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The words “outward, open, actual, visible, substantial, and exclusive,” in connection with a change of possession, mean substantially the same thing. They mean not concealed; not hidden; exposed to view; free from concealment, dissimulation, reserve, or disguise; in full existence; denoting that which not merely can be, but is opposed to potential, apparent, constructive, and imaginary; veritable; genuine; certain; absolute; real at present time, as a matter of fact, not merely nominal; opposed to form; actually existing; true; not including admitting, or pertaining to any others; undivided; sole; opposed to inclusive.

C.D.Cal. 2005. “Should,” as used in the Social Security Administration’s ruling stating that an ALJ should call on the services of a medical advisor when onset must be inferred, means “must.”—Herrera v. Barnhart, 379 F.Supp.2d 1103.—Social S 142.5.

As regards the mandatory character of the rule, the word 'should' is not only an auxiliary verb, it is also the preterite of the verb, 'shall' and has for one of its meanings as defined in the Century Dictionary: "Obliged or compelled (to); would have (to); must; ought (to); used with an infinitive (without to) to express obligation, necessity or duty in connection with some act yet to be carried out." We think it clear that it is in that sense that the word 'should' is used in this rule, not merely advisory. When the judge in charging the jury tells them that, unless they find from all the evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant is guilty of the offense charged, they should acquit, the word 'should' is not used in an advisory sense but has the force or meaning of 'must', or 'ought to' and carries [***8] with it the sense of [*313] obligation and duty equivalent to compulsion. A natural sense of sympathy for a few unfortunate claimants who have been injured while doing something in direct violation of law must not be so indulged as to fritter away, or nullify, provisions which have been enacted to safeguard and protect the welfare of thousands who are engaged in the hazardous occupation of mining.

Every action or decision has some kind of effect on something or someone, if only in an indirect way. How we approach these decisions or actions we take can have a huge impact, not just on those directly involved, but on others we could hardly fathom would be affected. You never know what little action may be the tipping point for another action and or reaction. butterfly effect When you hear the words “The Butterfly Effect”, most of you will probably think of the movie. That was about the chaos theory, meaning one series of events leads to another and the effect of changing the course of those events. Actually the term “The Butterfly Effect”, was a phenomenon proposed in a doctoral thesis written in 1963 by Edward Lorenz. It states that a butterfly, by flapping its wings in one place and time is able to create a major weather event in another place and time, eventually having a far-reaching ripple effect on subsequent events. The butterfly effect suggests that cause and effect are applicable in the universe even if the pattern is indecipherable and the precise cause of our predicaments, rooted far away in time and space, are ultimately unfathomable. More than just an esoteric science, the chaos theory works off the concept that the relation between any two things is rarely linear in nature, that any reaction is usually the result of an accumulation of causative factors small and large, intentional and accidental.

