As we get into the dog-days of summer, my thoughts turn to hot reads to go with the hot sultry days of late summer. On that front, Termination Shock by Neil Stephenson delivers in spades. It is an exciting read rich in conspiracies and thrilling tales. The book is set in the near future, where climate change has come to a point where life in Texas is barely livable. An entrepreneur develops a way to deliver industrial quantities of Sulphur into the stratosphere, thereby cooling the planet, but things are not quite that simple.
In the book, T. R. Schmidt, Ph.D. a gas station and restaurant magnate (I love the irony there), develops a way to send Sulphur laden artillery-shells to the stratosphere. This causes local cooling, but also other effects, such as on the South-East Asian Monsoon, which cause heightened geopolitical tensions drawing in a very interesting cast of characters, from Dutch royalty to Indian martial arts experts and more.
I really liked it both for the thrilling tale and also the science. There is a growing body of literature suggesting that pumping sulphur into the atmosphere has a cooling effect. For example the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines is thought to have released 17 mega tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere causing a 0.5 C cooling over a period of two years from 1991 to 1993.
What is lacking, is discussion on how Sulphur departs the atmosphere, this can happen for example via Acid rain, which caused all manner of havoc when coal plants were more popular than they are now. Like volcanoes, coal plants are large sulphur emitters, and acid rain was one of the main environmental catastrophes in the late 20th century, that we successfully stopped. A large scale sulphur stratospheric aerosol injection project, would undoubtedly cause a similar effect, smaller perhaps, but something is bound to happen.
Electric car adventures 