Water vapor – water in gaseous form – is a natural greenhouse gas that traps heat, just like carbon dioxide released when coal, oil and gas are burned. So researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA believe that if they could just inject ice high into the air, it would make the water vapor in the upper atmosphere a little drier and remove a small portion of the human-induced heat could be countered.
It's just the spark of an initial idea, said the lead author of a study in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.
The idea of drying the upper atmosphere is the latest addition to what some scientists call a last-ditch toolbox to tackle climate change by manipulating the world's atmosphere or oceans. Known as geoengineering, this is often dismissed because of potential side effects, and is usually not mentioned as an alternative to reducing CO2 pollution, but as a complement to reducing emissions.
“This is not something we can even implement right now,” said Joshua Schwarz, a NOAA physicist and lead author of a study in Wednesday's journal Science Advances. “This is about exploring what might be possible in the future and identifying research directions.”
The way it could conceivably work is that high-tech aircraft could inject ice particles about 17 kilometers high, just below the stratosphere, where the air slowly rises. Then the ice and cold air rise to where it is coldest and causes the water vapor to turn into ice and fall, drying out the stratosphere, Schwarz said. So far, no workable injection technique exists, he said.
At a maximum injection of 2 tons per week, it is conceivable that enough water vapor would be extracted to reduce heating slightly, about 5 percent of the total warming caused by carbon from burning fossil fuels, Schwarz said. It is not much and should not be used as an alternative to reducing pollution, he said.
Schwarz isn't entirely sure what side effects might occur, and that's the problem, other scientists said.
Deliberately tinkering with Earth's atmosphere to solve climate change is likely to create new problems, says climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria, who was not part of the study. He said the technical side of this makes sense, but he likened the concept to a children's story in which a cheese-loving king is overrun with mice, lets cats deal with the mice, then has dogs chase the cats away and lions get rid of the mice. of the dogs and elephants to eliminate the lions and then goes back to mice to scare off the elephants.
It makes more sense to address the original problem: the cheese or the carbon dioxide, Weaver said.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography atmospheric chemist Lynn Russell, who was not part of the study, said the idea is worth exploring, but that the study “doesn't provide many answers given all the uncertainties.”
Groups from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to the United Nations Environment Program have looked at the ethics, side effects, legal complications and benefits of geoengineering with varying degrees of skepticism and cautious interest.
At the UN Environment Assembly, countries are considering a resolution to study solar radiation modification – placing particles in the air to reflect sunlight and cool the atmosphere – and possible regulations for countries or companies that would do so.
“If you're going to do laboratory experiments indoors, that might not be a problem,” UNEP director Inger Andersen told The Associated Press. “But from a UNEP perspective, we do believe that once we step out and we start doing small and large-scale experimentation outdoors, we actually need a global conversation.”
“I think the modification of solar radiation is a bit like artificial intelligence,” says Andersen. “Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in. It's a technology that's out there. We don't think in any way that it should be considered a climate solution.”
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Published: Feb 29, 2024 08:17 AM IST