Pollution can help alleviate global warming...
Finally, a sensible solution....
Growing forests remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It may be possible to speed up the oceans’ absorption of carbon dioxide. And a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research has shown how deliberate pollution of the atmosphere can cool the Earth. This approach, he argues, could stabilize global temperature and greatly reduce the needed cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, or substantially extend the time over which they would have to be made.
This notion could drive die-hard environmentalists into a frenzy as awareness of it spreads. But if the threat is as serious as they say, they should not rule out any promising ideas.
posted by GayandRight @ 12:30 PM
4 Comments:
OK, forgive my total ignorance of all things scientific ...
However, I've often wondered if those buildings with lots of reflective glass - http://tinyurl.com/yxxyom - influence global warming at all.
I ask myself the same thing about those monstrosities that Canadian architect Frank Gehry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Gehry - is being allowed to put up in various cities of the globe, many of them having what appear to be (in pictures) aluminum or stainless steel façades, but apparently the façades are sheathed in titanium:
http://tinyurl.com/v4yko
«The perfect setting: architecture for art´s sake
The building itself is an extraordinary combination of interconnecting shapes. Orthogonal blocks in limestone contrast with curved and bent forms covered in titanium.»
Considering that Canada's GHG emissions are only 2.1% (2002 figure) of the world's total output- http://tinyurl.com/yxawra - then maybe preventing Gehry from building any other post-modernist crap may help the planet.
Oh yeah, and so would stopping the opposition's constant huffing and puffing about the environment, which does nothing but increase CO2 emissions in Parliament.
Every climate scientist knows that putting a crapload of sulphur way up into the atmosphere would lower the temperature (in the short term). The problem is how would one put that much sulphur that high into the atmosphere? What would be the side effects? and How much would it cost? I suspect that it would cost more than simply reducing CO2. Similarly, I can't imagine the environmental and human health costs of that much sulphur (pinatubo every two years) returning to the earth - afterall sulphur only stays in the atmosphere for 3 years. And as we continue to pump more co2 into the atmosphere we will need to pump more and more sulphur into the atmosphere as well.
Yesterday when drawing a bath I noticed that the water was a little too hot. I suppose I could have kept the tap flowing at the same temperature and dumped in some ice cubes, but instead I decided to turn down the tap.
If the atmosphere does heat up, more clouds would be produced, reflecting more sunlight back out into space. That's how it works.
Yes anon, more clouds would reflect more light back into space.
But most of those rays would still make it through. More of those rays that made it through would then be trapped by the same clouds. Causing the world to warm up. That, while a simplification, of course, is actually how it works.
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