Selling Soft Power Success Is Hard It is not that soft power has more complex strategic aims; changing human behavior should always be the goal of a foreign policy. The strategic aims of soft power are more transparent and more directly translated in the operational phases of execution. It is much more difficult to obfuscate strategic aims during a soft power initiative because the operational “targets” are often human behavior and attitudes and are not easily quantifiable. U.S. foreign policy can be characterized, generally, as traditional and slow to change. This traditional approach has been long-centered on realist principles with the prioritization of hard power. Even the department charged with “soft power” programs like diplomacy and cultural exchanges face their own internal organizational culture barriers. In the SVI, for example, State Department officials were very reluctant to accept an interdisciplinary approach from an advertising executive, disparaging Undersecretary Beers with comments on her dress and demeanor. Moreover, this history of traditional approaches has been punctuated over the past three decades with periods of increased “toughness” abroad, most notably in the Middle East. In short, the United States prioritizes toughness and traditional measures. Soft power is doubly handicapped in this regard because, as mentioned above, it is new. It’s also not considered to be “tough.” Years ago, when explaining soft power to a young Corporal in the Marine Corps, I presented two different types of leadership. The first included threats and rewards to push subordinates to perform required tasks: “Take out the trash every day or get written up.” The second encouraged the same behavior by appealing to the subordinate, by setting the example and earning his/her respect resulting in the Marine taking the trash out because he/she wants to be seen as a team player and as a good Marine without explicit threats or rewards. When asked which form was more effective and generally preferable, the Corporal immediately favored the latter. “That’s soft power,” I replied. “No, I still don’t like it. It’s soft, and leaders aren’t soft,” he retorted. While this could be dismissed as a singular incident not indicative of a larger trend, a glance at any political campaign will show you that policymakers don’t win elections on being “soft.” While critics rightly point out the limitations of soft power, many critiques fall flat. , a Shanghai-based venture capitalist and social scientist, argues that countries overestimated their soft power capabilities since the end of the Cold War. That’s not a criticism of soft power itself, but rather an indictment of an over- or mis-reliance on it. The crux of Li’s argument isn’t against the utility of soft power, but rather its overall presence, or lack thereof. Other scholars beholden to the realist school of international relations are resistant to even considering the potential effectiveness of soft power because much of soft power is reliant on non-state actors, actors deemed irrelevant by the tenets of realism. Ultimately, most critics simply believe soft power doesn’t work in international relations, but offer little concrete evidence to support these assertions. Soft power has real limitations, and there are real challenges to its effective use in international politics. However, these challenges are not so much a reflection of soft power’s utility, but rather its political desirability, none of which challengse its validity or effectiveness. All policy is politics, and if the United States seeks to redefine and reshape foreign policy in a post-pandemic world, policymakers must first recognize and be willing to take the political risk in order to avoid the unnecessary risks associated with a one-dimensional hard power dominant foreign policy.

Soft power is hard to quantify, and thus it is hard to measure its success. Hard power, focused more on measurable resources (money, soldiers, bullets), is a straightforward counting game, and so are the results of its applications. Soft power aims to change attitudes, which is a hard “thing” to which to assign a number or level. Using targeting as an example, the joint targeting process includes two evaluative concepts—measures of performance (MOP) and measures of effectiveness (MOE). The former, MOPs, measures how friendly forces are completing targeting tasks and asks planners “Are we doing things right?” The latter, MOEs, measures the impact of those actions and asks, “Are we doing the right things?” Using these concepts in an operational military environment, targeteers and intelligence analysis can track the progress of campaigns and ensure that friendly forces are striking the right targets with the right weaponry to have the pre-determined effects. Still, the effects of soft power are tangible—and can be measured. The serve as one example with the longstanding and respected Fulbright scholarship program as a second. Graduate student exchanges, as part of the , had two important effects. First, it grew a body of U.S. students with knowledge and understanding of the Soviet Union during a time when much of U.S. policy was based on conjecture and fear. Second, on the Soviet side, it grew a body of Russian scholars who understood how far behind their communist country was and allowed them to discern between truth and government-sponsored domestic propaganda. Likewise, studying in locations around the world routinely return to their home countries only to reinvest their knowledge and build on their experiences—further fostering global understanding and diplomacy. Because soft power is not confined to the domain of the U.S. government, with public and private industries contributing to U.S. influence abroad, the effects of soft power can be seen in other ways. Take the role of the English language in the Netherlands as an illustration. Upwards of 93% of residents in the ; much of this trend can be attributed to the dominance of American film and textbooks coupled with the relatively small size of the Dutch population. Quantifying the successes of soft power can work, but the process becomes much more of a qualitative over quantitative exercise. It is much easier to calculate the destruction of a training compound or to count enemy dead than it is to track pro-U.S. sentiments in a key village. Part of this problem is a sense of time—feedback from a bombing or freezing of a key group’s assets (hard power approaches) is near real time. Calculating anti-U.S. sentiment (soft power metric) throughout a region is not. This soft power feedback is hamstrung by time in two non-concurrent ways. First, analysts need time to allow preferences to change, and second, they need time to collect new data. The shift in language in the Netherlands, for example, took years to manifest fully. The effects of the cultural exchanges were not apparent or public until after the Iron Curtain had fallen. One of the most , developed and conducted by Portland and USC Center on Public Diplomacy, was first released five years ago and is compiled once a year. Battle damage assessments, on the other hand, are often released to the public in near real time, as evidenced in President Donald Trump’s order to attack Shayrat Air Base in Syria in April 2017. The strike was immediately followed by an to the American public. President George W. Bush’s infamous also stands as an example of the simplicity of success when it comes to hard power, regardless of its premature nature. It was relatively easy to convince the American public that U.S. efforts in Iraq were not only complete, but also successful based on the results of military action. The lessons of psychology and marketing tell us that simplicity sells, and selling is the most difficult challenge to soft power.

The second mode is human destruction of the natural environment, which could leave the planet uninhabitable for humanity (Ward 2008; Brannen 2017; Steffen et al. 2018; Spratt and Dunlop 2019; Wallace-Wells 2019; Ripple et al. 2020). Humans have become the driving force behind environmental change, which is why this geological epoch is increasingly called “the Anthropocene” (Crutzen 2002), to distinguish it from the unusually temperate period since the end of the last Ice Age roughly 11,700 years ago, the Holocene, when human civilization—probably not coincidentally—began and flourished (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007).9 The decline of some of Earth’s environmental subsystems already exceeds the “planetary boundaries” believed to constitute a “safe operating space for humanity” (e.g., climate change, biodiversity loss, and the nitrogen cycle), while others are under serious strain (e.g., ocean acidification and the phosphorus cycle). The outcome of human-driven environmental decline could be “irreversible and, in some cases, abrupt environmental change, leading to a state less conducive to human development” (Rockstrom et al. 2009, 472). The species extinction crisis—what some are calling the “sixth mass extinction” (Kolbert 2014; Brannen 2017)—is a sign of Earth’s declining habitability in the Anthropocene.10

The biggest environmental danger may be climate change (or “global warming”). The major anthropogenic drivers of climate change are the burning of fossil fuels (e.g., coal, oil, and gas), combined with deforestation for agriculture (e.g., livestock and monocultures) and resource extraction (e.g., mining and oil), plus ocean warming undermining the planet’s capacity for absorbing carbon dioxide. Anthropogenic climate change could soon pass certain “tipping points,” whereby positive feedback loops in Earth’s climate system could lead to potentially irreversible and self-reinforcing “runaway” global warming (Kump, Kasting, and Crane 2003; Steffen et al. 2018). For example, the melting of Arctic “permafrost” could produce additional warming, as glacial retreat reduces the refractory effect of the ice and releases huge quantities of methane currently trapped beneath it. Earth could then move towards a “Hothouse Earth” climate, which would make the planet a less-hospitable place for humanity (Steffen et al. 2018; Spratt and Dunlop 2019; Wallace-Wells 2019; Ripple et al. 2020).

In summary, six of the nine proposed planetary boundaries (phosphorous, nitrogen, biodiversity, land use, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution) are unlikely to be associated with existential risks. They all correspond to a degraded environment, but in our assessment do not represent existential risks. However, the three remaining boundaries (climate change, global freshwater cycle, and ocean acidification) do pose existential risks. This is because of intrinsic positive feedback loops, substantial lag times between system change and experiencing the consequences of that change, and the fact these different boundaries interact with one another in ways that yield surprises. In addition, climate, freshwater, and ocean acidification are all directly connected to the provision of food and water, and shortages of food and water can create conflict and social unrest.

Climate change has a long history of disrupting civilizations and sometimes precipitating the collapse of cultures or mass emigrations (McMichael, 2017). For example, the 12th century drought in the North American Southwest is held responsible for the collapse of the Anasazi pueblo culture. More recently, the infamous potato famine of 1846–1849 and the large migration of Irish to the U.S. can be traced to a combination of factors, one of which was climate. Specifically, 1846 was an unusually warm and moist year in Ireland, providing the climatic conditions favorable to the fungus that caused the potato blight. As is so often the case, poor government had a role as well—as the British government forbade the import of grains from outside Britain (imports that could have helped to redress the ravaged potato yields).

