Wednesday, October 24, 2007

If you don't want to join the Pigou Club...

...you might like this idea:

If we could pour a five-gallon bucket’s worth of sulfate particles per second into the stratosphere, it might be enough to keep the earth from warming for 50 years. Tossing twice as much up there could protect us into the next century.

A 1992 report from the National Academy of Sciences suggests that naval artillery, rockets and aircraft exhaust could all be used to send the particles up. The least expensive option might be to use a fire hose suspended from a series of balloons.

This proposal is well beyond my ken, but I wonder about unintended consequences.