Steve Milloy
Contributor
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin acted this week to stop a dubious, if not dangerous, idea: blocking sunlight with air pollution to cool the planet.
Make Sunsets is private company in South Dakota that launches balloons containing sulfur dioxide particles into the stratosphere. When the balloons reach the proper altitude they burst and release the particles. In the sky, these particles reflect sunlight so that it doesn’t reach the Earth and contribute to global warming. Or so they claim. (RELATED: STEVE MILLOY: The Interior Department Must Enforce Trump’s Offshore Wind Ban)
Make Sunsets’ business model is to sell “Cooling Credits” for as little as a dollar each. Every Cooling Credit is supposed to counteract the warming caused by one ton of carbon dioxide emissions. Purchasers receive an email notifying them of a successful balloon burst including video of the burst.
There are potential problems with what Make Sunsets is doing and Administrator Zeldin is rightly concerned about at least one of them – the sulfur dioxide particles are a form of conventional air pollution. Their reflectivity is temporary. They will eventually fall to Earth, likely caught up in rain. To maintain or increase the claimed effect, balloons would need to be continually launched. It sounds like a great business model on paper.
But sulfur dioxide particles were a major contributor to the mid-20th century problem called “acid rain,” caused by the burning of high-sulfur coal without smokestack emissions controls. All rain is acidic, but the addition of sulfur dioxide makes it significantly more acidic. During the 1950s, Pittsburgh residents reported stinging sensations on their skin during rainfall. Under certain windless weather conditions called temperature inversions that trap and concentrate air pollution, sulfur dioxide particles were deadly to vulnerable people during a few major 20th century air pollution events.
The acid rain phenomenon in the US was largely fixed by the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. Electric utilities and other coal burning facilities were required either to buy air pollution control equipment or stop burning high-sulfur coal.
On the one hand, Make Sunsets is far from the sort of industrialization that caused acid rain. On the other hand, people can’t just launch potentially dangerous air pollutants into the sky without some sort of guidelines and monitoring.
Could Make Sunsets stop what some call “global warming”? We know from historic volcanic eruptions that reflective particles in the sky can block out sunlight. The 1815 Mt. Tambora eruption is thought to have caused 1816 to be the “year without a summer.” More recently, the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo caused noticeable global cooling.
Last May, a study published in Nature reported that 80 percent of the “global warming spike” of 2023-2024 was attributable to global shipping that had transitioned to cleaner (lower sulfur) diesel oil. The study concluded that fewer reflective emissions allowed more sunlight to reach and warm the Earth.
The notion of altering the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth for purposes of climate control is called “geoengineering.” Skeptics of the notion of catastrophic global warming don’t think it’s necessary, cost-effective or controllable. Global warming activists don’t like geoengineering because it short-circuits their basic goal of advancing the left’s political agenda. And everyone should be concerned about the unknown and untested effects of random efforts to block out the Sun that is necessary for life on Earth. A final caution on attempts to learn how to manage the weather by controlling sunlight is the potential for its weaponization. Imagine if China could control sunlight in the US.
At present, Make Sunsets is a small-time novelty company providing harmless anxiety relief for a relatively small number of gullible climate fretters. But more serious players with deeper pockets and more serious intentions are looking to get into the game, including climate fretter Bill Gates and other left-wing philanthropists. The Biden administration spent $22 million on solar geoengineering projects. It is time to shut down these more serious efforts before they make the Sun go down on all of us.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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They are going to reintroduce a pollutant we have been at pains to eliminate for decades – in case you didn’t get it H2SO4 is Sulphuric Acid – they want to reintroduce acid rain – which you may remember from the 70’s was going to lead us into an ice age, destroy our forests and agriculture and lead to the downfall of man.
This is a very bad idea. How soon we forget.
SO2 pollution production peaked at about 55MT in 1978 and is now down to about 30MT and falling as nations wisely keep on reducing this pollutant (that’s why “green” diesel is advertised as being low Sulphur 50ppm, 20ppm or even 2ppm – the refineries have to extract it and coal fired power stations have to use scrubbers to remove it etc. etc.).
My point is that Sulphuric acid is billions of times more potent than weak carbonic acid and it all ultimately falls into or drains into the sea.
(pH is a measure of positive Hydrogen ions and is actually not a good indicator of the overall “strength” of an acid or alkali – “strength” is generally considered via its Ka rating (dissociation constant).
Ka equivalent rating: Sulphuric Acid H2SO4 is 1.0 x 10^3 which is 2.27 Billion times stronger than Carbonic Acid CO32- is 4.4 x 10^-7 (which is quite pleasant to drink – soda water – common to all fizzy drinks – is as “bad” as it gets).
So H2SO4 acid rain represents a threat 2.2 billion times worse than man’s CO2 production and the seas soak it up without so much as a blip in its pH.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_dissociation_constant
In 2021 Bill Gates launched a project to introduce chalk dust into the atmosphere to test if “solar dimming” was possible – I call that pollution.
