Nightmare Sulfur Injection Geosynthetic plans can cause problems – Frustrated with that?

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

If you block the sun, you will damage food production. There is even a study. But this dreaded issue hasn’t stopped climate enthusiasts from pushing forward with efforts to recreate the end of the age of the dinosaurs, to “save” us from 1C of global warming.

Before geoengineering to mitigate climate change, researchers must consider some basic chemistry

Via University of Pennsylvania
11/22/2021

It’s a tempting thought: With climate change so difficult to manage and countries unwilling to take decisive action, what if we could mitigate its impact by How to set up a chemical umbrella – a layer of sulfuric acid in the upper atmosphere that can reflect the sun’s radiation and cool the Earth?

According to a new study in Journal of the American Chemical Society, a collaboration between Penn scientists and two groups in Spain, atmospheric conditions in the stratosphere poses a challenge in generating sulfuric acid, making its production less efficient than previously expected. Therefore, more facilities to explore chemistry about how sulfuric acid and its building blocks will react in High atmosphere It is necessary to move forward confidently with this climate geoengineering strategy, the researchers say.

“These basic insights underscore the importance of understanding photochemistry in relation to engineering,” said Joseph S. Francisco, an atmospheric chemist at the Penn School of Arts & Sciences and a co-author of the study. geotechnical engineering. “It’s incredibly important and it’s something that’s been overlooked.”

Using sulfuric acid to dim the sun’s rays as a means of limiting climate changeThe effects are based on a natural phenomenon: When volcanoes erupt, the sulfur they release creates cooling clouds that locally — or sometimes even spread — filter the sun. But those clouds appear again in the troposphere, from the Earth’s surface up to about 10 km. Geoengineering using sulfuric acid will occur more in the stratosphere, about 10 to 20 km above the planet.

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“One of the implications of this finding is that, if you put sulfur dioxide on it, it just gets recycled,” says Francisco. “So it opens the door to whether we have a complete understanding of stratospheric atmospheric sulfur chemistry.”

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The findings also underscore the need for a Plan B if atmospheric chemistry is not going as expected. “It raises a fundamentally important question,“Francisco said. “If we put sulfur dioxide in, can we get it out of the stratosphere?“

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Read more: https://phys.org/news/2021-11-geoengineering-mitigate-climate-fund Basic-chemistry.html

The abstract of the study discusses what geoengineering can do to plant growth;

Estimating global agricultural efficiency of geoengineering using volcanic eruptions

Published: 08/08/2018

Jonathan Proctor, Solomon Hsiang, Jennifer Burney, Marshall Burke & Wolfram Schlenker

Nature (2018)

Solar radiation management is increasingly seen as an option for managing global temperatures, however the economic impact of ameliorating climate change by scattering sunlight back into space remains. not much is known. Although solar radiation management can increase crop yields by reducing heat stress, the effects of concomitant changes in sunlight availability have never been empirically estimated. Here, we use volcanic eruptions that have inspired modern solar radiation management proposals as natural experiments to provide the first estimates, to the best of our knowledge, on how the stratospheric sulfate aerosols produced by the El Chichón and Mount Pinatubo eruptions changed the quantity and quality of global sunlight and how these changes in sunlight affect to global crop yields. We found that the sunlight-mediated effect of stratospheric sulfate aerosols on yield was negative for both C4 (maize) and C3 (soybean, rice and wheat) crops.. Applying our yield model to a stratospheric sulphate aerosol based solar radiation management scenario, we find that mid-21st century losses due to scattered sunlight caused by management of solar radiation is approximately equal in magnitude to the benefit from cooling. This shows that solar radiation management—If deployed using stratospheric sulfate aerosols similar to the volcanic aerosols it seeks to mimic—will actually alleviate some of the global agricultural losses due to climate change. Our approach could be extended to studying the impact of solar radiation management on other global systems, such as human health or ecosystem function.

Read more (with wall fee): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0417-3

You can only imagine the scenario. Scientists pumped some sulfur into the atmosphere and nothing happened. Then they pumped some more, the needle still didn’t move. Then, suddenly, an extreme atmospheric event, such as a major hurricane or a volcanic eruption, picks up some water vapor and the entire sky turns black.

I’m glad at least one of them asked the obvious question, how to get sulfur out of the atmosphere if things go wrong? But I guess if there’s a chance for a full-scale test they might still want to try.