Skip to navigation | Skip to content  Global warming 'rescue'
plan may backfire  polar stratospheric clouds  Injecting sulfur
into the stratosphere would react with chlorine gases at the
poles, triggering chemical reactions that would speed up ozone
depletion, scientists predict (Source: Ross Salawitch)  A
proposal to reverse the effects of global warming by spraying
sulfate particles into the stratosphere could make matters much
worse, climate researchers say.  They say trying to cool the
planet by creating a kind of artificial sun block would delay
the recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole by 30-70 years and
create a new loss of protective ozone layer over the Arctic.
"What our study shows is if you actually put a lot of sulfur
into the atmosphere we get a larger ozone depletion than we had
before," says Dr Simone Tilmes of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, whose research
appears online today in the journal Science.  A number of
climate scientists have proposed sulfur inject