For every generation of environmental problems, there is a group of scientists willing to come up with whacky Rube Goldberg solutions:
Leon Sadler of Alabama University says we could do it [fix an ozone hole] by injecting 5,000 tonnes of ozone into the stratosphere a day for a century. You could, he says, hitch small ozone generators to ordinary commercial aircraft which could spray the ozone into the stratosphere on their normal flights, or you could fly special flights from world ozone production centres or even fire frozen 'bullets' of ozone into the air from special guns.
--Fred Pearce, The Sunday Times (London), Mar. 5, 1989.
Frozen ozone bullets. From special guns.
You might add a scheme from a Scottish scientist to use asteroid dust to block the sun's light and thus reduce the temperature of the earth. Of course this would also reduce the growth of plants, such as food plants.
ReplyDelete"A 1.7 percent reduction is very small and will hardly be noticeable on Earth," said researcher Russell Bewick, a space scientist at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. "I would like to make it clear that I would never suggest geoengineering in place of reducing our carbon emissions," Bewick told LiveScience. Instead, he said, "We can buy time to find a lasting solution to combat Earth’s climate change. The dust cloud is not a permanent cure, but it could offset the effects of climate change for a given time to allow slow-acting measures like carbon capture to take effect."
See the article "Asteroid Dust Could Fight Climate Change on Earth" 9/29/2012 By Charles Choi: http://news.yahoo.com/asteroid-dust-could-fight-climate-change-earth-132248031.html