So I was watching a video the other day about a massive volcano that erupted in the 1800s. It released so much sulphur into atmosphere that the planet cooled by 2 degrees. Which led me to the absurd thought that maybe we could induce a volcano into erupting to cool the planet and negate some of the climate change we’re seeing?
EDIT: forget the word NUKE and just think about if we could trigger a volcano successfully to our benefit? I understand that we wouldn’t want nuclear fallout.
In: Earth Science
What you’re essentially asking about, and its core, is called geoengineering: trying to manipulate the climate deliberately on a global scale as a way out of global warming.
A volcano is a pretty terrible way to do this (far too hard to control, far too many other effects other than just inserting particulate matter into the atmosphere), and let’s leave nukes out of it, but there are other ideas that use the same concept, like spraying special materials into the upper atmosphere that would reflect sunlight and in that way decrease how much heat the planet was taking in, so it would cool.
The main reasons not to do this kind of thing right now is that our ability to predict what would happen is very, very limited. We don’t have good models for this. Our knowledge of this is right now only at the modeling stage. To make something that would not be dangerous to deploy, you’d need to not only get very good models, but also do experiments to refine the models. It’s not easy to do, but there is research being done along these lines. But it isn’t as simple as saying, “reflect sunlight, global temperatures stabilize.” You’re talking about an immensely complex system of interconnected feedback loops. Would our crops all die? Would it cool all over in the same way, or might there be differential cooling that sets of extreme weather? What if the cooling sets off a feedback loop that we can’t stop? Etc.
The fear about going into it half-cocked is that you could create unintended consequences either locally (e.g., you end up creating terrible weather for some country, ruining crops, whatever) or globally (you somehow over-compensate and the climate becomes unstable, freezes us, who knows).
The other issue is that this would only address one aspect of global warming, which is temperature rise. Acidification of oceans would not be cured by this, for example. So this is a sort of “last gasp” sort of strategy. It will not “fix” the planet for us — the only way to do that is to come up with a global solution for our energy needs that does not generate huge amounts of carbon. (There are a variety of ways to do this already known to us, of course, but there is also the political will in getting people on board.)
We may indeed get to a point in the future where this seems like a good idea, because of our absolute failure to mitigate climate change when it was more feasible, but that will in fact be a reflection of how desperate we are, and how much we have failed.
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