(I hit post.) Grrr
Which is it, ICE AGE or Global warming?
money, money for crazy stuff.
1 year go.
Humanity isn't doing enough to stop it. So, scientists are increasingly musing about conducting dramatic interventions in the atmosphere to cool the planet. And new research suggests that a project of atmospheric cooling would not only be doable, but also cheap enough that a single, determined country could pull it off. That cooling wouldn't reverse climate change. The greenhouse gases would still be there. The planet would keep warming overall, but that warming would significantly, measurably slow down.
Those are the conclusions of a paper published Nov. 23 in the journal Environmental Research Letters by a pair of researchers from Harvard and Yale universities. It's the deepest and most current study yet of "stratospheric aerosol injection" (also known as "solar dimming" or "solar engineering"). That's the spraying of chemicals into the atmosphere to reflect the sun's heat back into space, mimicking the global cooling effects of large volcanic eruptions.
The researchers found that humanity could, using this method, cut our species' annual contributions to the greenhouse effect in half at a price that states and large cities spend all the time on highways, subways and other infrastructure projects: a total of about $3.5 billion over the course of the next 15 years to develop the technology. (Most of those funds would go into building planes able to carry big tanks of aerosol spray into the stratosphere, about double the cruising altitude of a Boeing 747.) Once the tech is ready, the researchers found, the project would then cost another $2.25 billion or so each following year (assuming the effort would run for the next 15 years).
For comparison, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation budget in 2017 was $1.8 billion. Texas will have spent nearly a billion dollars replacing a single bridge in Corpus Christi. New York City subway-repair budgets routinely run into the tens of billions of dollars. Belgium spends about $4 billion every year on its military. In other words, geoengineering the atmosphere to slow climate change is cheap enough that a small, determined state or country could probably afford to do it, not to mention a superpower like the U.S. or China.