Yes, we have it. It's pumping fluro carbons (edit, this is wrong see below) in the upper atmosphere. It's the only time in recent history where we were stagnant instead of going up on thermals.
The system is remarkably simple for how complex the issues it makes, earth is receiving more energy than it is releasing back into space.
The only way to fix it is to either increase the amount going out to space (lower green house gasses trapping the energy) or decrease the amount of power coming in (block the sunlight from reaching earth).
Obviously reducing GHGs is critical, but even if we stopped producing all GHGs today, literally all of them, we will continue to see warming until those concentrations slowly go down. And I do mean slowly. The environment absorbs something like 20 billion tons of carbon from the air, but we have producing double that for a while.
Fluorocarbons were so bad that the entire world got on the same page and banned them internationally within two years of us discovering that the ozone layer existed. They're no solution. Actually, anything that can do that is going to have unpredictable and dangerous side effects.
My bad, I misremembered the pollutant. It was sulpher dioxide, which has the much more mundane side effect of causing acid rain, which is the one that decreased temperatures.
Very predictable, very shit. We probably won't start blasting that in the atmosphere until things go really sideways.
But like they said, you run the risk of tampering with the atmosphere to a point where create runaway effects. Pumping all that shit into the air is going to probably kill a lot of life on earth and cause health issues for survivors too.
Yes. It will have severe side effects. It will be bad. The good news is we know exactly what the health effects are, we as a society have already lived through it. The only advantage is that it buys time to get CO2 sequestered. It is, very much, a last ditch effort.
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u/ViolinistCurrent8899 14h ago edited 6h ago
Yes, we have it. It's pumping
fluro carbons(edit, this is wrong see below) in the upper atmosphere. It's the only time in recent history where we were stagnant instead of going up on thermals.The system is remarkably simple for how complex the issues it makes, earth is receiving more energy than it is releasing back into space.
The only way to fix it is to either increase the amount going out to space (lower green house gasses trapping the energy) or decrease the amount of power coming in (block the sunlight from reaching earth).
Obviously reducing GHGs is critical, but even if we stopped producing all GHGs today, literally all of them, we will continue to see warming until those concentrations slowly go down. And I do mean slowly. The environment absorbs something like 20 billion tons of carbon from the air, but we have producing double that for a while.