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Asbestos would be less expensive.Sprinkling diamond dust into the atmosphere could offset almost all the warming caused by humans since the industrial revolution and "buy us some time" with climate change, scientists say.
New research indicates that shooting 5.5 million tons (5 million metric tons) of diamond dust into the stratosphere every year could cool the planet by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) thanks to the gems' reflective properties. This extent of cooling would go a long way to limiting global warming that began in the second half of the 19th century and now amounts to about 2.45 F (1.36 C), according to NASA.
The research contributes to a field of geoengineering that's looking for ways to fight climate change by reducing the amount of energy reaching Earth from the sun.
"It's a very controversial topic," study co-author Sandro Vattioni, a researcher in experimental atmospheric physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), told Live Science. "There are many scientists who want to forbid doing research — even research — on the topic."
To mitigate the sun's warming effect, researchers have long suggested using tiny particles, or aerosols, that reflect the sun's rays back into space. Injecting these aerosols into the stratosphere — the layer of Earth's atmosphere that sits between 7.5 and 31 miles (12 to 50 kilometers) above the planet's surface — means they will stay in the atmosphere for at least one year before falling back to Earth, the researchers say..............
Scientists say sprinkling diamond dust into the sky could offset almost all of climate change so far — but it'll cost $175 trillion
The geoengineering scheme, known as stratospheric aerosol injection, would not be cheap, but scientists say it could buy us some time until we reach net-zero carbon.www.livescience.com
