Bonner Russell CohenFrom Greek mythology’s Icarus, whose wax wings melted after he flew too close to the sun, to Goethe’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” who unleashed forces he couldn’t control, our culture warns us that hubris rarely ends well.
A California startup wants us to “work together to cool our planet for future generations.” Make Sunsets seeks to combat climate change by reflecting sunlight (albedo enhancement) through releasing a balloon loaded with sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The plan is for the balloon to burst, scattering sulfur dioxide particles that then form clouds of dust that will block the sunlight, thereby cooling the planet. Serving as a role model is Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, whose 1991 volcanic eruption “cooled the Earth by 0.9°F or 0.5°C for over a year,” the company notes on its website.
Depending on the altitude and latitude at which they are released, Make Sunsets’ dust clouds can stay in the sky from six months to three years. The solar geoengineering company has raised more than $1 million from investors and sold $100,000 worth of “cooling credits” this year, The Washington Post reports. Make Sunsets has sprayed just over 240 pounds of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere this year — far short of the millions of tons needed to block enough sunlight to lower temperatures.
Standing in the way of wider application are skeptical governments. “Tennessee, Louisiana, and Florida have banned the practice, and further bans have been proposed in 34 other U.S. states, at the federal level, and in Mexico,” the Post notes. The Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates sulfur dioxide as a criteria air pollutant under the Clean Air Act, acknowledges that it is investigating Make Sunsets.
“Geoengineering, weather modification, stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening … the list goes on where people have questions,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told The Daily Caller in early December. “And my position is that they deserve answers.”
Aside from EPA’s concerns about a technology whose centerpiece is the injection of vast amounts of a criteria pollutant into the stratosphere, there are other reasons to be worried about solar geoengineering. What if the technology actually succeeded in blocking sunlight?
A 2018 study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution explored how the introduction of solar geoengineering, also known as solar radiation management (SRM), could affect biodiversity. The type of solar geoengineering it investigated involved injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, which would form a protective veil around the Earth, reflecting sunlight and cooling the planet.
“Aerosols have a limited lifetime in the stratosphere and would need to be released at regular time intervals in order to be effective,” Carbon Brief explains. “If the release of aerosols were suddenly stopped, global temperatures could rapidly rise again.” Many species would be unable to cope with rapidly changing environmental conditions, study author professor Alan Robock of Rutgers University told Carbon Brief:
“The main findings are that any implementation of stratospheric geoengineering could end catastrophically for many species. Although if geoengineering were ever done, it would not make sense to abruptly end it, there are credible scenarios where this might happen. Might society ever take that risk?”
Geoengineering, along with never-ending lawsuits, has become the Plan B for alarmists who have seen their fortunes wane, as the public’s appetite for climate-related sacrifices diminishes. But the risks of geoengineering are real and are being pursued in the absence of any compelling reason.
“Satellite data from the past four decades confirm a significant growth in vegetation over as much as half the globe,” Vijay Jayaraj, a science and research associate at the CO2 Coalition, points out. “During this period, atmospheric CO2 increased from about 350 parts per million (ppm) to more than 400 ppm.” The result is the “longer growing seasons of a modestly warmer climate paired with higher levels of CO2. This is hardly the making of a catastrophe that some would have us believe.”
Starving the Earth of sunlight and reducing atmospheric levels of life-sustaining CO2 would open a Pandora’s box of troubles that threaten both wildlife and agricultural productivity. As the low crop yields and resulting famine during the Little Ice Age (ca. 1300–1850) document, there is nothing desirable about a cooler planet.
Efforts to promote global cooling by fiddling with the stratosphere will backfire on far more than just the misguided souls who set the scheme in motion.
Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph.D., is a senior policy analyst with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
How people fell for that idiotic, “Green New Deal” crap is beyond me. They actually want to destroy the one thing that makes earth, a good home by destroying the very thing that keeps all living things Alive. Carbon Dioxide.
What they don’t know is that within the last few years a group of biologist did an experiment on a tree to see just what makes it grow by studying every aspect of its life cycle. Well guess what they found out. Trees use the Carbon in Carbon Dioxide to build their mass, outside of water and what nutrients it took up from the soil.
At some point human hubris needs to be examined as to why it went so far, that scientific idiots would actually back such nonsense as Climate Change or Global Warming in a scale they hoped we would accept, and it was all a Psy-Ops, that had NO basis in fact !!!
it’s not human humorous. It’s evil SOB! They have too much money. I agree take it from them! We’ve had bad people in positions of power, making bad decisions for way too long!
How about we put sulfur dioxide and or carbon dioxide just above their meals while they eat oh that’s right they’ll die! So I put it above our heads
I suppose it’s one way of lowering the earth’s population, through famine etc.,which is apparently their goal.
Here’s something “I know for a fact”:
The Mount Pinatubo eruption did not cool planet Earth by even the smallest fraction of a degree … it simply redistributed where the thermal energy was located. And that’s all ejecting sulphur dioxide particles will do.
And that’s not my opinion, that basic physics.
Unless of course, one wants to postulate that the ash particles absorbed solar radiation and were subsequently ejected into space, taking that thermal energy with them.
This would not be so if the particles, instead of absorbing the radiation, would reflect it, like white clouds do; secondly, if the former is the case, shifting the temperature increase to higher and inhabitable elevations – if I understand what you say – would be of catastrophic consequences for the biosphere (that is, where we actually live)
How does one apply for a permit to do this? Do they put up a bond for working in the atmosphere? Who is the Authority having jurisdiction to approve a plan on this scale? The hubris and audacity is off the charts.
This already has been going on for many decades go to geoengineeringwatch.org for the real truth about what these weather terrorists are spraying
Their main goal is terraforming the planet so that it is inhabitable by humans and animals. They are rapidly achieving their goal, as we see the spraying in our skies of heavy metals and other toxins on a daily basis, yet most American’s, although they are sick, do not look up to see what is the causation of their illness.
The only actual climate dangers always have been and always will be global cooling and CO2 starvation. The exactly-backwards modern hysteria about global warming, supposedly caused by too much CO2, is the most anti-science thing ever.
I too have a plan.
We can greatly increase the SO2 in the atmosphere if we start a program where we build plants around the country to do this. It can be done at very low cost if we use thermal energy to lift the gas by heating it, or better, by burning something that contains some sulfur content.
I understand this would be very expensive, but I believe we could do it for low cost if we use waste heat from the process to generate electricity, and sell the electricity to cover costs and maybe even make a profit..
Coal, I understand, often has high sulfur content, so these “Solar Radiation Management” plants could burn clean, beautiful, coal to save the Earth!
I know this sound very radical and experimental, but I think there may be something worth pursuing.
We need to do anything to our atmosphere….why? Did Nature not have it figured out real well until about 1965?
Blocking Out the Sun?! Someone needs a padded cell and Straight Jacket