This one just gives me a headache (or cough): global warming, or climate change, is theorized to have been hastened by improved shipping pollution standards. The theory being that our filthy air polluting practices shielded us from increased solar heat entrapment caused by our other filthy practices. ffff#!@! tell me this study was funded by British Petroleum
Thu 30 May 2024 11.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 30 May 2024 13.45 EDT
The slashing of pollution from shipping in 2020 led to a big “termination shock” that is estimated have pushed the rate of global heating to double the long-term average, according to research.
Until 2020, global shipping used dirty, high-sulphur fuels that produced air pollution. The pollution particles blocked sunlight and helped form more clouds, thereby curbing global heating. But new regulations at the start of 2020 slashed the sulphur content of fuels by more than 80%.
The new analysis calculates that the subsequent drop in pollution particles has significantly increased the amount of heat being trapped at the Earth’s surface that drives the climate crisis. The researchers said the sharp ending of decades of shipping pollution was an inadvertent geoengineering experiment, revealing new information about its effectiveness and risks.
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Yeah, this has been making the rounds for a while, and it’s probably true, for the short term. Long term, it makes somewhere between no difference and possibly a little worse. Pollution is bad, but the particulates did shade the ocean a bit. Until they settle, and if they settle on ice pack, they darken it and cause it to melt faster. I can’t see putting gross shit into our atmosphere ever being touted as a benefit, unless it’s be the folks who profit by putting gross shit in our atmosphere.
I know there was similar discussion about the effects of jet contrails going back decades now, and some interesting studies were done looking at the effects when most North American air traffic got grounded for a few days following 9/11:
james hansen 6 months ago (and we had some discussion @ floods, fires and heat domes);
The new research, comprising peer-reviewed work of Hansen and more than a dozen other scientists, argues that this imbalance, the Earth’s greater climate sensitivity and a reduction in pollution from shipping, which has cut the amount of airborne sulphur particles that reflect incoming sunlight, are causing an escalation in global heating.
gavin schmidt is still not entirely convinced;
Dr Gavin Schmidt, at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said the new research was “definitely a positive contribution, but it’s not using a fully coupled climate model, so there is still more work to be done. We’ll see how this all gets reconciled over the coming months.”
but the short term effects could haul the system over the edge to the point of runaway feedbacks. thats the real danger of such -even short term- termination shocks.
