Word: sulfurous
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...compensate for man-made climate change. The authors visit Nathan Myhrvold, the brilliant former chief technology officer of Microsoft and co-founder of 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...
...table in all commercial, oil and gas agreements." British Foreign Secretary David Miliband vociferously rejects that claim, as does Business Secretary Lord Peter Mandelson, who twice met Seif this year. British officials must hope the brouhaha blows over soon. Because Libya's oil is light and low in sulfur, it is prized for being among the easiest to refine. And since Libya has nearly 44 billion bbl. of proven reserves, Western capitals have little intention of freezing out Gaddafi again...
...before we start creating man-made volcanoes, we should worry about the side effects. For one thing, increasing sulfur in the atmosphere would increase acid rain, with all the damage that can do to 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...
...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...
...Taiwanese hiking group recommends other mountains to climb, points out how to get to the sulfur springs. One of the women went to college two hours from my home in Pennsylvania...