Explore Challenges
- Countryside in Crisis?
- The Energy Water Food Stress Nexus
- Unsustainable Fishing
- Keeping pace with a digital revolution
- Global health in the 21st Century
- Adapting to an urban future
- Educating for tomorrow
- Digital technology in Africa
- Persistent poverty in Britain
- Can the UK ever be sustainable?
- Plastic pollution in the oceans
- Natural disasters: how to improve?
- Not In My Back Yard
- Digital Divide in the UK?
- Importing goods, exporting drought?
- Britain’s ageing population
- Engineering our climate
- The future shape of Capitalism
- Migration: skills and the job market
- Razing the Rainforest
- London under water
- Concreting the countryside
- Future of low carbon energy
- Africa in the 21st Century
Sulphur screens
What is a sulphur screen?
It is the idea of adding a screen of sulphur particles at high altitudes in the stratosphere. These particles would help to partially reflect the Sun's radiationback into space.
The sulphur shield would aim to recreate the natural process that occurs during volcanic eruptions.
10m tonnes
The amount of sulphur that was ejected into the atmosphere in 1991 from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines
0.6°C
The drop in recorded temperature across the Earth for two years after Pinatubo eruption
1995
The year Professor Paul Crutzen won the Nobel Prize for helping to explain how the ozone layer is formed and depleted.
Partly due to his work, world governments took action on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), used in fridges and aerosols, that were thinning the ozone's presence over Antarctica.
Professor Paul Crutzen's advocates the idea of a sulphur shield solution. It could involve hundreds of rockets filled with sulphur being launched into the upper stratosphere. Or distributed from aircraft.
Consequences?
The presense of sulphur in the lower atmosphere from the industrial revolution has had harmful effects.
In the 1950s sulphur in the atmosphere was resulting in thousands of people dying from respiratory diseases.
High amounts of sulphur in the atmosphere can also cause acid rain and has had devastating effects on both plants and animals.
Professor Crutzen believes that in the next 30 years global warming may reache such a critical level that a radical strategy will be needed.
A sulphur shield solution does not tackle the problem of the ever-increasing levels of CO2 being emitted.
