Refreezing Earth's Poles: Feasible and Cheap, New Study Finds (phys.org) 177
"The poles are warming several times faster than the global average," Phys.org reminds us, "causing record smashing heatwaves that were reported earlier this year in both the Arctic and Antarctic. Melting ice and collapsing glaciers at high latitudes would accelerate sea level rise around the planet.
"Fortunately, refreezing the poles by reducing incoming sunlight would be both feasible and remarkably cheap, according to new research published Friday in Environmental Research Communications." Scientists laid out a possible future program whereby high-flying jets would spray microscopic aerosol particles into the atmosphere at latitudes of 60 degrees north and south — roughly Anchorage and the southern tip of Patagonia. If injected at a height of 43,000 feet (above airliner cruising altitudes), these aerosols would slowly drift poleward, slightly shading the surface beneath. "There is widespread and sensible trepidation about deploying aerosols to cool the planet," notes lead author Wake Smith, "but if the risk/benefit equation were to pay off anywhere, it would be at the poles."
Particle injections would be performed seasonally in the long days of the local spring and early summer. The same fleet of jets could service both hemispheres, ferrying to the opposite pole with the change of seasons.
newly designed high-altitude tankers would prove much more efficient. A fleet of roughly 125 such tankers could loft a payload sufficient to cool the regions poleward of 60 degreesN/S by 2 degreesC per year, which would return them close to their pre-industrial average temperatures. Costs are estimated at $11 billion annually — less than one-third the cost of cooling the entire planet by the same 2 degreesC magnitude and a tiny fraction of the cost of reaching net zero emissions.
Smith calls the idea "game-changing" (while also warning it's "not a substitute for decarbonization").
"Fortunately, refreezing the poles by reducing incoming sunlight would be both feasible and remarkably cheap, according to new research published Friday in Environmental Research Communications." Scientists laid out a possible future program whereby high-flying jets would spray microscopic aerosol particles into the atmosphere at latitudes of 60 degrees north and south — roughly Anchorage and the southern tip of Patagonia. If injected at a height of 43,000 feet (above airliner cruising altitudes), these aerosols would slowly drift poleward, slightly shading the surface beneath. "There is widespread and sensible trepidation about deploying aerosols to cool the planet," notes lead author Wake Smith, "but if the risk/benefit equation were to pay off anywhere, it would be at the poles."
Particle injections would be performed seasonally in the long days of the local spring and early summer. The same fleet of jets could service both hemispheres, ferrying to the opposite pole with the change of seasons.
newly designed high-altitude tankers would prove much more efficient. A fleet of roughly 125 such tankers could loft a payload sufficient to cool the regions poleward of 60 degreesN/S by 2 degreesC per year, which would return them close to their pre-industrial average temperatures. Costs are estimated at $11 billion annually — less than one-third the cost of cooling the entire planet by the same 2 degreesC magnitude and a tiny fraction of the cost of reaching net zero emissions.
Smith calls the idea "game-changing" (while also warning it's "not a substitute for decarbonization").
Treating symptoms? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not sure how well that's going to work.
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Maybe, maybe not. Reality though is a fleet of >100 high altitude tankers would take about 20 years to deploy from approval,
What I am curious about is the impact of an even greater temperature differential between the poles and equator.
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A greater temperature differential means a faster jet stream. The opposite of what we've been having recently. A faster jet stream will mean less intense and shorter heat waves and less flooding, because weather patterns will be less likely to get stuck in one location. Just as a slower jet stream has meant the opposite.
This doesn't mean I think it's a good idea. It MIGHT be. It's more a desperation move than a reasonable plan, but it might be one of the pieces needed. OTOH, it's difficult to be certa
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Unfortunately, we've ignored reasonable plans for about 40 years now, so it's only natural that desperation moves are going to start being the only moves left.
Re:Treating symptoms? (Score:5, Informative)
Arctic warming is a symptom but also a major cause of AGW as GHGs are released from the permafrost. If we continue to do nothing, it may soon be the biggest cause. We ignore it at our peril.
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It typically backfires. But it also allows giving the appearance of "doing something" and politicians that have still not understood how dire the situation is (or are evil fucks that only care about themselves) love that.
Re:Treating symptoms? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like taking antipyretic medication to faster reduce a fever while an antibiotic treats the fever cause.
As stated in the summary, it's not a substitute for decarbonization, but it can buy the world some time do to such decarbonization in an less hasteful way.
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It better work, because there is no way we'll stop releasing CO2 into the atmosphere before it hits the crucial 350 ppm level [arxiv.org].
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That paper is about reducing atmospheric CO2 to reach that level. It's currently somewhere around 420ppm.
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Oh no! According to that paper, we're screwed!
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According to we're currently at 416 ppm [www.co2.earth] with an annual change of +2.8ppm, as measured by NOAA at the Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii.
This graph [noaa.gov] should show you all you need to know about the going trends, measured from several locations.
Short version: without meaningful change, and right now, there's a good lot of folks that are going to be supremely fucked by nature in the coming years.
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You can't interpret things that statically. The configuration of the continents has changed since the time that study refers to, so the critical concentration is probably different. I can't say whether it would be higher or lower, but different, anyway.
One of the crucial components here is the Bering Strait. That limits/allows the flow of currents from the Pacific into the Arctic ocean. There are others on the side near Norway, Iceland, and Greenland, but the Bering Strait is narrow enough that we could
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LOL that is a clear example of cognitive bias you displayed there. What did you do? "I disagree with this scientist, so I must find a way the scientist is wrong." What do scientists do? They say, "I agree with that scientist so I must find a way that I am wrong."
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Geoengineering is absolutely a last, not first, resort plan. Something to do if we find ourselves looking at a full blown siberian meltoff feedback blowout (Which has the potential of turning the 2-4 degree celcius warming we are already likely to get into a 10 degree celcius existance-threatening super-catastrophe, it almost sterilized the planet last time it happened) , if the greenland sheet starts disintegrating or if that giant shelf in the antarctic starts melting.
We just don't know what the side eff
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Why not space based photovoltaics instead? (Score:2)
We could capture and beam the energy somewhere else. Even better if it doesn't head back to the earth to heat up more stuff. Like if it was used to process materials in space (solar furnace?) or was stored somehow.
Re:Why not space based photovoltaics instead? (Score:4, Informative)
Enough space-based photovoltaics to make a difference would cost far more than the Gross-World-Product.
Also, there is no possible orbit where PV satellites would only cool the polar regions.
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We could put a few million square kilometers of PV panels at Lagrange Point L1.
Of course, L1 would be even more insanely expensive than LEO.
But hey, if you are going to imagine impossible things that will never happen, why not go big?
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There are ways around that launch problem that would be viable if we were launching that much stuff. (I'm thinking of a ground laser powered steam rocket.)
But there's no way around the fact that a sunshade would need to be thinner than a mono-molecular film, or too massive to believe, if it were going to have any measurable effect from L1.
I'm all in favor of space industrialization, but this sure isn't the way to justify it.
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You need to think a bit about the size of the mirror/lens/whaever you're thinking of using. Imagine that you could just hold it fixed at whatever distance you choose from the earth, and then calculate how big the diversion apparatus would need to be to intercept the appropriate amount of sunlight. I think even this "well, you're assuming the impossible" simulation will demonstrate to you that this approach won't work.
Say you have a disk 100 miles in diameter that you're holding at a fixed distance between
What Could Go Wrong? (Score:3, Funny)
All we need is humans trying to fix their own problems by using a magic 8-ball.
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Snowpiercer
Animatrix: how could this possibly go wrong? (Score:3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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$11 billion here, $11 billion there (Score:2)
Pretty soon you're talking about some REAL money.
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The Federal government spends $11B every 19 hours.
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Yep, and the US debt is now more than $30 trillion, or $92,000 for every man, woman, and child in America.
https://www.pgpf.org/national-... [pgpf.org]
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And it doesn't matter!
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Here are a few reasons why it does matter.
https://seekingalpha.com/artic... [seekingalpha.com]
Maybe (Score:2)
It depends on why the poles are heating so rapidly. Is it due to some problem with the solar radiation balance at the poles which we don't understand yet that cause the poles to warm faster? Or is it due to more energy in weather systems carrying heat from lower latitudes to the poles. Introducing aerosols at the poles _might_ fix the first case. Not so much the second. "Might" because we don't have a good explanation for rapid polar heating other than the weather system thing.
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And if something goes wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there a plan to remove those aerosols from the atmosphere if necessary?
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Obviously not. All this geoengineering stuff is exceptionally risky.
Re: And if something goes wrong? (Score:2)
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly...
Re:And if something goes wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
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Then what happens when they die? Acid rain?
If sulphur-based, acid rain would certainly be possible.
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I'd be worried about soot landing on the ice and decreasing albedo, thereby increasing melting. The tech that we have for creating persistent clouds involves basically a retarded afterburner.
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Hey! I have seen this one before (Score:2)
Useful bandaid (Score:5, Insightful)
Slowing Earth's warming by things like this helps reduce the feedback loops (warming tundra releases carbon, warming speeds up, etc).
So, given the depth of the hole we are in, it is probably a good idea.
Not so helpful for things that depend more directly on carbon content, like ocean acidification I just hope governments (etc) don't think these sorts of bandaids solve the whole problem. If they think that, they might not put in the other efforts we'll still need.
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So, given the depth of the hole we are in, it is probably a good idea.
Remember when banning bad hairspray supposedly fixed the ozone layer?
I agree with your concerns regarding this blatant bandaid, but I'm sure Greed will try and convince us that the problem is somehow solved so they can get back to their regularly scheduled plundering of the planet.
MORONS COULDNT STOP A PANDEMIC..... (Score:2)
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It is about buying time. Over here, we held off the pandemic for two years until everyone was vaccinated (except a few idiots). Good result.
So put down the "moran" sign.
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It is about buying time. Over here, we held off the pandemic for two years until everyone was vaccinated (except a few idiots). Good result.
So put down the "moran" sign.
WOW! You can use the internet to try and slide in a "I know you...." Buy a mitt, catch a clue.
Buying TIME is all HUMANS know how to do, instead of actually solving the problem beyond their lazy.
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Yet they are going to convince the world to repopulate the ice caps. SURE THING!
The difference is, to stop a pandemic you have to convince just about everyone. To implement measures being discussed to combat AGW, you only have to convince the rich people. That's an obnoxiously smaller percentage of the global population.
Neal Stephenson "Termination Shock" (Score:3)
Neal's book doesn't target the poles. But otherwise this is covered in detail in Neal's book.
Conservative and Environmentalist (Score:2)
Conservative and Environmentalist go together like cheese and wine
What do we want? Gradual change.
When do we want it? In due course
Czar Vlad (Score:3)
is not only going to freeze the Poles, he's going to freeze the Germans too.
By cutting off the fuel for this winter
Cheap per year, not overall unless you decarbonize (Score:4, Insightful)
PREVENTING *all* excess warming by decarbonization would cost a few trillion dollars spread over the next couple of decades and is pretty much finished once you've done that requiring no further 'excess' investment to maintain.
MITIGATING (only) runaway arctic warming by this method would cost at least $11 billion dollars a year - for the next several thousand years (longer than the entire history of 'modern civilization') - costing (order of) 100 trillion dollars net. And requires stable, motivated, and financially capable governments do it that entire time because if you stop you jump from '0' to '100' in less than a decade. I note NO large government in the world has existed for more than a few centuries at this point.
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We need to do both.
Unintended Consequences (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure you can cool the poles, but you're also cutting out some of the sunlight, and that is the energy input into every ecosystem on the planet, that's not near a deep ocean hydrothermal vent.
And it's already pretty tricky to eke out an existence near the poles.
Have to ask ... (Score:3)
How much extra CO2 will that fleet of 125 tankers add to the atmosphere in the Arctic zones and contribute to the problem they are supposed to help with?
The real danger of this kind of geo-engineering is that it can end up messing with the Earths natural response to the increased temperatures. The more Humanity tries to control things the more we might end up causing the fluctuation to become even more extreme eventually causing the system to completely collapse.
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That issue was addressed in the study.
"Fallen Angels" (Score:3)
by Dr. Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, and Michael Flynn
Need I say more?
{^_^}
Futurama (Score:2)
[Nixon's head]... thus solving the problem once and for all!
[tiny girl] ... but ...
[Nixon's head] ONCE AND FOR ALL!
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Not sure if parent should be modded insightful, informative or funny.
Agent K.: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."
To that, you can add "politicians are even dumber than people because they can't be objective about anything that may negatively affect their career in any way."
I'm curious how that would work (Score:2)
Ignorance and stupidity (Score:3)
While the poles are cold, the polar seas are teeming with life - a food chain, where the bottom of the food chain consists of plankton that depend on sunlight.
Blocking the sunlight in summer months would be detrimental to polar life.
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Blocking the sunlight in summer months would be detrimental to polar life.
I don't think the sky will actually go dark. As far as I know, the aerosols reflect infrared, but let through visible light, so life should go on as normal, while reducing the temperature. With volcanic eruptions, which also cause a cooling effect, a great deal more than SO2 goes into the atmosphere, e.g. smoke and dust, and the sky does go dark, so killing plant life if it lasts too long.
The real threat? Hare-brained schemes ... (Score:2)
... to address climate change. You can convince frightened people to do anything. Having spent decades fomenting the fear of climate change the profiteers and 'snake-oil' peddlers are poised to make a tidy profit. What more damage will be done implementing bizarre and ill-informed (or plain stupid) "solutions" to the problem of climate change? What if people just accepted that just as climate change didn't happen overnight neither will its solution. And by the way, the long term solution is to stop our
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:2)
We finally know what they used... (Score:2)
...to create the worlds in Snow Piercer and The Matrix!
(Amazing no one else has mentioned this?!?)
Snowpiercer, The Matrix.... (Score:2)
I have seen this movie before?
The countries near the poles will not want this (Score:2)
This is recipe for a war.
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In the next episode: will Canada team up with Alaska and Vermont to fight the United States of Mexico? Tune in next week for the conclusion!
Yes, we must terraform Terra, immediately! (Score:2)
Nothing could possibly go wrong. Our what-if models are provably, highly accurate and they are all in complete agreement with one other. There are no doubts about The Science, here. We ARE Science. We have proved our ability to predict climate change and its impacts for many decades now, and all of our predictions have come true, exactly when we said they would. The technical solution we are proposing has been thoroughly and exhaustively tested and we know it will work exactly as intended. The people who wi
Facing a global disaster (Score:2)
What could possibly go wrong?
Re:How stupid do they think the audience is? (Score:5, Informative)
It may be far cheaper than the alternative. The Arctic is warming much faster than other regions, and the permafrost contains trillions of tonnes of sequestered CO2 and methane that could warm the earth far more than all other emissions combined.
We may have to take drastic action to prevent a feedback loop of warming causing CO2 and CH4 release, which causes more warming, which causes more GHG release ...
It may already be too late to prevent a runaway loop with only fossil fuel use reductions (and we aren't even doing that).
Re: How stupid do they think the audience is? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: How stupid do they think the audience is? (Score:2)
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They got better. Temporarily (Score:5, Interesting)
So when shipping slowed during covid. Why didn't things get better Luckyo?
If you've been paying attention to the analysis by climatologist of the lockdowns' climate impact:
things DID ACTUALLY get a bit better. For a while.
Except that after a couple of months, lockdowns were lifted and things went back to normal.
To have any chance of reversing the current global warning, we would need to keep our CO2 emissions at lockdown-level for several years .
(e.g.: we would need to entirely switch our Society to never use air transport within area that could have rail connections (on the same continent. e.g. Europe) and never traval (even to work) for things that could be done online (increase work-from-home and video-conference as much as technically possible) )
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We may have to take drastic action to prevent a feedback loop of warming causing CO2 and CH4 release, which causes more warming, which causes more GHG release ...
Just like the last time. Oh, wait...
What last time?
Re:How stupid do they think the audience is? (Score:5, Informative)
Like.. Different things in the atmosphere absorb and reflect different wavelengths of light, therefore they have different effects? In principle this is pretty basic stuff. For example, it's well known that certain aerosols from volcanic eruptions have a cooling effect on climate. Those ones also tend to be bad for the ozone layer, but presumably this project would use a substance designed not to do anything undesirable.
