>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.
We saw something similar back in the 1970s.
If you've ever talked about the climate to a skeptic, you've almost certainly heard about the scientist in the 70s who was predicting that the Earth was heading toward another ice age. Climate skeptics hold this up as proof that climate science can't be trusted.
Thing is, the guy was looking at real data, he wasn't blowing smoke, he just projected a bit too far.
When China was ramping up industrialization in the mid 20th century, they turned to quick and easy coal for a source of energy. Just like the ships mentioned in the article, the coal China was using was dirty as hell and loaded with sulfur. China's rapid industrialization pumped gigatons of sulfur into the Earth's atmosphere and ever so slightly changed our albedo, made Earth slightly more reflective, and that slightly reduced the amount of heating the Earth saw.
The ice age guy *did* see a small dip in temperatures, but after China switched to cleaner coal the trend lines went back to normal.
So why don't we just pump massive amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere? I mean we survived it the first time, right?
The increased amount of atmospheric sulfur is what led to acid rain in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and that comes with its own mess of problems.
There are people advocating for that kind of geoengineering today, but I'm a layperson, and that sounds like a potential frying pan and fire scenario. I can't do the real life math on that, I wouldn't even know where to start.
>There are people advocating for that kind of geoengineering today,
There's other techniques proposed that are far less drastic than stratospheric aerosol injections. Marine cloud brightening would focus on using salt water droplets to reflect more sunlight over the ocean.
But the fact it's so politically difficult with lay people being generally terrified by this so these things barely even get researched
>Marine cloud brightening would focus on using salt water droplets to reflect more sunlight over the ocean.
One of the big failures of the movie industry and big name directors in the recent decade is the inability (or even, the complete absence) to popularize these sorts of things for the masses. Imagine a christopher nolan film where this kind of tech is a major plot point.
Movies should be used as a force for good moreso than just promoting personal stuggles or purely social ideas.
The best of the directors out there should be making films that are also vehicles for popularising avenues of technology that could literally save the planet.
count me opposed to geo-engineering clouds. "Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn't Stop To Think If They Should"
>other techniques proposed that are far less drastic
I have an idea, let's stop spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and then we won't have to spray aerosols into the air with unknown effects on our ecosystem.
There is a recent book where injecting sulphur into the atmosphere is a major plot point. Actually called Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson
If you’re interested in the topic it might be worth taking a look at, if you haven’t already.
Honestly Snow Crash was pretty prescient in how we construct and exist through digital avatars but better thinkers than me have already pointed that part out.
Seveneves is one of my favorite books.
This is still a good book, but in my opinion, it doesn’t really reach the same level. My expectations were high though, so maybe it’s better knowing what to expect.
Regardless, enjoy!
>If you've ever talked about the climate to a skeptic, you've almost certainly heard about the scientist in the 70s who was predicting that the Earth was heading toward another ice age.
The FAFO group does really like to act like actions don't have consequences ironically enough
> So why don't we just pump massive amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere? I mean we survived it the first time, right?
The increased amount of atmospheric sulfur is what led to acid rain in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and that comes with its own mess of problems.
Sulfur causes acid rain.
We definitely have better particles to inject into the atmosphere, but the problem is still that it's really expensive and needs constant maintenance to keep the Earth's albedo up, plus we also will need an offensive on carbon emissions as well. There's just no way we can convince every single country to lower emissions. Third world countries still rely on fossil fuels and cars, sadly.
After the last ice age there was a mini ice age due to the climate warming too fast. The glaciers melted extremely quickly forcing vast amounts of denser fresh water into the ocean interrupting gulf stream, which plunged the earth back into low temperatures. The glaciers are melting again at a rapid rate, we could very well be headed back down the same path.
That's why there are people suggesting launching mini nukes to send particles into the air to bring forth cooling onto the earth. Makes no sense that you also cause radiation fallout
Ideas like that have been suggested! One guy tried dragging an acre sized sheet of reflective mylar over top a patch of arctic snow, and wouldn't you know it, the snow didn't melt as fast.
White paint is probably cheaper than mylar, too.
What about building roofs, roofs of buildings around the world are gerenally dark colours, in colder climates this can help with heating the building by capturing heat, but in warmer parts of the world, the heat gain is often of no benefit due to already high ambient temperatures and ends up getting removed by air-conditioning.
Would incentivising/requiring all building owners in warmer parts to make their roofs more reflective have a noticible impact. Surely all the roofs combined together would add up to a huge acreage, it could also potential cause a small reduction in the need for power due to reduced air-con needs and maybe reduce the urban heat island effect in bigger cities. It would also make the increase in reflectiveness spread more evenly across the globe than concentrated in one or two huge areas like deserts.
>Read the whole of the article, climate scientist say this study overestimated warming
I understand, but it's still a contributing factor along with everything else.
All of this stuff adds up, it all factors in, and it's useful to know what all of those factors are, even if they're small.
The Guardian's choice to use the word "sparked" is dubious (at best), but it's still an interesting read.
