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Acid Rain fights Global Warming?
Mad_Morlock
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
There's a new treatment being suggested for Global Warming by Paul Crutzen (Nobel laureate).
Inject huge amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere to increase Earth's albedo, thereby reflecting more light and heat back into space.
Sounds like risky business from the beginning. The environmental impact could cause thousands upon thousands of species to become extinct and generate a whole new host of problems.
I've heard otherwise, but is there any chance that injecting huge quantities of chemicals into the atmosphere could speed the melt of the polar ice caps?
Inject huge amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere to increase Earth's albedo, thereby reflecting more light and heat back into space.
Sounds like risky business from the beginning. The environmental impact could cause thousands upon thousands of species to become extinct and generate a whole new host of problems.
I've heard otherwise, but is there any chance that injecting huge quantities of chemicals into the atmosphere could speed the melt of the polar ice caps?
Mad_Morlock on
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Do you have to ask?
The dirt particles in the atmosphere reflect the sunlight.
Nuclear winter was based off a flawed model (from what I recall from class). There would actually be "nuclear autumn," where certain localized areas would have light blocked off but others wouldn't, or something to that effect.
One of the scientists who did the more complex simulations that corrected the initial nuclear winter projections was talking to our class. He gave it as an example of an ethical dilemma they faced, because their research boiled down to "nuclear war: not so bad after all"
Didn't he come out and say he isn't seriously proposing this just yet and saying that this is just what would be necessary if we continue on our current path?
Perhaps. If said chemicals cause the snow to change colour, this would lower raise the normally very high albedo of the snow and cause it to absorb more energy. I'm not sure if sulfur particles would do that, though.
The guy was actually kind of pissed off, because some magazine or paper was doing a story on the research, and that was basically the title of the article they ran.
o_O
Perhaps it should read "Nuclear War: The aftereffects aren't so bad, but the US still has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over!"
- "Proving once again the deadliest animal of all ... is the Zoo Keeper" - Philip J Fry
I've been wondering the same thing. Apparently there's no effect, but the same article said soot from fossil fuels washes off the ice caps rather quickly rather than settling and building up layers, which I'm iffy about as well.
I'm just curious, because if it does have an effect on the albedo, you'd be looking at quite a backlash. If the ice caps start to melt faster then wouldn't you be seeing a runaway greenhouse effect as more moisture ends up in the atmosphere?
Does any know what the projections are for if the Antarctic ice cap melts? And I'm not just talking about rising waters. What happens when you take several billion tons of matter off of one point of the Earth's crust?
I also thought that rising sea levels would mostly be caused by the oceans heating up (and the millions of tons of water expanding ever-so-slightly with temperature) rather than the ice caps melting.
Am I mistaken?
Neither are most of the people in this thread, I'd wager.
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but clouds are not. Clouds actually contribute to the effect that this guy is trying to create. So, clouds form when water vapor finds little particular matter to collect around. Well, sulfur particles works just fine for that purpose. What you might actually see is a huge upshot in clouds, which would drastically reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the surface. This could very easily run away into a deep ice age
The northern ice cap could melt with very little worries.
But the southern ice cap sits over a land mass. The combined mass of several billion tons of ice causes the entire techtonic plate to be pushed inwards about 500 meters. Projections for the melt figure it rising *very* slowly. So says Cool Antarctica.com
Does this take into account the amount of pressure residing on other techtonic plates that would be relieved if Antarctica rose half a kilometer? Wouldn't the whole Pacific Ring of Fire go apeshit as Earth's molten core sudden had that much pressure relieved from its surface?
The whole crust might shift.
It probably happened about 12,000 years ago to move the Hudson Bay from being the previous North Pole to its new position, hence the nice circular depression of the Bay.
You'd think layers of soot would take just as long.
The ice caps melting in the space of ten or twenty years would be pretty fucking sudden on geological terms.
You wouldn't need much change in mass distribution... just take off enough weight to get the Ring of Fire erupting. The extra soot from the series of volcanic eruptions would darken the albedo even further and speed up the melt process.
As for how quickly the change might occur... it's a matter of energy. Einstein figured the uneven distribution of mass would make the shift sudden. Like apocalypse level event. You'd see the stars fall from the skies as the entire Earth's crust shifted to a new position with a new North and South pole.
I sure don't know. I'm just wondering.
However, I still call bullshit. I'm pretty sure there are ice core samples that show major changes with the polar ice cap when Vesuvias blew because of the soot it put on the ice caps.
Nobel for Chemistry, actually. And well deserved too. He's the guy who discovered that CFCs were seriously fucking up the ozone.
What is seriously lacking is the context for this proposal. He was disgusted at how little we are doing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, so he proposed this as a sort of shock tactic, only to have it backfire. The aim was to say, "Look, fuckers, you guys are doing jack shit to fix the problem, so this is what you're going to have to do to fix it when you realise your mistake too late."
Jesus. I can think of better ways to 'shock' than making oneself sound like a C-average undergrad. I mean, its never going to be a viable option even under those circumstances, it'll create far more problems on the ground than it'll fix in the air.
It will do what he intends it to do. He's basically amplifying what we're already doing with global dimming. I don't think he's particularly thinking about the other effects it will have, considering he's probably not serious.
Uhh, sulfur is pretty heavy, so it would sink to the ground. I doubt an orbit of a cloud of sulfur particles would last particularly long either.
America.
What, so they should get a vote? Let's see you get a bear into the poll booth.
We should invent polling booths for animals.
Besides, by the time the situation reaches that point we'd probably all be huddled in underground bunkers anyway.
But it's late so I'll do that tomorrow.
Until then, here's some "enchanted learning for you"
And backwards:
This just seems very wrong to me. Like someone was playing around with the gif animator. I wouldn't show this to children and tell them it's truth.
Continental drift on that literally looks like rafts floating around at sea.
Here's the site it came from: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/Home.html
And here's a much better picture of continental drift.
I'd say Australia is going to be one of the biggest movers as the western portion of the Pacfic Ring of Fire cracks off and the Indo-Australian plate torques back around towards the Eurasian plate. It might even crack in half as the mass swings around the Eurasian plate, leaving India behind.
Think the last Tsunami was a big one? Just wait and see what happens next.
I can't remember who, but someone was arguing a couple of years ago that the best way to fight global warming was to release particulate polution into the air, by, say, burning coal, to create a "global cooling" effect. Unfortunately, this has the side effect of less sun reaching the earth which, despite it possibly solving the global warming problem, causes a whole host of other problems.