I am really surprised by the low price tag for the magnitude of the effect. Even if they're off by an order of magnitude, it'd still be a bargain. Certainly worth exploring.
Price uncertainty [Re:How stupid do they think...] (Score:4, Interesting)
... I am really surprised by the low price tag for the magnitude of the effect.
I don't believe price tags on such speculative ventures.
Even if they're off by an order of magnitude,
I don't even believe order of magnitude of price tags.
Among other things, aerosols in the atmosphere have to be frequently refreshed. (For what it's worth, though, let me note that Neil Stephenson's most recent novel, Termination Shock, is about exactly this: atmospheric aerosols used as a band-aid against global warming.)
I do believe the final phrase of the summary: ""it's not a substitute for decarbonization".
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The problem is, it's very hard to be sure that they've properly modeled all the effects of this that weren't what they were after. I'd call them "side effects", but occasionally one of them will turn out the be the main effect. There are reasons that geoengineering is viewed with fear and trepidation. And it's not even certain that this would solve the problem. Warming oceans washing up from below the ice is one of the major causes of melting, and that ocean got warm somewhere else.
Re:How stupid do they think the audience is? (Score:5, Informative)
How do they explain these aerosols not holding in the infrared heat just as CO2 would
CO2 is transparent to visible light and high-frequency infrared (just below visible range and plentiful in sunlight), but opaque to low-frequency infrared (heat emitted by the earth).
Sulfur dioxide aerosols are the opposite.
This isn't just theory. Global cooling due to SO2 is common after major volcanic eruptions. The cooling effect has caused crop failures and famines. It also causes plague outbreaks for reasons that are not well understood. The Plague of Justinian [wikipedia.org] and the Black Death were both preceded by major eruptions and a global drop in temperatures.
Re:How stupid do they think the audience is? (Score:4, Informative)
Another thing to keep in mind is that infrared radiation from the Earth is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. The infrared reradiation is a lot less at the poles because they are colder than lower latitude.
(Yep. Paradoxical as it seems, the greenhouse effect mostly comes from lower latitudes, although the effect is worst at higher latitudes.)
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Wikipedia has a good page on the atmospheric window.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Aerosols are much larger than the molecules in the air and have a larger scattering effect on visible light. This allows them to reflect the light from the sun. This scattering effect is significantly reduced for the outgoing infrared given the larger wavelength. This can be seen in the first graphic on the Wikipedia page.
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This might come as a galloping shock to you, but just like Oxygen isn't as potent of a greenhouse gas as Methane is, the aerosol they are talking about releasing would have different physical properties than some other gas. I'm guessing it's not going to be Aqua-net they're hosing out the back of their airplanes, but rather a compound that is optimized to the task at hand.
Seems that would be super obvious, but to each their own.
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By definition that means it is not fast.
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It crosses my mind that this is how the war between the machines and the humans began in "The Matrix."
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Stupidity.
This solution accrues no social, military or economic power to anyone in the climate change fight.
That is the long and short of it.
Re:testing my hearing (Score:5, Informative)
Not the same aerosols.
The ozone layer was reduced by fluorocarbons.
TFA doesn't say, but most proposals to reflect sunlight use sulfur compounds.
Stratospheric sulfur aerosols [wikipedia.org]
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Aha, thank you. That is all I needed clarified.
All right then, make it so.
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Sulphur compounds, eh? And next year's crisis (oh my God!, give me money!) will be acid rain.
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Sulphur compounds, eh? And next year's crisis (oh my God!, give me money!) will be acid rain.
The amount of sulfur released would be far too small to make a measurable difference.
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Or you could get a badass cyberhand that can crush bricks or carbon legs that let you run faster that an un-augmented person. Perhaps an engineered liver that filters sugars and alcohol. We're almost there. You can already borrow a liver from someone else, a heart from something else.
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Have you ever used a snow globe? You shake it and all the sparkly particles just swoosh around in there, going round and round, never leaving the globe.
The Earth and its atmosphere are also round, so the cloud particles would indeed blow all over the globe, making the sky all pretty and shit.
That's basic science!
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No we did not. One or two years is nowhere near long term, in fact it was barely short term, so whatever effects we saw was probably not enough to predict for the medium and long terms.