They make geoengineering sound like a good plan – it’s not – it’s colossally stupid – dimming the sun is a very bad idea.
About the time we started actively scrubbing SO2 from our output is also when temperatures began rising from “Man Made Global Warming”
From 50 MT to 30 MT are both relatively ZERO SO2 in the atmosphere, not great if you live a couple of miles downwind of the smokestack, which is why such emitters now need scrubbers and such….
MT gained traction as a scary unit of measure when it was the default way to describe size of a nuclear blast – how dumb is that, “clarifying” an unrelatable quantity by inaccurately translating it into a second unrelatable quantity. Like I know the difference between 1 kiloton on TNT and 1 gigaton of TNT.
Al Gore used to scale storm energy by Hiroshima bomb energy.
I have nothing constructive to add, just complaining.
Good point. The rate of temperature rise from 1900 to 1940 is very similar to the rate from the late 1970s to the present and no-one has provided a scientifically rigorous explanation of why the 2 are different given that the IPCC has stated many times that the prior to 1950 human CO2 emissions were insufficient to cause significant warming. Perhaps most of the warming in the last 120 years has been natural, slowed down by SO2. I am sure that I am wrong because the yet to be validated climate models couldn’t possibly be wrong.
Unintended consequences of “geo-engineering” have not been addressed, like unintended consequences of massive solar voltaic arrays and wind turbine generators sprouting up like weeds.
We could achieve the same result by bypassing the SO2 scrubbers on coal power plants. It would actually save money with no increase in equipment costs!
However, it would also be illegal.
Illegal becomes legal with an act of Congress.
Irresponsible might be a better choice as we know the negative biological impacts.
Geo engineering likely shouldn’t be attempted due to the law of unintended consequences.
Blocking the sun might look good at the start but our crops depend on an unhindered sun and as much CO2 as plants can absorb. Solar Panels perform best from 10am – 2pm under maximum sun. Blocking some sunlight will also negatively affect their performance. The best form of geo engineering would be increasing albedo. Let the maximum amount of solar reach crops and useless panels and reflect a portion back to space from the surface.
Bastiat had something to say about this …
http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html
Well, they did propose that I believe. Let’s paint all our roofs white! Simples!
And the roads and we all drive white cars.
Politicians need to ban themselves from science.
The good news is the U.S. government is opposed to such an idea as dimming the sunlight.
The bad news is the UK government is promoting the idea.
Any serious sun-dimming project would be a cause for war among nations, imo.
In the news today.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14638689/Experiments-dim-SUN-curb-global-warming.html
What could possibly go wrong!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer
Howzabout this for an idea, people who emit CO2 calculate how much extra heat that CO2 absorbs….and are required by the principle of Net Zero to put mirrors on their roofs that reflect that same amount of incoming sunlight back into outer space….just a thought….probably not enough caffeine yet this AM….
Since we all exhale CO2, we should all wear mirrored hats.
Tom,
could we have possibly the very worst government ever with the current L:abour one and we have had some seriously bad governments?
Yes, I worry about the UK leadership. They all seem to be divorced from reality and are ignoring all the warning signs telling them Net Zero is a failed exercise.
They may wake up when the economy goes broke, but it’s too late by then..
Their goal is failure. Failure of Western Civilization.
Any activity that crosses borders with a negative impact usually results in a correction mandated by military action.
If you can’t survive without messing around with something as necessary for life as the sun, maybe you should consider that you weren’t intended to.
The Climate Syndicate has been using scare tactics to emotionalize people into submission.
I submit for consideration that the same tactics be employed to counter that evil.
I suggest all of these policies and regulations that are wreaking havoc on peoples lives be presented as
Economic SLAVERY.
“You will have nothing and you will be happy” is nothing less than that.
Maybe before trying to cool the planet, Mr Gates and others should ask the rest of the world how they feel about this? Who knows, some may want it warmer. Some may want it the way it is. Some may not care either way but think God does not want humans messing with it.
Trying to get agreement would at least take up a lot the energy of the maniacs, and provide the rest of us with years, decades maybe, of harmless entertainment.
And something is needed to replace the COPs. Yes, not a bad idea.
Good point. No matter what the climate does, or is likely to do–warms, cools, stays the same–it will be bad for some, good for others, and of little notice for most. Playing Mickey Mouse in a sorcerer’s robe will likely have no net positive outcome and could be a disaster.
We have an analogy in “hail suppression”. Whole farming regions get “sold” on weather modification programs. After a few years of paying fees some of the farmers have bachelors and masters degrees in other fields….notice that the fees are more costly than insurance plus the stats of the program are conflicting depending on who does the cherry picking….the program ends up halted…a while later the insurance companies, having more recently received the new enhanced sales pitch, and seeing the benefit of fee increases to cover the new costs, start paying for the program which means the farmers pay for it on their insurance….stats are still diverse depending on who is doing the cherry picking…it hard to beat these guys with their “for-the-greater-good-just-pay-us.”sales pitch with impressive color graphics….geoclimate is going to be the same for taxpayers.
