Scientists believe tanker planes could spray sulfur dioxide aerosol in the upper atmosphere over Earth’s poles to help them refreeze.
The temperatures of Earth’s poles could be cooled by about 2 degrees Celsius, the study says, costing about $11 billion annually.
But this proposal comes with risks, and it’s not a final solution to climate change—just a Band-Aid.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/here-s-one-way-we-could-refreeze-earth-s-melting-polar-ice/ar-AA123FTf?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=81f08851eed34512ac39423f6cef2b10These stratospheric aerosol injections (SAI), as the study calls them, offer “a prospective climate intervention that would seek to abate global warming by slightly increasing the reflectiveness of the Earth’s upper atmosphere.”
The concept of SAI is nothing new, but this proposal calls for aerosols to be targeted at the places where melting ice can most dramatically lead to sea-level rise across the entire planet. With greater warming at the Earth’s poles over time, the study calls for “injections of sulfur dioxide (SO2)... which will oxidize into sulfuric acid (H2SO4) and coagulate into liquid supercooled aerosols after a month in the stratosphere.”
The expectation is that this could lower temperatures at the poles by 2 degrees Celsius. That’s enough cooling to help refreeze the polar extremes and bring average temperatures back in line with what they were before the industrial era. The harmful effects of climate change, such as extreme weather and massive flooding, could possibly be slowed.
“Subpolar deployment would quickly envelope the poles as well and could arrest or reverse ice and permafrost melt at high latitudes. This would yield global benefit by retarding sea level rise,” writes lead author Wake Smith in the study. Smith is a lecturer at Yale College and senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Unlike previous aerosol plans, which would encompass the entire Earth, the one Smith proposes focuses just on latitudes beyond 60 degrees north and south (think north of Anchorage, Alaska, and south of Patagonia).
