Geo-Engineering
by Shervin Saedinia
What is Geo-Engineering? Good question, I am learning about it as we speak. Let me fill your brains with a tadbit of useless info. You ready? Okay so in layman’s terms, it is a manipulation of the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere to reduce global warming and/or CO2. Got it? Good.
Okay so this info isn't totally useless, but there is no way we—individually—can really change the way things are right now on this scale, and there haven’t been any real experiments done in the field so far. Just recently though, the American Association for the Advancement of Science held a conference in San Diego discussing cooling the planet manually.
Once inside the conference center, University of Calgary physicist David Keith presented work on the concept of spreading droplets called aerosols in the stratosphere, where they could block a small fraction of the sun’s rays. A paper published last year suggested that the main way scientists have proposed to do so, spraying sulfur dioxide gas, wouldn’t work. Sulfur dioxide is converted in the atmosphere into droplets of sulfuric acid—a month-long process which happens in nature after the eruption of volcanoes, which spew the gas. But the paper found that the acid droplets would clump up and fall out of the sky before they could have much cooling effect. For example, injecting 10 megatons of sulfur—roughly the amount of sulfur belched forth by Mt. Pinatubo in 1991—would counteract less than half of the “forcing” energy thought to be responsible for global warming.
To get around this problem, Keith and colleagues—some of whom wrote the first paper—have proposed spraying the acid, and not the gas, with airplanes. In data that has yet to be published or peer reviewed, Keith and his collaborators found that only “a few megatons per year” of sulfur could be more than twice as effective at blocking radiation as the sulfur dioxide.
What I got from this article is that sulfuric acid isn’t a real solution for how to decrease the temperature of the Earth. In fact, it seems like studying sulfuric acid is a waste of time since there aren’t any lasting effects on the temperature change.
Honestly, I’m hesitant about the idea of altering the temperature of the Earth. It may solve our short term problem, but is anyone thinking about the possibility of any negative side effects? Such as Giant Hurricanes? Just food for thought, folks. Stop and think about it. And what about the physiological side effects of spraying sulfur in the air to people or animals? I do not look forward to the day that I am going to take part in a ginormous lab experiment. Are you?
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