ON THE CUTTING EDGE: Air Pollution May Counteract Global Warming
At the UN conference on climate change in
Crutzen, one of three scientists sharing the 1995 Nobel in chemistry for their work on the depletion of the ozone layer, suggested that if the sun were to raise the temperature of the Earth dangerously high, an effective countermeasure would be to deliberately shoot sulfites into the stratosphere.
Unlike carbon dioxide, which traps heat in the atmosphere, sulfur dioxide reflects solar radiation, which would cool the Earth down. US government climatologist Tom Wigley published a paper last month in the journal Science, in which he confirmed that Crutzen’s idea would do the trick using computer models based on the estimated 10 million tons of sulfur that the 1991 eruption of Philippine volcano Mount Pinatubo spewed into the stratosphere, which cooled the Earth as much as 0.9 degrees for a year. Wigley’s models showed that half that amount of stratospheric sulfate injection would provide a measurable cooling effect. But the pollutant would need to be replenished every year or so, since the sulfates would fall back to Earth - as acid rain.
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