Withering under a green sky
Popular Australian Scientist, Tim Flannery chose last weekend to come out with a novel (but not original) idea to rid the world of the Global Warming evil: let’s seed the atmosphere with sulphur!
Professor Flannery’s background is one of researching first Australian animals and then later, their fossilised counterparts from yesterera. He then went on to write several books which got him out there in the public eye. However it wasn’t until Flannery strayed from his animal learnings and stepped into the footsteps of Al Gore, and developed global warming messages with some ‘downunder’ prophecies thrown in for good measure, that he truly came to be recognised as ‘one of Australia’s foremost scientists.’ This all endeared Flannery to the Australian public, happy to have their own “Al Gore with an akubra” and ultimately allowed him to waltz away with the ‘Australian of the Year” award in 2007.
Today Flannery concluded global warming was ‘much worse than he thought,’ and we should up the wattage on methods to combat it. To that end, he approached the media (a group of people known to be highly responsive to messages of doom and drastic measures) and proposed we insert sulphur into the stratosphere to block the sun’s rays from ever getting to the earth. Think volcano eruption on steroids!
When asked of the consequences of such drastic action (other than cooling the planet of course!), Flannery admitted he didn’t know what the consequences would be.
The Australian newspaper, the Herald Sun, obviously a bit miffed that some of Flannery’s dire climate prophecies for Australia had passed their expiry date (its the curse of Nostradamus!), decided to point out the rather glaring obvious ‘bad’ point about injecting sulphur into the atmosphere – it causes acid rain. Acid rain is something the industrialised world spent the better part of the 1970s and 1980s trying to reduce to the comparatively minuscule levels of today
The story of acid rain goes like this: sulphur mixes with water in the atmosphere (and there is quite a bit of water up there in them thar clouds) and then eventually falls down to earth as acid rain.
Hence the green skies – get it? Yellow (sulphur particles) + blue (sky) = green (sky).
At least in the short term, many landscapes would soon resemble the sulphur hotsprings of Yellowstone National Parkin the US or Rotarua, New Zealand… Plants will also wither and die, and almost nothing will grow in the yellow-brown acidic soil. And you have to ask, how will those Hollywood actresses react to the unsightly acid burn scars caused by acid falling on them from the sky? Will they become a badge of honour, to signify support for such drastic actions to prevent global warming?!
However, the dinosaurs kind of testify its not the most winning strategy, as they battled 2 million years of volcanic generated acid rain until so weakened, a meteor was enough to snuff them out.
Another question (not put to Flannery) would be just where would we find adequately large supplies of sulphur to actually have enough to inject into the atmosphere? And just as we now frantically scramble to try and squash CO2 back into its original carbon sinks (officially called, “carbon sequestration“), is it possible such large scale use of sulphur might see us shortly afterwards trying to find ways to sequester sulphric acid as well?
Since some believe the pollution from industry post WWII until the 80s was responsible for keeping the pesky CO2/global warming problem hidden until Al Gore was elected VP of the USA in 1992, its probable we don’t have to be as drastic as Flannery – just relax those pollution controls that were put in place!
However, if a world of plantless deserts under green skies isn’t for you… it might be better to focus on other solutions for climate change which have less drastic consequences for life on the planet. Just a thought.
