Who doesn't love a beautiful sunrise or a gorgeous sunset? I've known more than a few people who never seem to be awake for the former, and others never pay attention to the latter, but they're poorer for it. Early morning has long been one of my favorite times of day. In my Colorado years, I waited for the sunrise in many a high mountain meadow, hoping the dawn would lead me to a deer or elk. Now, here in the Great Land, our sunrises come as late as 10:15 AM in the winter and as early as 3:00 AM in summer, but that doesn't make them any less beautiful.
Although I confess, I sometimes miss those summer sunrises. I'm an early bird, but I'm not that anxious to catch that particular worm.
So why the talk about sunrises and sunsets? Because the very phenomenon that causes those brilliant red sunrises and sunsets could make a disastrously bad climate-change idea even worse, especially in the far north and far south. That does not, however, stop the New York Times from pushing this bad idea.
In The New York Times’ (NYT) op-ed, “Turns Out Air Pollution Was Good for Something,” Zeke Hausfather and David Keith argue that because sulfur particles from past industrial pollution once cooled the planet by reflecting sunlight, policymakers should now consider a deliberate version of that process. They suggest aircraft could inject sulfur into the upper atmosphere to mimic the cooling once provided by dirty smokestacks, pointing to volcanic eruptions such as Mount Pinatubo in 1991 as evidence the method would work. This idea is wrong-headed madness. Experience demonstrates geo-engineering ideas such as this have dangerous and unpredictable consequences.
The authors write that “geoengineering the climate in this way is not a new idea,” and claim that “a more modest approach” of maintaining present temperatures with controlled sulfur injections buying the world time for carbon dioxide reductions to continue.
This is one of the dumbest ideas since Icarus said, "Don't worry, Dad, I'm just going to fly a little higher, it will be fine." It's worth pointing out for the umpteenth time that the Earth's climate is far too vast, too chaotic, and too complex for us to go messing around with like this. Human activities have already had some effect, yes; nobody can deny that. But the effects human industry is having on the atmosphere at present, according to the best evidence we have, don't justify surrendering our modern lifestyles, and they certainly don't justify messing about with things we cannot possibly comprehend in full.
As Robert Heinlein may have put it, we do not yet grok the planet's climate cycles in full. Going messing about with them deliberately could have... unpleasant results. This proposal is particularly wrong-headed because it proposes to partially block the sun, and as anyone who has had a fifth-grade science lesson knows, the sun's energy powers not only the climate scolds' beloved solar panels, but almost every living thing on earth depends on it. Without the sun, there would be no photosynthesis; without photosynthesis, there would be no plant life, no producers, and with no producers, there would be no consumers, including all animals. Yes, including us.
This dumb idea would hit harder the closer one goes to the poles, for the same reason that those sunrises and sunsets can be so brilliant: An effect called Rayleigh scattering. This has the potential to drop those higher and lower latitudes into a deep freeze:
But geoengineering by blocking the sun is a dangerous fool’s errand. First, the potential unintended consequences are enormous and unpredictable. Sulfur dioxide particles injected into the upper atmosphere would scatter sunlight differently depending on latitude. At middle to low latitudes, sunlight passes through less atmosphere, so scattering effects are modest. But at higher latitudes, sunlight travels through more atmosphere, amplifying scattering—just as sunsets turn red because of the increased distance light travels through more air and particles at low sun angles. Injecting reflective particles globally would therefore not create uniform cooling. It would over-cool the polar and sub-polar regions, while perhaps under-cooling equatorial areas. The result would be an uneven, artificial climate system with consequences no climate model can reliably predict.
Thanks, but Alaska winters are cold enough as it is.
We have natural examples of where this kind of thing could take us; just look at any good volcanic eruption, like the 1816 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which gave the world a "year without a summer," and which led to crop failures and famines. And, like with this geoengineering scheme, a great deal of what volcanoes spew out consists of sulfur compounds. Sulfur combines with water to make sulfuric acid - acid rain.
Isn't acid rain a bad thing?
Read More: CO2 and Climate: This Is How Science Works
Contrails Aren't Our Worry, but Sun-Blocking Schemes Should Be
It's a bit of a head-scratcher as to why this bad idea keeps coming around. The climate scolds are constantly insisting we muck around with things we really don't understand all that well. But this may be one of the worst ideas in a long list of bad ideas. The climate scolds and their fellow travelers in government are using a natural warming cycle, one that has been ongoing since the end of the last major glaciation, to try to justify a dramatic change in our modern, high-tech way of life, but this, the idea of interfering with life-giving sunlight, has to be one of the worst ideas in the history of bad ideas. Fortunately, human efforts tend to be pretty puny compared to one good volcano, not to mention the vast cycles on which the planet's oceans, atmosphere, and even orbits operate.
That does not, however, mean that any deliberate meddling in the service of a political agenda is anything other than catastrophically stupid.