The problem, in these cases, has a name: “tipping point” [28]—it is something typical of those systems called “complex” which tend to switch rapidly from one condition to another. We will see more about these systems in the next section but, for the time being, it is enough to note that they are very common in the real world. Think of the turkey of the story, it can have two distinct and separate states: a live turkey and a dead turkey. The same two states may occur for the whole of humankind when facing climate change.

Nassim Taleb uses the term “gray swan” for extreme events or conditions that were never experienced before but that might have been statistically predicted. A good example of gray swan is the Tōhoku tsunami that hit Japan in 2011. The tsunami wave was so large that it overcame the coastal defenses built on the hypothesis that such an event was too unlikely to be considered, yet it was not impossible on the basis of the known data on the sizes of historical tsunamis. A different case is that of events totally outside the statistical distribution, true black swans or “dragon kings” as they have been termed by Sornette [29]. In these cases, the system behaves in ways just not predictable from previous historical data. No matter how many times you test a gun by having the hammer hit an empty chamber, you won’t have data about what happens when the hammer hits a live round. The transition between one state and another fits well the concept of the “Seneca Cliff” we are discussing in this book and these considerations apply also to climate predictions. In the heat of the debate, there is a point that the critics of climate science nearly always miss and that sometimes is missed also by supporters. The problem is that the current models are limited in terms of their capability of predicting extreme events. That is, they are not made to foresee the possibility of rapid, unexpected, and catastrophic variations, the concept described here in terms of the “Seneca Effect.”

