I was trying to figure out why volcanoes sometimes have a global cooling effect, I mean the things are pumping out obscene amounts of carbon dioxide right, so whats with the cooling. Well it turns out sulfur dioxide has a negative greenhouse coefficient(it will pass infrared light better than visible light). And if the volcano dumps tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, you get the cooling effect.
At which point I got too clever for my own good and went "Hey wait a minute, we(as a species) worked very hard to get the sulfur compounds out of our fuels, what it that was a mistake" conveniently ignoring why you don't want sulfur in your fuels. "Acid rain was not that bad, right?"
But sometimes it is fun do a little mustache twirl and in my best supervillain voice, proclaim "You know what would reduce global warming, we need to add a bunch of sulfur to jet fuel, to increase the amount of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere"
Do we know what reducing solar irradiation will do for plant growth though? We might actually make the root cause worse if it decreases carbon fixation.
Yep, this. Same for any kind of solar shielding. Some are so fixed on controlling a single metric (Carbon/Temperature)that they may end up inadvertently influencing hundreds of other things.
When simple solutions interact with complex systems, complex problems arise. As it is said, for every problem there is a solution that is simple, easy and wrong.
I was trying to figure out why volcanoes sometimes have a global cooling effect, I mean the things are pumping out obscene amounts of carbon dioxide right, so whats with the cooling. Well it turns out sulfur dioxide has a negative greenhouse coefficient(it will pass infrared light better than visible light). And if the volcano dumps tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, you get the cooling effect.
At which point I got too clever for my own good and went "Hey wait a minute, we(as a species) worked very hard to get the sulfur compounds out of our fuels, what it that was a mistake" conveniently ignoring why you don't want sulfur in your fuels. "Acid rain was not that bad, right?"
But sometimes it is fun do a little mustache twirl and in my best supervillain voice, proclaim "You know what would reduce global warming, we need to add a bunch of sulfur to jet fuel, to increase the amount of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere"