Word: pinatubo
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...Intellectual Ventures, a private think tank. Myhrvold and his staff have the idea to build a giant "garden hose to the sky" that would pump liquefied sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. Scientists know that increasing SO2 in the air deflects sunlight, which cools down the earth; when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines exploded in 1992, for instance, the SO2 sent into the atmosphere created a brief global cooling spell. Levitt and Dubner advocate pursuing this geoengineering scheme, which could potentially avert a hotter world for pennies on the dollar, compared with the long-term work of shifting...
...forests and wildlife. And there are serious concerns that artificially changing cloud cover could disrupt global precipitation patterns, a risk that climate scientists Susan Solomon and Gabriele Hegerl raised in a recent article in Science. They found a global drop in precipitation levels after the eruption at Mt. Pinatubo, and an increase in droughts. A cool but dry planet wouldn't be an upgrade from where we are now. "Climate change impacts are driven not only by temperature changes, but also by change in other aspects of the climate system, such as precipitation and climate extremes," they write...
...turn down the thermostat would be to spread sulfur particles into the atmosphere, either through artillery or with airplanes, thickening the air enough so that it would bounce some sunlight back. We know that process does reduce global temperatures: when Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, it threw millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, causing global temperatures over the following months to drop by nearly 1°F. Geoengineering would work much the same way - only it would need to be done continuously, to keep up with the intensifying greenhouse effect...
...explosion of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines was the largest eruption in recent memory, and its effects on the atmosphere are still being measured. The 1883 eruption of Indonesia's Krakatoa led to a global cooling and the deadly winter of 1886-87 that wiped out the short-lived open-range cattle bonanza of Montana Territory. In 2000, Ken Wohletz, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, postulated that an even bigger Krakatoa eruption in 6th century A.D. may have sent a tall plume of vaporized seawater into the atmosphere, causing the formation of stratospheric ice clouds with superfine hydrovolcanic...
Ollie Barge has an American name, but not much else. She never knew her parents, having been raised by a foster mother. When her college was flooded by mud slides from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, the school relocated and Barge couldn't afford the commute. She tried getting work at the garment factories now prospering on the former base. But each time she carefully combed back her curly hair and went for an interview, the managers turned her away. Only a handful of mixed-race Filipinos have landed jobs at Clark Special Economic Zone, where thousands...