Climate Change Is Bad for Our Health Climate change impacts human health in countless ways, but four are worth emphasizing here: Rising temperatures: As temperatures climb around the globe, we expect to see more heatwaves – and ever-more intense ones at that. Extreme heat can “” and cause dehydration, heatstroke, and major organ damage. And certain populations are more at risk from the impacts of heatwaves than others, including the elderly, children, and the poor. Air quality: Pollution from burning fossil fuels is bad enough for the air we breathe, but many impacts of climate change also impact air quality. For instance, climate change has been linked to more wildfires. Wildfire smoke carries fine particles that “.” Exposure has been linked to burning eyes, heart and lung diseases, and even death. Vector-borne diseases: Vector-borne diseases are illnesses spread by insects or arachnids like mosquitoes, fleas, mites, and ticks. As our climate becomes warmer, some insects will see their geographic ranges grow – bringing the Lyme disease and West Nile or Zika viruses they carry along with them to new regions. Extreme weather: While we go into more detail on this later, climate change has been linked to many types of extreme weather, including hurricanes and floods. Not only can these extreme weather events have immediate fatal consequences, but they can lead to major injuries and the spread of waterborne illnesses . The short of it? Healthy people need a healthy climate. Climate Change Means More Extreme Weather When we pollute the atmosphere by using dirty energy sources like oil, coal, and gas, we end up with dirty weather. Climate change affects weather, in large part, by . In short, water evaporates into the atmosphere from both land and sea and returns to Earth’s surface in the form of rain and snow. As the world warms, the rate of evaporation from our oceans seems to be increasing, powering ever-stronger storms. , which moved across abnormally warm waters in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico before dropping unprecedented rain on Houston, Texas. Hurricanes and typhoons work like “giant engines that use warm, moist air as fuel.” Think about heating a large pot of water on your stove — the higher you turn the dial, the faster the water evaporates. Now, imagine a powerful cyclonic swirl sucking up all that steam, carrying it over land, and dropping it like a bomb. So far, it sounds like the world is getting wetter, right? Not so fast! We also know that climate change increases the risk of severe drought. But how does that work? Contrary to what you might expect, more intense rain doesn’t necessarily mean wetter or healthier soils. Quite the opposite. Rain that falls as a violent downpour doesn’t gently soak into the soil, and instead quickly runs off into rivers and is carried back to the sea, leaving the land to get drier and drier between periods of precipitation. The short of it? Climate change "loads the dice" and makes extreme weather more likely to happen. Climate Change Is Bad for Water Security Climate change poses a huge threat to something humans need above all else – water. We need it for drinking, of course, but also for growing food. We’re seeing the dire consequences climate change can have on our water supplies right now . Put simply? The city – and the four million people who call it home – could run out of water (and soon). While many factors have led to Cape Town’s water crisis, climate change has undoubtedly made a bad situation much worse. We know that increasing global temperatures can lead to droughts, and Cape Town has been experiencing record drought for years – getting only about . Many cities around the world could face a similar fate. We already know that the largest reservoir in the US – Lake Mead – contained less than half the amount of water in 2015 as it did in 2000. The short of it? Everyone deserves access to water for their survival. And climate change is making our water supply much less secure. Climate Change Is Bad for Our Agriculture and Food Farmers around the world depend on a stable climate to grow their crops and put food on our plates. But as climate change leads to more droughts, floods, and extreme weather, we see harvests wither or wash away. In 2011, , more than 2 million acres of crops were lost. Climate change also , as nutrients key to plant growth are stripped out by these same droughts and floods. Some deniers will argue that carbon dioxide is “plant food” and that more of it will help crops flourish. But this is a huge oversimplification of science. Plants also need water, but does that mean a flood is a good way to get it to them? Absolutely not. The same holds true for carbon. Experiments show that some plants may do better in a world with more carbon dioxide, but many actually show signs of damage. Not convinced? Recent research has revealed that elevated levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere can actually have a “” on typically nutritious foods. As increasing CO2 speeds up photosynthesis, plants are producing more and more carbohydrates to keep up with their sped-up growth – at the expense of the minerals, vitamins, and proteins that take longer to build (and which we need). The short of it? Carbon pollution and climate change mean both more floods and droughts – making it harder and harder for farmers to grow good quality, nutritious food. Climate Change Is Bad for Our Economy It may seem obvious, but it’s important to point out that the planet’s economies depend on, well, the planet. In 2017, a team of scientists and economists mapped out the potential economic damages different counties in the US can expect as the climate continues to change. “that if warming continues at recent rates, it could shave 3 to 6 percentage points off of the country's gross domestic product by century's end — the warmer it gets, the bigger the hit to the economy.” Extreme weather linked to climate change also has huge economic repercussions. In fact, 2017 was the United States’ costliest disaster year on record. Between 2007 and 2017, the federal government spent an estimated $350 billion responding to extreme weather and fires. On the other hand, climate solutions like renewable energy are . In 2016, renewable energy employed nearly 10 million people around the globe. This sector has offered hope to laid off fossil fuel workers – where (during the 2015 oil price crash) “an estimated 100,000 Canadian oil workers were laid off, at some points causing Alberta’s unemployment rate to hover around 10 percent.” The short of it? There are no jobs on a dead planet.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that the increase in global atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) is primarily due to fossil fuel use and, in a smaller but still significant level, to land-use change. An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary by former United States Vice-President Al Gore, has also drawn public attention to the critical issue of global warming and how the burning of fossil fuels has increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Global warming can result in many serious alterations to the environment, eventually impacting human health. It can also cause a rise in sea level, leading to the loss of coastal land, a change in precipitation patterns, increased risks of droughts and floods, and threats to biodiversity. The effects are already evident in areas like Nunavut, Canada, where Inuit hunters are facing survival challenges due to the thinning of the ice. Explorer Will Steger gives an account of hunters in the Baffin Island, who are faced with the dilemma of unsafe hunting due to ice loss, risking their lives to get in contact with sea animals. Besides the visible effects on people's livelihoods, global warming is predicted to have a strong and adverse impact on human health. The populations of countries that have contributed the least to global warming are the most vulnerable to death and diseases brought about by higher temperatures. The coastlines along the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean and in sub-Saharan Africa will be at higher risk of enduring the health effects of climate change. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that climate change is responsible for at least 150,000 deaths per year, a number that is expected to double by 2030. The effects of global warming will cause dire health consequences: Infectious diseases. IPCC predicts that global warming will worsen human health conditions, especially in tropical regions. In places like Africa, an increase in temperature signifies an increase in mosquito populations, thus escalating the risk of malaria, dengue and other insect-borne infections. Other regions are also affected. The United States experienced varying levels of malaria outbreaks; in 2006, the United Kingdom was plagued by an outbreak of legionnaires' diseases -- a bacterial lung infection that scientists attribute to global warming. WHO states that global warming will also cause a major increase in insect-borne diseases in Europe. Countries like Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Turkey might already be in the danger zone for mosquito-borne malaria. However, the ability to tolerate temperature changes differs from region to region. Richer societies can utilize technological advances; for example, the use of more powerful air conditioners and the construction of houses minimize heat retention. On the other hand, developing countries lack not only the technological know-how, but also the resources and public health systems, required to prevent such outbreaks. Heatwaves. Prolonged periods of abnormally high temperatures can have serious health effects on vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and the sick. This was already seen during the 2003 heatwave in Europe, which claimed approximately 35,000 lives. In a study by Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research in the United Kingdom, scientists using computer models showed how greenhouse gas emissions have increased the likelihood of heatwaves. The most common health effect is hyperthermia or heatstroke that can be fatal if left untreated. IPCC predicts that global warming will lead to hot days, followed by nights of high temperatures. Loss of agricultural productivity. Global warming can result in droughts that can worsen living conditions, particularly in Africa. The World Wild Fund has reported that climate change can drastically alter rainfall pattern, and risk water and food supplies for millions. The IPCC report estimates that approximately 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will be without adequate water and will face food shortages by 2020, as crop productivity will decline by about 50 per cent. Rising temperatures could also result in food shortages for 130 million people in Asia. Asthma and other respiratory diseases. People suffering from heart problems are more vulnerable to increased temperatures, especially those living in already warm areas, as their cardiovascular system must work harder to keep their body cool. Hot temperatures increase the ozone concentration, which can damage people's lung tissue and cause complications for asthma patients and those with lung diseases. Increased global warming can also pose a threat to national security, affecting food security, which, in turn, can lead to resource conflicts. At the UN Security Council debate on energy, security and climate, British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett introduced global warming as a security risk. Despite opposition from many Council members, such as the Russian Federation and China, she argued that the loss of basic needs due to climate change in poor countries can increase the risk of conflicts. Similarly, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has labelled climate change as "an act of aggression by the rich against the poor". On a positive note, many countries have now realized the grave consequences of global warming. The United States Supreme Court ordered the Federal Government to look into regulating CO2 emissions. Protest participants in many American cities like Boston and New York have urged the Government to reduce emissions up to 80 per cent by 2050; some 1,300 protest events have been organized in the United States under the Step It Up 2007 banner. In Sydney, Australia, businesses and homeowners switched off their lights to acknowledge the critical issue of global warming. Likewise, corporations are realizing the need to become environmentally friendly. PepsiCo, a global beverage and snack company, plans to purchase 1 billion kilowatt hours of renewable energy over the next year. However, the major impact on reducing the effects of global warming cannot be made without the commitment of those countries that account for the greatest production of greenhouse gases.

