This company wants to cool the planet one balloon at a time. Some scientists aren't buying it | CBC Radio LoadedLuke Iseman and Andrew Song have a plan to cool the planet, inspired by a science fiction novel, using balloons full of heat-reflecting sulfur dioxide launched into the Earth's stratosphere. But some scientists aren't buying it.
In return, the customer receives what the company has dubbed "cooling credits," which Iseman says indicates the customer is doing a small part to help cool the planet. It introduced Iseman to the real-life story of Mount Pinatubo, a volcanic eruption in the Philippines in 1991. That eruption released sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, cooling the Earth by half a degree Celsius for about two years.could prevent hundreds of thousands of heat-related deaths a year.
The company claims to speak regularly with leading scientists in the field, but declined to share any names. Make Sunsets balloons contain a little over a kilogram, meaning you'd need a billion of those launches every year to hit that target. Shuchi Talati, founder and executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, says Iseman is right to an extent. Incidents like the eruption of Mount Pinatubo have shown that sulfur can help lower Earth's temperature.
"If you become reliant on solar geoengineering to keep the earth habitable, you're really committing all future generations to doing this essentially forever. And if they ever stop, then the Earth will heat up very rapidly," said Pierrehumbert.