We Do Owe Ourselves an Oxygen Airlift Program

A longstanding environmental remediation tradition for soil, air and water contamination is the use of oxygen or oxidation enhancement with hydrogen peroxide to restore harmony by making compounds inert and harmless to their surroundings. This principle applies to the atmosphere as it stands now, as well. Countless refrigerant gases and reactive greenhouse gases such as methane are set to increase in concentration at the layer of the lower stratosphere, where as of 2017, ozone is depleted the most, while the upper stratosphere at 25 Km and above is recovering. While we emit more CO2 and methane, and increase warming at an accelerated rate with these contaminants, we all owe ourselves a chance to remove some of these man made culprits and we can share the cost globally in a fair way

Each of is who has benefited from years of refrigeration, air conditioning and fossil fuels can bear some of the cost to cool us down with an oxygen airlift and then bigger “polluters” in developed economies can shoulder some, and then newer polluters could make up the difference a “pay as we pollute” scheme so the past actions get us started and the present maintains our ability to oxygenate.

Scientists know how to attribute emissions to emitters, but not how to have them pay for cleanup, so I am going to provide a provisional framework for cost sharing. We deserve to reverse some of the global warming we are experiencing in order to save lives, property, and economies, as we shift off of fossil fuels and reduce all emissions.

In my blog I outline and reference why an oxygen airlift to 20-25 Km above the Earth will help us cool off the planet, and oxygen is the only non-toxic element that will do this for us. Oxygen is a part of the natural system and we need it. We deserve to give ourselves a break from accelerating global warming; a mistake that we can at least partially pull back from. Of the 487ppm of CO2 equivalent warming we have, 87 ppm are because of the refrigerant and synthetic greenhouse gases which are trapping heat at 20-25 Km above us. That means that we could with a thorough, well modeled, and tested effort, reverse 40% of all of our industrial era warming by removing these gases using oxygen. The oxygen when dispersed, would be activated by the Sun into reactive atomic oxygen radicals which would then destroy these gases, and the system would bring them down naturally. Make no mistake, this is known to happen in both atmospheric chemistry and in the fossil records. If we reversed 40% of the warming, it may mean that we return some snow cover and planetary reflectivity. We would have to maintain this reversal while we reduced emissions, and avoid putting stuff up in the atmosphere as much as possible so that heat escapes continually. No other agent will encourage heat release to space.

A million tons per day of oxygen are created from our ground based oxygen factories. We would only need a fraction of this to affect the lower stratosphere in an airlift. We have enough oxygen at ground to borrow for this restorative protocol, and we have all the means at our disposal to do it. We have tanks, aircraft, and skilled people who can perform it. We only have a limited window of about two decades to start this kind of protocol before the warming acceleration becomes too powerful and our polar ice is gone. Consider heat trapping geoengineering with sprayed toxic aerosols the alternative. Do you prefer that…or this?

In the next article I will outline a scheme to fund this protocol based on a historical and present polluter pay scheme, after providing an estimate of the provisional amount to airlift and its cost.

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