Models are only models, of course. But whatever the precise scale of the current aerosol effect, it would be quite wrong to imagine that it can carry on protecting us from the worst as global warming gathers momentum. That is because aerosols and greenhouse gases have different life spans in the atmosphere. Aerosols stay for only a few days before they are washed to the ground in the rain. By contrast, carbon dioxide has a life span of a century or more. If, for sake of argument, we stuck with current emission levels of both aerosols and carbon dioxide, the aerosol levels in the air would stay the same. There would be no accumulation and no increase in the cooling effect. But carbon dioxide levels would carry on rising and produce ever greater warming.

In the rush to industrialize, China used coal plants without filters. Unfiltered coal smoke contains sulfur. And that air-borne sulfur blocked the sun's rays from ever reaching the Earth's surface. But before you start burning brimstone to save the polar bears, think about this. Sulfur containing chemicals also cause acid rain and contribute to toxic smogs. That's why Chinese, and most other nations' power plants now install scrubbers to remove the sulfur from the smoke. Sulfur's effect is short-lived. It drops out of the atmosphere after a few months to years, whereas carbon dioxide can stay in the atmosphere for centuries. That means the carbon dioxide keeps insulating the Earth long after the sulfur is no longer blocking the sunlight. This isn't the first time industrial booms have masked the greenhouse effect. After World War II, industrial production soared, and sulfur slowed global warming, Kaufmann said. Some have even suggested pumping sulfur into the atmosphere to act as a band-aid to climate change. But other research by Simone Tilmes of the National Center for Atmospheric Research has suggested that sulfur compounds would react with ozone high in the atmosphere and slow the healing of the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica.

