The Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is part of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, will coordinate a five-year research plan to explore the possibility of altering the Earth's atmosphere's ability to mitigate the negative effects of global warming, known as solar geoengineering.
The research plan includes an assessment of the effects of potential climate interference, including the dispersion of special aerosols in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight into space and the consequences it could have for the whole planet.
Some technologies, such as the atmospheric dispersion of sulphur dioxide, are capable of harming the environment and human health in their own right; however, scientists believe that humanity, which seems to be "overdoing" carbon emission plans very soon, must assess what is more risky — given the potential catastrophic overheating of the atmosphere due to the greenhouse effect — even those who support a plan to change the reflecting power of the Earth's atmosphere do not see it as the ultimate solution to all problems and emphasize the importance of reducing emissions. If such measures can be the solution, then only temporary.
It is known that a plan to change reflecting power was proposed to US President Lyndon Johnson as early as 1965, when the change in reflecting power was estimated at about $500 million annually, not much for the Earth, even at the cost of those years, and today it is estimated that such changes would cost $10 billion a year.
The U.S. National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine baseline report allows for three types of changes: aerosol spraying in the stratosphere, bleaching clouds over the oceans, and the depletion of permeable clouds.The first method is to spray an effective aerosol from sulphur dioxide from aircraft at an altitude of 10-30 km, a method that, as demonstrated by high-level volcanic eruptions, works almost immediately.
The bleaching of clouds over the ocean involves increasing their reflecting power through sea salt, but the effect of such technologies is too short and insignificant. Finally, the depletion of permeable clouds will allow part of the heat to escape the Earth's surface. Strictly speaking, technology does not belong to solar geoengineering, but it is also linked to atmospheric manipulation.
The risks of such technologies are already known; for example, sulphur dioxide can hinder the recovery of the ozone layer, and in the long run, it will return to Earth as acid rain, and it can cause many respiratory diseases in the world's population.
According to the CNBC portal, it is worth weighing which of the effects are worse -- the effects of sulphur dioxide or global warming -- as the planet's temperature rises, so does the risk of a global disaster. According to experts, the amount of carbon dioxide that has already been released is sufficient to keep the planet's temperature high for hundreds of years, even if emissions are stopped immediately.
Some opponents of the initiative refer to the enhancement of the atmospheric "moral threat" because it suggests a relatively simple solution alternative to reducing emissions. Supporters emphasize that one does not exclude the other, and that it is extremely important to continue research in this direction. Moreover, many fear that, against the backdrop of severe climate change, one country may attempt to "manage" sunlight unilaterally without sufficient research. As one expert points out, the likelihood that one developed country will do something like this in the next 20 years is more than 90 per cent. Other experts call this probability 100 per cent after millions of people begin to die from climate change, so research needs to be done now in order to be ready to perform effective "desollarization" in the future.
Computer simulations have recently been reported to have revealed the possible cause of extinction of hypothetical Martian micro-organisms, which could have caused climate change that destroyed them.