's where quantum mechanics gets it's name.

Photons are modeled in our system of physics two ways. One is as a particle called a photon. This is a fixed quantity of energy, a quantized amount of energy. The other method is as a wave, which has a wavelength and frequency. A photon is both a particle and a wave, it has properties of both. The wavelength (which is inversely proportional to the frequency) defines the amount of energy the photon has. The two are directly related and you can't have a photon of different energy but the same wavelength. If it's wavelength is x, it's energy is y - ALWAYS.

For an electron to absorb a photon, the photon has to be of one of the specific wavelengths it wants to absorb (it has to be the correct quantized amount of energy).

Once absorbed, the electron has 2 ways of getting rid of it:

1. Emit it back out - same energy released, same wavelength.
2. Vibrationally relax - bump into nearby electrons, give them some of the energy they absorbed.

Once 2 happens, the electron can no longer emit that same wavelength of light - it doesn't have that energy anymore. It can emit a longer wavelength of light (less energy), but it gave some of the energy to another electron, so it can't emit the same energy it absorbed.

For reasons I won't get into, electrons overwhelmingly prefer option 2. Option 2 is faster, it's less "violent" to the electron, it makes everything easier.

Option 1 only happens in extreme circumstances - usually when option 1 isn't available after a relatively long wait (think nanoseconds for option 2, and 1-2 seconds for option 1).

This is why a radiator won't emit IR radiation of a wavelength matching it's temperature. It'd much rather just bump into the air and warm the air up. And this is why heat pumps can warm your home, versus just shooting a bunch of IR light around while you're freezing.

You have to find a way to take that radiator, get it to emit IR light, and get that IR light to be of a frequency that will pass through the atmosphere (probably using some kind of stimulation to increase the frequency).

But that's not all you have to do. You then have to emit that light very specifically away from the Earth (if it just emits everywhere - not in a straight line like a laser - it'll hit trees and the ground and water and just get absorbed again).

This is a technologically monumental task, and one that is going to require massive amounts of energy (almost certainly more than you can emit in the laser).

Is my point t made?

Video 1 is complete nonsense.

The heat in your home is of a continuous wavelength (it'll be of all IR bands). You might have some material that can convert higher IR wavelengths to lower ones and then emit those, but it still kept some of the energy.

It can't convert lower wavelengths to higher ones (where is the energy coming from to do this!?).

But there's an entirely different problem. The ambient air is ALSO emitting all wavelengths of IR radiation. So while the panels may emit light of a particular wavelength, they're also absorbing it from the air. So the net exchange of energy is 0. In fact, the panels will likely absorb some of the heat, causing them to warm, and trapping more heat in your home.

If your house is the same temperature as the outdoors, you can't just "move" the heat from inside to outside without expending energy, no matter what you tape to your roof.

In the second video, they're talking about reflecting SUNLIGHT.

That's exactly the same process that emitting particulates in the atmosphere hope to accomplish. The only difference is, emitting particulates in the atmosphere can do it over a much much larger area, and do it above the cloud layer (EDIT: there's also a bunch of potential problems with emitting particulates that I haven't mentioned but exist).

So while you can put something on your roof to reflect UV and visible light (increasing the Earth's Albedo), the total surface area of the rooves of homes across the planet is much much much smaller than the surface area of ice on Earth - which is melting.

All of this is to say, while helpful to reflect more sunlight from our rooves, even doing this on every roof in the world won't even make up for the lost Albedo of ice melting (the Earth will still be absorbing more light than it reflects, even after you spend the trillions to install this everywhere).

Did you watch any of the fournlinks to videos or radiant heat I edited in? This is the first you should watch and the best describing the phenomenon.

https://youtu.be/pq8xDXkbXZs

So the panel is constantly editing infra red light or heat. It is colder than what's around it because it is better at making that light so it absorbes vibrating heat around it and organizes it into the waveform that best escapes. So we make refrigeration loops, that collect heat from the deep water, then organize and concentrate that heat expelling it Into the cold panels (heat exchanger) that emit the light.

I'm not crazy this stuff already exists.

Yes, I watched and responded.

Increasing the albedo of the Earth is good - it's the same thing these particles are trying to do.

But there's not enough surface area on every house in the world for you to even make up for the albedo loss of just ice melting. In other words, installing this material on every house in every country on the planet will still result in more sunlight being absorbed than is being reflected right now, because the ice that's melting reflects more light than houses can.

This system would allow the efficient rejection of heat into space day and night, the aerosolized particles will only cover day side. These aerosol particles will also fall and need to be replaced, they will also effect life on earth as life on earth Injests them. We watch cancer rates raise daily as it is.

You asked for proof and I provided at least two videos on how what I was talking about was possible.

https://youtu.be/pq8xDXkbXZs

Explains exactly what I was talking about for transferring the heat, but I want to make aerogel or the metal the vantawhite color using harmonic resonance to make the nano texture.

I am done arguing.

Yeah, exactly! Gotta watch out for the video drones.

Again, you have a fundamental misunderstanding.

This is why you shouldn't get science from YouTube videos.

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Which one would be more cost effective?

In the long term? Def not sulfur dioxide. We all gonna die

C’mon. At least give us a week of articles about how the ozone layer is going to make and be okay in the 2060’s it before you drop this on us.

“Zero impact” would be false. You can’t change something like that by “a few percent” and have a 0% change.

Of course. Obviously we’d be doing it to lower temperatures and prevent climate collapse. I mean to say that it would not be harmful to life.

It would have no meaningful impact on the ability of any biosphere on Earth to function as it currently does. We get about 50% more sunlight than we need. The majority of that sunlight (and I mean the enormously overwhelming majority) is converted into ambient heat.

We know this because when the sun dims by several percent over the course of years, nothing happens on Earth, except global temperatures very slightly drop.

I have no idea of the chemistry involved in any of these process, or your knowledge on this topic, but I’m about damn near ready to start spraying calcite all over my back yard.

amazon shopping list search for “calcite particles”

It's an extremely common mineral, found in all sorts of different rocks. You already have some in your backyard.

Calcite is a very common mineral, but I don't know which has more cooling effect for the same mass. But neither one is likely to be expensive, and preserving the ozone layer is a pretty huge benefit.

starts digging back yard and throwing dirt in air

The cause is not disputed.

Mmmmmm have you done a search on the cause, you will find some dispute

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It's disputed in the same way that some people think the Earth is flat.

In my experience, global warming has become politicized, and opinions on its reality vary. Reasoning and technology have not provided a definitive solution to the debate, so a rift exists. Some will argue that the causes of global warming cannot be based on computerized models with their problems but needs real scientific evidence. I have also noticed that much depends on the ocean temperatures, which have yet to be fully measured.

It definitely has become politicized. It doesn't follow that there is a reasonable disagreement. If conservatives decided one day that the shape of the Earth was very important for them ideologically, it wouldn't thereby make disagreements about it reasonable.

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The shape of the earth can be seen and measured, that cause of global warming cannot be, that is my point

We know what happens when the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases. We know that because we know the relevant chemical properties of CO2 that we can measure in the lab and we know how much CO2 there was in the atmosphere the past and what happened. We also know roughly how much CO2 we are releasing into the atmosphere.

It's not complicated, even if the details are.

I think you will find that there is dispute over whether it's the CO2 or other gases

What I said does not preclude that there are other greenhouse gases.

There is a dispute about what is the most important for global warming