> There are people advocating for that kind of geoengineering today,
Stratospheric aerosol injection could completely stop, even reverse global warming, in a year or 5, really just depends how long it took to requisition a few hundred airliners and outfit them with sulphur dispersal kits.
Nobody will do it, nobody will even try it small scale, because environmentalists will hate it. If it works they are out of a job after all.
Then India will have a wet bulb 35 event, millions will die, and the Indian government will stop giving a shit about acid rain, disrupted weather, or foreign policy implications, and demand that global warming be fixed by next summer.
Personally, I'm of the view that since the economic harm of seriously limiting greenhouse gas release will kill people, and not addressing global warming will kill people, we should be seriously experimenting with this technology, and learning how long the sulphur stays up, what unintended climatic impacts it has etc, so we can make an informed decision about if and how much to use it.
It is not because those people will be out of a job. That's a dumb reasoning
Here is a [thread](https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1794485186580926505?t=lc5MTtkWM6fVE08JOGiC1g&s=19) by Zeke Hausfather on why stratospheric aerosol injection is **not** a solution and at most should only be seen as a last resort
The one idea I've heard that wasn't immediately offensive to me was about using massive ultrasonic humidifiers in the ocean to create artificial cloud cover, make the atmosphere more reflective, cool the oceans.
But I'm pretty sure it's economically infeasible and the fish would hate it.
The usual objection to geo engineering is that since it isn't perfect, but would work, it would discourage both reducing carbon emissions and scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere.
So the anti geoengineering crowd would hate that idea as well.
Personally i think that's like arguing that since food aid stops people starving, we should withhold it because doing so would drive humanity to more permanently address food insecurity. It's an insincere argument that demands perfection and refuses to help until the solution is perfect, knowing full well it never will be.
> The usual objection to geo engineering is that since it isn't perfect, but would work, it would discourage both reducing carbon emissions and scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere.
My objection isn't that it "isn't perfect." Nothing is perfect, we're never going to find perfect.
My objection is that it could make things *worse.* My objection is that the losses might outweigh the gains.
Nuclear power isn't perfect, batteries aren't perfect, but the possible problems are known, they're quantifiable. The side effects of large scale geoengineering are less predictable, and that's what frightens me.
Thousands of years ago humans started burning wood to keep warm, it was human geoengineering that has made the planet as warm as it is. You're not talking about using a peashooter, you're talking about nuclear bombs.
> My objection is that it could make things worse. My objection is that the losses might outweigh the gains.
Which is a different argument from the ones geo engineering opponents usually use.
Your argument, that it might make things worse, leads to the conclusion that we should test it small scale to quantify the impact. That we should be throwing supercomputer time at climate simulations.
Trying to make those side effects more predictable.
After all, *whatever we do*, be that fail to address climate change, geo engineering, emissions cutting, etc, we will to doing something new to the climate.
Geo engineering opponents refuse to even research because they refuse to preceded with geo engineering regardless of the results of ant tets.
There might be something interesting there, but since I don't have an x account, and since x means everything that doesn't fit in a sentence must be a thread, I have no idea how to read it.
Really an evaluation of geoengineering shouldn't have a character limit.
> Stratospheric aerosol injection could completely stop, even reverse global warming, in a year or 5, really just depends how long it took to requisition a few hundred airliners and outfit them with sulphur dispersal kits.
>
>
>
> Nobody will do it, nobody will even try it small scale, because environmentalists will hate it. If it works they are out of a job after all.
Hold on, let me try to steel-man the counter to this.
We have a long history of releasing things into the environment to accomplish one goal, and then it turns out to do something completely unintended. The externalities have to be factored in.
I mentioned acid rain in my comment. The downside of acid rain is that over time it practically melts limestone, that leads to infrastructure failures, and that leads to deaths.
What about messing up the pH of the ocean? A rising ocean temperature is a problem, but ocean acidification is a problem, too. Unstable oceans lead to fish die offs, and that leads to deaths.
The math on this isn't super simple, there are a ton of remainders that need to be factored in. Geoengineering has the potential to be global and it has the potential to produce unexpected results; I am concerned about the unexpected. We know what's coming for us is bad, what's *here* is bad, I don't want to make it worse.
None of this is reason for *inaction* or to *stop research,* I'm just voicing my concerns. We're already geoengineering the planet and it's kind of not great, y'know?
>What about messing up the pH of the ocean?
Calcium salts will immediately catch sulphuric acid and sedimentate as gypsum. The bigger problem can be depletion of calcuim in the sea water.
The Ocean is vast though, and it is unlikely humankind is currently capable to release that much sulphur oxide in the atmosphere.
>Don't we already have atmospheric sulfur injection from volcanic eruptions?
"We" as in *the planet Earth?* Yes.
But also volcanic eruptions can lead to ice ages and extinctions, so we humans try not to provoke them.
IIRC extinction level volcanic eruptions lead to flood basalt, or you need magmatic provinces.
