In today’s Finshots, we explore climate’s tipping points and a rather unconventional scientific solution to keep them at bay.

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The Story

Climate change is real, and it’s accelerating faster than we’d like to admit.

Sweltering summers, intense storms, rising sea levels and fierce wildfires — all of this is happening around us while some of us sit inside air-conditioned rooms and barely notice.

But the thing is, we can't brush these phenomena under the carpet and continue warming the earth without consequences. If we do, we could risk hitting climate tipping points or critical environmental thresholds we can’t afford to cross.¹ At these points, huge environmental shifts could become irreversible, spiralling into a self-sustaining cycle that could put climate deterioration on autopilot.

Imagine a ball perched on a hill. Once it tips over, it rolls down faster and faster, without any push and no way to stop it.

Think about how disappearing coral reefs could threaten fish species and marine life. These undersea animals build massive, colourful structures that are home to nearly a quarter of all marine fish. They also help create sand for islands and protect coastlines from storm surges. But rising temperatures and pollution are causing coral to die off rapidly. And at this rate, reefs could disappear by 2050, taking their vital ecological benefits with them.

Then there’s melting permafrost, which could worsen global warming.

If you’re wondering what that is, it’s simply a layer of soil, rock, and sediment in Siberia, Alaska, and Canada that acts as the Earth’s freezer. It stores carbon from ancient plants and animals that decomposed over thousands of years. And the moment it melts, microbes break down this trapped organic matter, releasing carbon dioxide and methane. This melting creates a vicious cycle of more warming, melting and even more greenhouse gases, worsening the global temperature rise.

But it’s not just permafrost melting that can push our planet’s climate to a tipping point. Ice sheets are melting, too. For context, Greenland’s ice melts directly from exposure to warmer air, while Antarctica’s ice erodes from below due to warmer ocean currents. If either of these ice sheets crosses a tipping point, we could see significant sea level rises that could flood coastal cities worldwide.

That’s not all. The freshwater from melting glaciers can disrupt the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is like a global heat-distribution system in our oceans. AMOC redistributes heat throughout the Earth’s climate system, but the influx of freshwater from melting ice can interfere with its flow. And if AMOC slows down too much, we could experience drastic weather changes in Europe, Africa and beyond, affecting everything from rainfall patterns to agriculture.

Each of these tipping points poses a serious and irreversible risk. And studies suggest that the warming we’ve already experienced has brought us close to these thresholds. If global warming crosses the range of 1.5°C to 2°C — the target set by the Paris Agreement, we could trigger multiple tipping points all at once.

And while reducing greenhouse gases is part of the solution, it might not be enough to keep our promise to control global temperature rise.

That’s exactly why scientists are constantly looking for innovative ways to cool the Earth. And one of their latest ideas is injecting diamond dust into the atmosphere to bring down temperatures.

Wait… what?

Yup!

You see, this isn’t just some random idea they pulled out of thin air. It’s something they actually learnt from the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. At the time, it was one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the 20th century. But soon, scientists realised that it also had a cooling effect on the Earth, lowering the planet's temperature by 0.5°C that year.

Courtesy: the magic created by the massive amounts of sulphur dioxide released into the atmosphere. It combined with water vapour to form sulphate particles that reflected sunlight back into space, reducing the amount of heat that reached the Earth.

And that got scientists thinking, “What if we could mimic this cooling effect of a volcanic eruption by spraying particles similar to sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere?”

And they set to work! Over the years, they’ve experimented with a bunch of materials for this process called stratospheric aerosol injection (or SAI), which is just a fancy way of saying, “spraying particles into the sky to bounce sunlight away”. They looked at different options like calcite, aluminium, silicon carbide and, of course, sulphur dioxide.

But guess what came out on top?

Diamond dust!

These tiny diamond particles can reflect a ton of light and heat back into space since they won’t stick together and trap warmth. They hang in the air just long enough and are also a safer option than sulphur dioxide, which can lead to issues like acid rain and ozone layer damage. On top of that, diamond dust is chemically inert, which means that it doesn’t react with other substances in the atmosphere, making it a more environmentally friendly choice.

So, shooting about 5 million tonnes of diamond dust into the stratosphere (the atmospheric layer where planes fly) each year for 45 years could cool the planet by approximately 1.6ºC.²

But hold on… Mining those many diamonds isn’t as simple as it sounds! Diamonds form hundreds of kilometres deep in the Earth, where intense heat and pressure turn carbon atoms into beautiful crystals. This process takes anywhere between 1 to 3 billion years, which is about 25% to 75% of the Earth's age! So, to make this cooling idea work, we’ll need to rely on synthetic or lab-grown diamonds.

And that can come with a hefty price tag. We’re talking up to $200 trillion! At roughly $500,000 per tonne, synthetic diamond dust would be 2,400 times more expensive than sulphur, which is widely available and much cheaper. This simply means that if we started spraying diamond dust into the air from 2035 to 2100, we’d still be looking at that astronomical cost.

It doesn’t stop there. Creating synthetic diamonds requires a lot of energy and water for cooling systems. Sure, they’re considered more eco-friendly since they release just a few grams of carbon for each carat.³ In comparison, mined diamonds pump out a jaw-dropping 57 kg of carbon for every carat!

But here’s the catch. The environmental impact of synthetic diamonds really depends on how they’re made and the energy sources they rely on.⁴ So, it’s not as straightforward as it seems. And unless we’re entirely using renewable energy to create them, the whole idea of spending on diamond production just to spray them into the atmosphere could be a waste, bringing us right back to square one.

So, yeah, we’ll just have to wait and see how it all unfolds.

Until then…

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Story Sources: Earth.org [1]; Science.org [2]; BBC [3]; National Geoographic [4]

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