Global Cooling?!

While recently cruising the net I came across the latest for global cooling. Here's the pitch: To counter act all the CO2 we've been pumping to the atmosphere to heat up the planet, we're going to pump massive amounts of sulphate into the atmosphere to cool it down.

Does any one else miss the logic here?!

In yet another grand scheme to solve the symptom and not the problem, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen has proposed a band aid solution to global warming: pump massive amounts of sulphate into the stratosphere. Simply put the sulphate particulates will act as tiny mirrors and reflect more of the sun's solar rays back into the space, increasing our planet's reflectance or albedo. By reflecting the sun's rays back into space we'll effectively reduce the amount of energy (heat) reaching the planet. The logic being: efforts to reduce the levels of CO2 production have been pitiful slow (no objection here) so we need a solution to stop the planets temperature rising. Any adverse affects of the sulphate can be dealt with since the sulphate will dissipate within a few years.

Let's review: We are currently pumping huge amounts of one substance into the atmosphere, so while we debate to what extent this substance is affecting our climate we'll pump another substance into the atmosphere with unknown consequences, but wait it's ok we can control the second substance.

Am I the only one that think this is insane?! Ok, I get the rational behind it, I can even see how someone could come up with this idea. But where does anyone on this planet, Nobel Laureate or not, get off with the arrogance to think we could pull this off.

The inconvenient reality here is that this idea will more than likely be implemented, or some variation there of. The inconvenient truth is that we're likely more capability of finding a solution to the symptom in a reasonable amount of time, than pulling together the political clout to clamp down on the problem.