Water vapour is a potent player in the Earth’s greenhouse effect, serving as a critical amplifier that intensifies the warming of our planet. The greenhouse effect is a natural process that helps maintain Earth’s temperature within a habitable range. Now, scientists have found a new way to cool an overheating earth – by reducing the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere.
Because of human activities like burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, leading to global warming, but in recent years, the surface temperature has been rising. Earth’s surface temperature would be about 59 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius) colder without the greenhouse gases, according to NASA.
The idea of drying the upper atmosphere is the newest addition to what some scientists are calling a last-ditch toolbox to deal with climate change by manipulating the world’s atmosphere or oceans. “This isn’t something that we can even implement right now. Then the ice and cold air rise to where it’s coldest and gets the water vapour to turn to ice and fall, dehydrating the stratosphere.
Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA plan to inject ice high up in the air so that water vapour in the upper atmosphere would get a bit drier and that could counteract a small amount of the human-caused warmth, according to a study published in Science Advances . Because of potential side effects, and is usually mentioned not as an alternative to reducing carbon pollution, but in addition to emission cuts, known as geoengineering, it’s often rejected. Climate scientists plan to send high-tech planes to inject ice particles about 11 miles (17 kilometres) high, just below the stratosphere, where the air slowly rises.
This is about exploring what might be possible in the future and identifying research directions,” said Joshua Schwarz, a NOAA physicist who is lead author of the study.
How Will That Help?
But the study added that it is not much and shouldn’t be used as an alternative to cutting pollution. At its maximum, injecting 2 tons a week, it could conceivably take out enough water vapour to reduce heating a small amount, about five per cent of the overall warming created by carbon from the burning of fossil fuel.
The team is not quite sure about what side effects could occur, and that’s the problem, other scientists said.
