what mitigation and adaptation measures can you recommend for the arctic region to counter the albedo effect?
Answers
This report considers climate intervention strategies for deliberately modifying the energy budget of Earth to produce a cooling designed to compensate for some of the effects of warming associated with greenhouse gas increases. The physical principles for modifying the energy budget to cool the planet are discussed more thoroughly below, but they also appear to all of us in our everyday lives. For example, in the temperate and polar regions, winter temperatures are generally colder than summer temperatures, because those regions receive less sunlight in the winter. The energy principles controlling temperature on a hot day or cool night result from and influence weather on a day-to-day local scale and also operate on climate at seasonal through millennial timescales over the globe. For example, in 1784, Benjamin Franklin speculated that “a constant fog over Europe” arising from volcanic eruptions near Iceland diminished the heating effect of the rays of the sun, and that it was responsible for the abnormally cold winter of 1783-1784 in Europe (Franklin, 1789). Since that time, the connection between cooler temperatures and volcanic eruptions (which release particles into the atmosphere that scatter sunlight back to space) has been well established.
These principles operate everywhere in nature; as understanding of Earth’s physical system has increased, some scientists have begun to consider deliberately making use of these physical principles to counter global warming. Budyko (1974) was the first to suggest that global warming might be countered by burning sulfur on airplane flights high in the atmosphere to make small particles (called aerosols) that, like volcanic emissions, would reflect sunlight. Since that time, a variety of suggestions have been made regarding ways to reduce the amount of sunlight absorbed at the planet’s surface.
Climate intervention ideas have been explored in a variety of ways: (1) through basic theoretical considerations, (2) through the study of climate-relevant features that occur today and have occurred in the past that serve as approximate analogues relevant to the methods being suggested for engineering the climate, and