Yes, but think of the money to be made.
From IEEE Spectrum, September 3:
Make Sunsets' sulfur dioxide strategy has academics and NGOs fuming
Another day, and another weather balloon ascends gracefully into the clear blue skies above Northern California. But this balloon isn’t headed up to the stratosphere to predict the weather—it’s going there to change it.
Make Sunsets is a tiny start-up headquartered in South Dakota that is using balloons to release small quantities of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, in the hope of reflecting some of the Sun’s energy away from the earth. Each gram of SO2, says Andrew Song, one of Make Sunsets’ founders, offsets the warming from one metric ton of carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels. Not everyone is convinced by Make Sunsets’ methods, however—and many researchers and environmentalists worry the startup’s unregulated operations are disrupting more responsible research into geoengineering, including a prominent effort at Harvard.
Make Sunsets’ name is a reference to the dramatic sunsets that high-altitude SO2 particles can produce, as seen following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. That eruption briefly depressed global temperatures by about 0.2 °C for a year, until the particles slowly returned to Earth.
The 53 kilograms of sulfur dioxide Make Sunsets has released since February 2023 is the cooling equivalent of planting 2.5 million trees, again for about a year, says Song, although neither he nor anyone at Make Sunsets is a professional climate scientist. “The largest direct air capture facility in the world can only remove about 4,000 to 5,000 tons per year,” he says. “We could do that in literally one session with balloons, without the capital costs. We are only restricted by customer demand.”
Make Sunsets finances its operations by selling US $10 “cooling credits” for launching each gram of SO2. Customers include both individuals and corporate customers like Numerous.ai, which was looking to offset emissions-related warming from its AI spreadsheet software.
“I believe that stratospheric SO2 injection is now well-researched enough that the risks associated with it are smaller than the risks of the effects of the temperature rise it prevents,“ says Mehran Jalali, co-founder of Numerous.ai. “Dealing with Make Sunsets was very simple and their answers to my many questions made sense.”
Not everyone is happy with Make Sunsets
But although solar geoengineering promises one of the quickest routes to reducing warming quickly (if only temporarily), not everyone is happy with Make Sunsets. “There’s a lot of disagreement among folks thinking about solar geoengineering, but most agree that Make Sunsets is a bad idea,” says Sikina Jinnah, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. Jinnah was also the co-chair of Harvard University’s Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEX) advisory committee, one of the first efforts to design a governance framework for an outdoor solar geoengineering experiment.“A couple of rogue tech bros taking action completely outside the scope of government authority or any public engagement are really embodying the nightmare of what folks think this could be,” Jinnah says.
The consensus among most atmospheric scientists is that we have only a very limited understanding of how to inject particles effectively into the upper atmosphere without triggering side effects such as damage to the ozone layer, disrupting weather patterns like monsoons, or causing pollution at ground level. Solar geoengineering could also lock us into having to continue to inject particles essentially forever, in order to avoid the “termination shock” of a sudden temperature rise....
....MUCH MORE
Another potential trillionaire-maker was Planktos, chronicled here in real-time over a few dozen posts.
Additionally, we've looked at the visual effect of sulfur injection a few times, most recently five years ago in ""This sulfur-spewing Russian volcano is turning sunsets purple" (and climate and art do a mashup)":
....And the other effect, noted in the Science article above and which has been captured by painters for at least a couple centuries, is the change of color of the sky
We highlighted one contested example in a post from 2010 (contested
because Krakatoa erupted in 1883, ten years before Munch painted this
version of the painting):
Hmmm... Krakatoa's Baby May be Getting Ready to Erupt
From Sky & Telescope
...A new analysis of Edvard Munch's The Scream provides the precise location where Munch and his friends were walking when he saw the blood-red sky depicted in the 1893 painting, as well as an explanation of why the sky appeared to be on fire. Through Munch's journals, topographic analysis, and a connection to the eruption of Krakatoa, proof now exists that the spectacular twilight seen in one of today's most recognizable paintings was inspired by this dramatic event.
In "When The Sky Ran Red: The Story Behind The Scream," in the February 2004 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine, Donald W. Olson, a physics and astronomy professor at Texas State University, and his colleagues Russell L. Doescher and Marilynn S. Olson reveal how they journeyed to Oslo, Norway, to pinpoint the exact location where Munch stood when he "felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature," inspiring him to put his emotions on canvas. They determined that Munch and his friends were walking along a road once called Ljabrochausséen, which is now a modern roadway called Mosseveien. It was along the railing of Ljabrochausséen that Munch became overwhelmed with emotion. Olson and his team located a rocky hillside overlook that precisely matches the artist's vista of Christiania (now Oslo) harbor and Hovedø island....MOREAnd from the outro of that long ago post:
While Sky & Telescope focused on The Scream, the effect can be seen in other art of the decade following the eruption including some Impressionist masterpieces.
***
A similar size eruption in 1815 is believed to have influenced the color choices of J.M.W. Turner:
Source: Guardian Unlimited
You can see more of the effect in the Tate Museum's online Turner collection "Skies Sketchbook [Finberg CLVIII]"
