The sun will turn red, and the sky will turn pale: scientists have come up with a salvation for the Earth, but there is a nuance

Researchers have found that moving away from fossil fuels, which aim to stop global warming on Earth, could reverse the process, as emissions of particulate matter (aerosols) reflect the sun’s rays in the atmosphere. Scientists propose to replace aerosols by spraying sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. But this is far from the best idea.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which includes 60 scientists, has written an open letter to world leaders calling for increased efforts to study solar geoengineering to understand how it can help humanity in the future to reduce the influence of the Sun on warming the Earth, writes Popular Mechan. Simply put, they call for exploring the possibility of obscuring the Sun for the salvation of mankind.

Experts in their letter warn that the temperature on Earth could rise by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, which would be quite critical for humanity. They also note that even if humanity reaches zero emissions, there will still be a problem with carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere.

“While reducing emissions is critical, no level of reduction now implemented can reverse the warming effects of past and current greenhouse gas emissions,” the letter said.

At the same time, as scientists note, unlike greenhouse gases, another category of emissions from human activities, aerosols, “can work to cool the climate.”

According to scientists, the current aerosols in the atmosphere, which have arisen as a result of pollution caused by human activities (mines, quarries, chemical plants, etc.), can reflect part of the sun’s rays in the atmosphere and reduce its impact on the planet by a third.

However, aerosols are extremely harmful to the human respiratory tract, so humanity has no other option how to get rid of them. Therefore, scientists suggest that if compliance with environmental regulations leads to a decrease in the concentration of aerosols in the atmosphere, humanity will discover the scale of how warm our world really is.

“Aerosols cool the climate by scattering sunlight, and when they mix with clouds, they can increase cloud reflectivity and cloud lifetimes. Reducing aerosol emissions over the next few decades will quickly expose a significant but very uncertain amount of climate warming,” the authors say. . letter.

They also voiced the idea of ​​how and with what to replace aerosols, suggesting purposefully injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere – the one that erupts from volcanoes, so that it acts as a reflector for sunlight. That sulfur dioxide will work, scientists know for sure, since earlier volcanic eruptions have shown a general cooling effect on the planet.

But this idea also has its downsides. First of all, sulfur dioxide is toxic, and purposefully injecting something that people can’t breathe is a concern.

Sulfur dioxide will also affect the way our world looks, since the Sun in the sky will no longer be yellow, but scarlet. And the sky itself will turn from blue to white.

However, scientists are convinced that these negative effects can be neglected, since the consequences of accelerated climate change are likely to be even worse.

Sulfur injection is proposed to be a temporary measure to buy scientists time in order to develop a truly effective method of lowering the temperature on Earth.

As GLOBAL HAPPENINGS said, one of these methods was recently proposed by researchers from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge (USA). They proposed using lunar dust, which will become a kind of cosmic curtain on the path of sunlight to the Earth. But for this you need to build giant catapults on the moon.