Geoengineering is one of those things that sounds like maybe a good thought on report but could also go awfully , apocalyptically wrong . But if the prospect ofplunging Earth ’s weather systems into chaosisn’t enough to convince scientists we take to tread very cautiously with the ultimate global warming tech - fix , perhaps this will : geoengineering could be a catastrophe for scientific discipline .
That ’s according to Modern simulation byCharlie Zender , an atmospheric physicist at the University of California , Irvine who represent the provacatively - entitle research card “ Death of shadow : Artificial Sky Brightness in the Anthropocene ” at the the American Geophysical Union conference this month . In a nutshell , Zender find that injecting light - scattering particles into the stratosphere — one of the most widely - discourse scheme for rapidly cooling the satellite — would have the unintended side - effect of messing with the incoming light from distant stars and planet .
As you might envisage , this would be very bad news show for the scientists who study tell adept and planets . “ If we geoengineered globally , this would strike all telescopes around the world , ” Zender told Gizmodo .
The thought behind stratospheric aerosol shot ( SAI ) is pretty unproblematic : if we can get a bunch of sulfate particle high enough into sky , they ’ll disperse around the Earth and act like sunblock , scattering light back into space and yielding a cooling burden . ( SAI was exhort in part by volcanic eruptions , which do essentially the same affair . ) Although our planet could really apply some help cooling off right now , SAI has amount under fleshy fervor for an obvious grounds : conducting a worldwide experimentation on our one and only shared global atmosphere is inherently dangerous .
Among the more frightening possibility critic have raised , SAIcould alter weather pattern , suppressing summer monsoonsin parts of the world where crop are utterly dependent on monsoon rainfall . Much more speculatively , SAI could work too well and trigger a runaway cooling scenario , a la Snowpiercer .
There ’s one other rather obvious side - burden of SAI that ’s received light attention , and that ’s the encroachment on incoming starlight . Zender ’s modelling , which are not yet print , suggest this effect could be big . When he tally a few megaton of S dioxide to a computer model of the stratosphere — an amount that may be required to chill the Earth back to pre - industrial temperatures — Zender found that the night sky over urban areas would become about 25 percentage bright . That ’s because our stratospheric shield would backscatter light from ground source , namely , electrical energy . “ It ’s like when you ’re driving through fog with your gamey beam on , ” he said .
Of course , most astronomy does n’t take situation anywhere near cities . The skillful lookout in the world are located on remote mountaintops , gamy above tune befoulment and far by from abstemious pollution . Here , Zender ’s models show a more or less different , but evenly bad effect : SAI would actually make the sky darker .
“ Our scope are in position where most of the [ night ] light comes from the stars , ” Zender explicate . “ There , what the aerosols do is they backscatter light from outer space . That means you ’re not incur as much starlight , and the starlight you do get is less pristine . The hotshot would await blurred . ”
According to Zender ’s calculations , at an approximate “ scope elevation ” of 10,000 feet ( 3,000 meters ) the amount of diffuse or scattered starlight would around double up , if we went whole hog on the SAI - to - reverse - global - warming mind . Given that astronomers rely on pencil - like beams of light to capture accurate spectral information about stars and exoplanets , this would amount to a serious concern .
Of course , the part of SAI where we trigger a global dearth would also be bad , so perchance we should test reducing our carbon emission before rushing to the tech - pickle , eh ?
AstronomyAtmosphereClimateClimate changeScience
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