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Former Microsoft tech chief says he has global warming solution
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Former Microsoft technology chief Nathan Myhrvold said he has an idea that will cool the planet and solve the world’s climate change problem.
Speaking with Ross Reynolds on the Seattle public radio show The Conversation, Myhrvold said catastrophic global warming can be prevented and even reversed by pumping liquid sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere.
He said a hose could be expanded more than 15 miles into the air using helium balloons and that it would dim the sun enough to reduce or reverse global warming. It’s something he’s dubbed Stratoshield.
“In order to cancel out the extra warming that comes from C02, we simply have to make the planet 1 percent dimmer—make the sunlight that strikes the earth 1 percent dimmer,” Myhrvold said.
Myhrvold said that Ben Franklin was actually the original architect of this concept. In 1783 a volcano erupted in Iceland, killing 25 percent of the people in Iceland. After a particularly harsh winter in 1784, Franklin outlined in a paper a theory that placed the cause of the temperature shift on gas and particles from the volcanic eruption blocking rays from the sun.
“It turns out Franklin was right,” said Myhrvold.
Since then, scientists have studies the effects of other volcanic eruptions and have come to similar conclusions: Volcanic eruptions emit gas and particles into the stratosphere—a part of the atmosphere where there is little weather to wash away the particles—that block rays of the run, therefore cooling the planet or a part of the planet.
Myhrvold cited another famous eruption in 1991 in the Philippines. After that volcanic action, temperatures dropped for 18 months by about 1 degree, which is about the increase in temperature the world has experienced so far from global warming, said Myhrvold.
Other scientists have tried to recreate these effects but have historically run into two issues, Myhrvold said.
1. What material should be put inorganically into the stratosphere and;
2. How does it get there cost effectively?
Myhrvold said his “nose to the sky” addresses both of those roadblocks. He said as few as two “surprisingly small” hoses—one in each hemisphere—would be needed, suspended by 100’s of helium-filled balloons.
He’s also not worried about negative environmental effects of pumping sulfur into the stratosphere because he points out that sulfur occurs naturally in the environment and the amount needed is “relatively small in the scheme of things,” according to an article on Seattle’s TechFlash.com.
“Look, I’d prefer not to do it,” he said in the interview. “I’d prefer we weren’t in this pickle, but we seem to be, and our political and diplomatic efforts to get out of the problem so far aren’t getting any traction.”
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