Scientists have discovered that the recent spike in global temperatures may be caused by a reduction in sulfur dioxide pollution from shipping vessels. Ships have long emitted sulfur dioxide, which cools the planet by seeding clouds and reflecting sunlight. However, new regulations that limit sulfur in ship fuels took effect in 2020, leading to a loss of this cooling effect equivalent to a large volcanic eruption each year. Models show this reduction in sulfur dioxide pollution can explain the extra warming seen in the North Atlantic. While pollution is bad, the new regulations provide a natural experiment that gives insight into how intentional geoengineering could potentially combat climate change in the future.
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My fear with geoengineering is that is allows us to become complacent about solving the primary problems, and then also creates its own set of unexpected secondary problems.
At least to your second point, in the video he explains that there are ways to seed clouds for cooling purposes without any major side effects, and the experiment hes talking about is that this shows it can be done on a large scale. Whether it would make us complacent on getting CO2 out of the air, though, it might but at least it would be the start of a solution.
Right, but their point was kind of about side-effects we’re not aware of at the time. So that’s kind of the entire point, that we think there are no negative side effects only to later find out we were wrong.
So that doesn’t really address what they said at all.
Hank also says that we’re at point where we need to cut emissions AND carbon capture AND geoengineer in order to mitigate climate disaster. It can’t be a one and done solution anymore, we’re beyond that
Hear me out guys, why don’t we just put a giant ice cube in the ocean to combat rising temps?
Thus solving the problem once and for all!
But-- ☝️
–ONCE AND FOR ALL!
Hank Green has a video about this and maybe we can safely replicate the sulfur dioxide’s effects by shooting sea water into the air.
I wonder if there is a solution that involves a less dangerous gas instead of sea water. Spraying large volumes of water into the stratosphere is not really possible yet, so if it just rose as a gas it would be more doable.
A while back there was a round of news suggesting calcium carbonate particulate stratospheric injection would be a good substitute for sulfur dioxide.
I’m not sure that spreading salt is a good idea when you consider that salt kills life when you spread it on land.
I think the idea is to do it over oceans.
But then we’ll get salt in the oceans and kill all the fish.
We sprayed it outside the environment.
How certain could we be of where these clouds would fall once they were created?
A good question, I’m not an expert on this unfortunately. A quick google search did not reveal any answers.