Started strong by acknowledging that change usually has losers AND winners.
e.g. Somebody won COVID…. maybe Amazon.com
Fauci seems to have done quite well out of it, to be sure.
“At present, Make Sunsets is a small-time novelty company providing harmless anxiety relief for a relatively small number of gullible climate fretters.”
No one likes to be thought “gullible.” But Milloy is not wrong here. Skeptics of climate alarm should likewise be careful not to be taken in with unsound claims. There is a large body of well-justified material out there to keep us grounded. Just a thought.
Not to mention all those damned burst balloons littering the ground. Acid rain, latex litter, dead eagles and whales, cut-down forests releasing their carbon so unrecyclable turbines and solar pabels can be buried 15 years later, full employment for child slave labor mining the materials for the replacements … this is modern environmentalism?
Bingo! How far we have come…or have we?
“Sceptical” won’t cut it, stop this mega BS right in it’s tracks. What could possibly go wrong tinkering with the sun or “climate” in general? Well the short answer is: EVERYTHING.
…so don’t even try, nor beg for funding…except for a length of rope and a riggedy stool.
Solar geoengineering is more than terrible idea, for it would ruin the ability to track natural changes in the upper atmosphere caused by volcanoes, major wildfire smoke, and other natural aerosols. Thanks to twilight photometry, since 2013 I have been measuring aerosol layer profiles from 2 km to more than 100 km (meteor smoke and cosmic dust), Geoengineering would contaminate the lower stratosphere and reduce returns from higher up. Forrest M. Mims III
Correct. Now translate that into a simple meme that can be used to generate alarmist headlines.
Fight fire with fire.
So, kinda like selling snake oil. If the snake oil might have some fentanyl and meth in it.
“Last May, a study published in Nature reported that 80 percent of the “global warming spike” of 2023-2024 was attributable to global shipping that had transitioned to cleaner (lower sulfur) diesel oil.”
Given how rapid (steep) that temperature jump was, I seriously doubt that a change in cleaner shipping oil had bupkis to do with it. A jump that large and sudden was more likely due to ENSO and HT.
There would have had to be shipping smoke trails everywhere covering much of the sky…sailors collapsing on deck due to SO2 inhalation…to do what the study claims….pure junk….the sulphur regs were an attempt to reduce SO2 levels in busy harbors…and like catalytic converters on cars, those regs mostly worked and mostly prevented smog in busy ports. Thinking it affected the other 99.3 % non industrialized portion of the planet is just the White Queen believing one of her six impossible things before breakfast.
Did they publish any results? I mean measurements.
Story tip.
Miliband is set to approve changes under which households in the South would pay more for electricity than those in Scotland and the North. The Telegraph has the story.
I wonder what the South thinks about Miliband discriminating against them?
Queue Bartholemu and the Oobleck.
“All rain is acidic.”
No it’s not.
Pure water at equilibrium with atmospheric CO2 has a pH of 5.5, so acidic.
Yes it is.
Actually it is, but only slightly.
Not enough to worry about until someone does something stupid.
Old tombstones and grave markers slowly-ever so slowly,true-dissolve under the rainfall. Sometimes they become nearly impossible to read.
Sure, caves don’t exist 🙂
Even rivers when they reach the sea are often somewhat below pH7..
The massive buffering of calciferous debris and limestone etc keeps the oceans around pH 8.1
If NASA weren’t paying so many people to write weather forecasts for 100 years after I die, maybe they could afford a few guys to design a super thin foil space shield deployable from rockets.
They have.
The problem is, it gets pushed by solar wind.
Anchoring it is nigh on impossible.
Seems ironic. For years we have been told by the experts that “its all to do with CO2 – nothing to do with the big fusion fire ball in the sky”
seems sunshine is important after all…
The only actual climate dangers are global cooling and CO2 starvation. To be trying to cool the planet on the theory that CO2 is causing too much warming is doubly perverse.
Odd isn’t it….
First they fight like heck to get sulphur removed from ship fuel.. making shipping a bit more expensive…
Now they want to put that sulphur back in the atmosphere.
Very nice Steve, couldn’t agree more.
This is nuts – Frankenstein science.
They are admitting that the reduction of air pollution caused the purported warming and not CO2. The scam continues.
Proof of concept of geoengineering has already been successfully studied and acted on in high sulphur burning coal consuming countries such as UK and USA. Australia with its perfectly clean coals missed out on the experience. Two things happened. With increasing SO2 pollution temperatures fell. Once the air had been cleaned the temperatures returned to rising naturally post the Little Ice Age. And yes, we still have another 2.5C to go until we reach the top of the normal band that has been in operation for the last 4,000 years if not before (there are ample proxies for this estimate including actual temperature data from the PRC).
You can’t make this up.
What contributes to the lunacy: Apparently they realize that SO2 cooled Earth, so the elimination of this pollutant contributed to the slight warming trend observed in past decades. But this is denied and just blamed on CO2.