Volcanoes erupt large amounts of sulfur (Fig. 1) and the most chemically active gas erupted by volcanoes in significant volumes is sulfur dioxide (SO2) [21], which is readily oxidized to sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid, “because of its low vapor pressure, quickly attaches to aerosol particles” [22]. The primary oxidant is the hydroxyl radical (OH) which is formed high in the atmosphere from ozone (O3) primarily through photodissociation in the near ultraviolent [23]. Ozone and OH are in limited supply. If large amounts of SO2 are erupted frequently enough, as will be explained in detail below, the atmosphere loses its oxidizing capacity, its ability to cleanse itself. Greenhouse gases such as water vapor, methane and carbon monoxide, and other pollutants increase, causing global warming.

Sulfur's ability to cool things down has led some to suggest using it in a geoengineering feat to cool the planet. The idea is that injecting  very high into the atmosphere might help ease global warming by increasing clouds and haze that would reflect sunlight. Some research has concluded that's a bad idea.

Using enough sulfur to reduce warming would wipe out the protective Arctic ozone layer and delay recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole by as much as 70 years, according to an analysis by Simone Tilmes of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. This is the ozone layer that is high above Earth and protects against harmful UV rays, not the ground level ozone that is a harmful pollutant.

Scientists have come up with a possible explanation for why the rise in Earth's temperature paused for a bit during the 2000s, one of the hottest decades on record.

The answer seems counterintuitive. It's all that sulfur pollution in the air from China's massive coal-burning, according to a new study.

But opposite in effect. Is the aerosol umbrella, then, a mandate to do nothing about global warming? Or to do nothing about reducing sulfur emissions? In a word, Charlson says, no. To him, the notion that humanity could fine-tune a system as big and complex as the climate is laughable. "There's always this temptation to tell ourselves we can handle it, that we're bigger than it is," he says. "Personally, I find that attitude very arrogant. It assumes that we understand climate well enough to engineer it, and we don't." Some of Charlson's findings about the parasol effect suggest that it won't help at all with some serious aspects of the global warming problem, such as rising sea levels. Sulfate aerosols may even make some warming effects worse, Charlson says. The reasons lie in the fundamental difference between greenhouse gases--which rise to the stratosphere and cover the globe--and sulfates, which travel only a few hundred miles. Because sulfates have such a limited range, almost all man-made aerosols are floating above the Northern Hemisphere, where 90 percent of industrial activity is still concentrated. By contrast, the Southern Hemisphere gets almost no such "protection" from man-made sulfates. Even in the relatively clean air of Seattle, Charlson says, "the amount of light scattered by haze is probably 10 to 100 times higher than it is in the Southern Hemisphere." With one hemisphere bearing the full brunt of global warming while the other is protected by an umbrella of pollution, he says, seas would still rise uniformly all over the globe, as the warmer southern waters expand. In other words, sulfates can't save the Maldives, the low-lying island nation in the Indian Ocean. But a rise in sea levels, Charlson says, might not be the biggest effect to worry about. Much more important, he points out, could be the increased difference in temperature between the two hemispheres. That's likely to affect the large-scale weather systems on which people depend. "More frequent occurrence of drought is a possibility," Charlson says. "Or of violent storms. Or the opposite--less frequent storms. I'd give either chance equal billing. The thing people need to understand is that a slight regional shift in any direction is a big concern. Last year in the mountains around Seattle we had more precipitation as rain and less as snow than normal. And the snowpack is our reserve of water that fills the reservoirs in late spring. So just because the balance of snow to rain changed, we had a drought here."

