Obama Considering Radical Solutions to Climate Crisis

The president’s new science adviser tells ABC News, “We don’t have the luxury … of ruling any approach off the table” in the fight against global climate change. Geoengineering, once the province of science fiction and climate eccentrics, may now be necessary. One approach involves blasting sulfur into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.

ABC:

[John] Holdren, a 1981 winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, outlined these possible geoengineering options:

— Shooting sulfur particles (like those produced by power plants and volcanoes, for example) into the upper atmosphere, an idea that gained steam when it was proposed by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen in 2006. It would be “basically mimicking the effect of volcanoes in screening out the incoming sunlight,” Holdren said.

— Creating artificial “trees” — giant towers that suck carbon dioxide out of the air and store it.

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