In order to forestall dread global warming, many, usually wacky, schemes have been proposed. The latest is from a group of British academics who want to simulate the cooling emissions of volcanoes by tethering a balloon about 1 kilometer into the sky and pumping up and dispersing a chemical mixture of sulfates to reflect sunlight. Of course, the EPA has for years been trying to reduce sulfur emissions from coal plants and automobile exhausts.

The academics have garnered a £1.6m ($2.5 million) British government grant to build a scale model of their device.

“The whole weight of this thing is going to be a few hundred tonnes. That’s the weight of several double-decker buses. So imagine how big a helium balloon do you need to hold several double-decker buses – a big balloon. We’re looking at a balloon which is possibly 100-200m in diameter. It’s about the same size as Wembley stadium,” said the Oxford engineering lecturer Hugh Hunt in an interview earlier this year. This hose would be just like a garden hose, 20km long and we pump stuff up the pipe.”

Read the whole story from the British newspaper, the Guardian.

For more wacky geoengineering schemes, see my post:

Geoengineering Wacky Schemes to Control Climate 

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2011 at 9:07 am and is filed under Climate change. Tags for this post: aerosols, geoengineering, global warming, volcanoes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.