The prevalence of nonsense associated with the so-called Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) scare seems to engender dubious engineering schemes purportedly intended to “cool off the planet”:

The white haze that hangs over many major cities could become a familiar sight everywhere if the world decides to try geoengineering to create a cooler planet.

Scientists have long suspected that one oft-discussed geoengineering technique — shooting tiny sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere to deflect sunlight — could turn the blue sky white.

. . . Now a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science attempts to determine just how big the effect from man-made geoengineering would be.

Adding enough sulfate to the stratosphere to block 2 percent of the sun’s light would make the sky three to five times brighter, they report in a paper that will be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

— Lauren Morello and Climate Wire, “Geoengineering Could Turn Skies White”, June 1, 2012, reposted on the Scientific American website

The idea is to vitiate the presumed deleterious effects of CO2 (a.k.a. “plant food”), which is the so-called “greenhouse gas” that, according to climate alarmists, will ultimately kill us all:

That is roughly the level of sulfate geoengineering needed to counteract the warming that would result if the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere climbed to 560 parts per million, up from roughly 390 ppm today.

The world might be cooler, but blue skies would become a little less blue, the scientists report. Even remote, sparsely inhabited areas would lie under a whitish sky resembling the haze that now blankets cities like Paris.

And the injection of a continuous stream of sulfate particles would lend sunsets a man-made afterglow. — Ibid.

Busy, self-absorbed people who normally don’t pay attention to nature’s alterations probably wouldn’t give it much thought:

“People who are used to living in New York might not notice a difference, but people in the mountains might notice a difference,” said lead author Ben Kravitz, a postdoctoral researcher at the Carnegie Institution.

“What happens when you put a layer of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, they scatter light. But they don’t scatter light equally. Depending on the size of the particle, they might scatter blue light differently than red light.”

It is that scattering effect that would change the sky’s appearance, he said.

Some people might not notice. Others might not care. But even folks who can’t tell a picture-postcard blue sky from its milky, geoengineered cousin might be able to detect other side effects of using sulfate to cool the planet.

Blocking just 2 percent of sunlight that would normally reach the Earth — the scenario depicted in the study — would probably be enough to create measurable drops in energy created by concentrated solar thermal power systems, which rely on direct sunlight. — Ibid.

The article ends with a discussion of a public opinion survey that seems to indicate “Americans are concerned about the safety and effectiveness of geoengineering”:

“One thing that surprised us a bit is the percentage of people who responded with an opinion,” [the survey’s author] said. “In every case, we gave them the option to say ‘not sure.’ I frankly expected more people to punt on this one.” — Ibid.