Geoengineering would turn blue skies whiter [View all]

[joshcryer]

Geoengineering would turn blue skies whiter
Blue skies would fade to hazy white if geoengineers inject light-scattering aerosols into the upper atmosphere to offset global warming. Critics have already warned that this might happen, but now the effect has been quantified.

Releasing sulphate aerosols high in the atmosphere should in theory reduce global temperatures by reflecting a small percentage of the incoming sunlight away from the Earth. However, the extra particles would also scatter more of the remaining light into the atmosphere. This would reduce by 20 per cent the amount of sunlight that takes a direct route to the ground, and it would increase levels of softer, diffuse scattered light, says Ben Kravitz of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California.

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Kravitz calculated how scattering from particles ranging from 0.1 to 0.9 micrometers in diameter would affect the spectrum of the scattered light, and how that would affect the colour of the sky. He found the sky would appear paler for all potential diameters. Particles with diameters in the middle of the range would make for much whiter skies.

The effect would be most visible in the countryside, where air pollution is generally lower, says Kravitz. "All you'd have to do to see it is to step outside."

This is what we're going to resort to. We aren't doing enough about CO2 emissions to stop catastrophic warming, so we're going to bleach the fucking sky. At least it won't be yellow as I envisioned it would be. So there's that.