But a third relationship between non-carbon pollution and the temperature of the planet is far more horrifying. This is not the problem of plastic but of “aerosol pollution”—the blanket term for any particles suspended in our atmosphere. Aerosol particles actually suppress global temperature, mostly by reflecting sunlight back into outer space. In other words, all of the non-carbon pollution we’ve exhausted from our power plants and our factories and our automobiles—suffocating some of the largest and most prosperous cities of the world and consigning many millions of the lucky to hospital beds, and many millions of others to early deaths—all of that pollution has been, perversely, reducing the amount of global warming we are currently experiencing. How much? Probably about half a degree—and possibly more. Already, aerosols have been reflecting so much sunlight away from the earth that, in the industrial era, the planet has only heated up two-thirds as much as it would have otherwise. If we had somehow managed to produce precisely the same volume of carbon emissions since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution as we have, while somehow keeping the skies clear of aerosol pollution, the temperature rise would be half again higher than it is now. The result is what the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen has called a “Catch-22” and what the climate writer Eric Holthaus has described, perhaps more incisively, as a “devil’s bargain”: a choice between publichealth- destroying pollution on the one hand, and, on the other, clear skies whose very clearness and healthiness will dramatically accelerate climate change. Eliminate that pollution and you save millions of lives each year, but also create a dramatic spike in warming. That would bring us to between 1.5 and 2 degrees warmer than the preindustrial baseline— pushing us right up to the threshold of 2 degrees of warming, long thought to be the border separating a livable future from climate catastrophe. For almost a generation now, engineers and futurists have contemplated the practical implications of this phenomenon, and the prospect of suppressing global temperature with a program of suspended particles—that is, polluting the air on purpose to keep the planet cooler. Often grouped together under the umbrella term “geoengineering,” this prospect has been received by the public as a worst-case scenario, nearly science fiction—and has, in fact, informed much of the recent sci-fi that has addressed itself to the climate crisis. And yet it has gained a terrific amount of currency among the most concerned climate scientists, many of whom will also note that none of the quite modest goals of the Paris climate accords can be achieved without negative-emissions technologies —at present prohibitively expensive. Carbon capture may indeed prove to be “magical thinking,” but the cruder technologies—we know these will work. Rather than sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, we could shoot pollution into the sky on purpose; perhaps the most plausible version involves sulfur dioxide. That would turn our sunsets very red, would bleach the sky, would make more acid rain. It would also cause tens of thousands of additional premature deaths each year, through its effect on air quality. A 2018 paper suggested it would rapidly dry the Amazon, producing many more wildfires. The negative effect on plant growth would entirely cancel out the positive effect on global temperature, according to another 2018 paper; in other words, at least in terms of agricultural yield, solar geoengineering would offer no net benefit at all. Once we began such a program, we could never stop. Even a brief interruption, a temporary dispersal of our red sulfur umbrella, could send the planet plunging several degrees of warming forward into a climate abyss. Which would make whatever installations were sustaining that umbrella quite vulnerable to political gamesmanship and terrorism, as its advocates themselves would acknowledge. And yet many scientists still describe geoengineering as an inevitability—it’s just so cheap, they say. Even an environmentalist billionaire, going rogue, could make it happen on their own.

Acid rain results when sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOX) are emitted into the atmosphere and transported by wind and air currents. The SO2 and NOX react with water, oxygen and other chemicals to form sulfuric and nitric acids.  These then mix with water and other materials before falling to the ground.

While a small portion of the SO2 and NOX that cause acid rain is from natural sources such as volcanoes, most of it comes from the burning of fossil fuels.  The major sources of SO2 and NOX in the atmosphere are:

A recent study on the global economic impacts of climate change by Moody’s concluded that Canada could be a “climate winner”: one of few countries that might benefit from a warming world. According to Moody’s, Canada’s GDP could increase by up to 0.3 per cent—about $9 billion per year—by the middle of this century. Other studies cite expanded farmland, increased economic productivity, and a decrease in cold-related deaths as potential benefits. Such findings have fuelled claims that investing in reducing greenhouse gas emissions here at home is a waste of money.

Some of this is true, but it’s not the whole story. Canada will probably fare better than other countries. But it’s not accurate to say the country will benefit from climate change. We need to examine both the small details and the big picture to see what these studies are leaving out.