Here’s a guy who wants to solve global warming by mimicking volcanoes:

For two years after Pinatubo erupted, the average temperature across the Earth decreased by 0.6C.

The volcano’s location close to the equator helped make Pinatubo the perfect model for explaining how sulphur in the stratosphere could reduce global warming.

Instead, controversially, he wants to duplicate the effects of volcanic eruptions and create a man-made sulphur screen in the sky.

His solution would see hundreds of rockets filled with sulphur launched into the stratosphere. He envisages one million tonnes of sulphur to create his cooling blanket.

A million tonnes. This would be a great market for suborbital vehicles.

If you can deliver a ton per flight, that would be a million flights. Let’s say that the marginal cost per flight is a hundred thousand or so (I think we can do a lot better than that). That would be a hundred billion dollar program. That seems like a bargain compared to many of the nostrums currently proposed. And boy would it give us a flight rate.

Of course, someone over at Free Republic pooh poohs it, because he doesn’t understand the concept. Even if one were to use a Titan (can’t be done–they’re out of production), the payload he quotes for it is to GEO. Just tossing stuff up in the atmosphere, you could probably get a hundred tons at a time. In fact, even if they were still in production, a Titan would be the worst conceivable choice for this mission. Deltas would make a lot more sense–clean propellants, and new vehicles with a high-rate production line, and their upper-stage performance issues would be irrelevant, since they wouldn’t need one. But it would be crazy to do it with expendables of any kind.

With suborbitals, I’d think you could do a hundred flights a day out of a given spaceport. If there are a ten spaceports scattered around the world, that’s a thousand flights per day. At that rate, you’d get the stuff up in three years.