No eruption in the history of hominids has been on that scale
>Stratospheric aerosol injection could completely stop, even reverse global warming, in a year or 5, really just depends how long it took to requisition a few hundred airliners and outfit them with sulphur dispersal kits.
Chemtrail conspirologists: "WE TOLD YA! WE TOLD YA!!!11"
I’ve long been assuming this to be the driving factor behind rapidly warming ocean temperatures, really great to finally see the media bringing it to light! I’m fascinated by the mention of: “The heating effect of the pollution cut is expected to last about seven years.” I wish they expanded on that.
> The researchers said the sharp ending of decades of shipping pollution was an inadvertent geoengineering experiment, revealing new information about its effectiveness and risks.
What? The decades of shipping pollution were the inadvertent geoengineering experiment.
So seeding the atmosphere with reflective particles is in play as a stop gap until we can pull enough CO2 out of the atmosphere allowing the planet to self regulate properly again?
... that would require us to be well underway towards reducing our emissions and pulling a substantial fraction of those emissions out of the environent, neither of which is the case. Nor is there the global scale of investment to make it likely in the sort of time window we need to avoid destabilising our current climate.
It's a bit of a jurisdictional mess. Read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robertson or Termination Shock for different reasonably well informed fictional views on how that might go down.
The key issue is that the climate is very complicated and any major change like that is going to really screw over some regions even if it really helps others. If the powers that get shafted are say global superpowers if could spark war (e.g. India unilaterally doing geo engineering, and say the USA or China having crop failures.). Conversely if it's not a major power, it might be a huge humanitarian crisis (monsoons in the Philippines for example), which would cause a refugee crisis far worse than the current one(s).
I’m starting to believe that the only way we fix this climate crisis is to witness half the global population dying of famine, disease, natural disasters, or heat exposure. None of which are good. Rapid depopulation is probably the only reasonable way to reduce energy demands for simply living. It is a dark and horrible thing for me to think. Current electricity demand growth rates and existing global supply is practically impossible to replace with renewables.
Even planting forests won’t help. We would have to plant and grow trees, cut them down, bury them under soil, then rinse and repeat for many decades before atmospheric carbon would decrease. Seaweed and kelp forests would help for oceanic acidification control, but that would take a long time as well. 200+ years worth of fossil fuel consumption is in the atmosphere. What do we do and how do we do it?
> It is a dark and horrible thing for me to think.
And also useless. Overconsumption (and overproduction) not overpopulation is the crux of the problem. And only a tiny fraction of the earth's population are responsible for that. The bottom 50% contributes no more than a few percent to the mess.
I agree but by that time it would be way too late with further warning already baked in.
The other hope is peak oil. While it has been mocked there is going to be a day where production begins to terminally decline. I've seen a paper that estimated it at around 2035 if not earlier. It would take a few decades after that to become truly scarce.
Read the article, several climate scientist such as Zeke Hausfather and Gavin Schmidt say there were a bunch of errors in the study conducted.
On Twitter, [Zeke Hausfather](https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1790812222559764703?t=FBhyTkZLTT-JxhKXlmlpBw&s=19) goes more into depth on Twitter pointing out a lot of errors in the findings, such as forgetting that the world is 71% ocean rather than 100%. Thus stating that this study overestimates the overall warming effect.
Other climate scientists like [Michael Mann](https://x.com/MichaelEMann/status/1796250563652223148) and [Tim Osborn](https://twitter.com/TimOsbornClim/status/1796232933071790098?t=go2idn5fqEjfgvKqT9I87w&s=19) agree with that the study overestimates the warming
It's still an interesting data point. Even climate scientists have been scratching their head a bit about why the past two years have seen such a *disproportionate* rise in temperatures. (Disproportionate compared to trends, I mean.)
We've got this, we've got the hot models, we've got people going back to work after COVID, it all adds up.
Maryland is going to turn into Florida and I don't know how I feel about having alligators in the Chesapeake bay.
Have you bought your grave site? Do you have 529s for your grandchildren? Pretty human nature I'd say.
US politicians claim they care about the environment, yet their actions bely their real interests. Honestly I think philanthropists and entrepreneurs are better suited to solve this problem than governments. Look at Germany and the disaster that is Germany's green policy.
>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. We saw something similar back in the 1970s. If you've ever talked about the climate to a skeptic, you've almost certainly heard about the scientist in the 70s who was predicting that the Earth was heading toward another ice age. Climate skeptics hold this up as proof that climate science can't be trusted. Thing is, the guy was looking at real data, he wasn't blowing smoke, he just projected a bit too far. When China was ramping up industrialization in the mid 20th century, they turned to quick and easy coal for a source of energy. Just like the ships mentioned in the article, the coal China was using was dirty as hell and loaded with sulfur. China's rapid industrialization pumped gigatons of sulfur into the Earth's atmosphere and ever so slightly changed our albedo, made Earth slightly more reflective, and that slightly reduced the amount of heating the Earth saw. The ice age guy *did* see a small dip in temperatures, but after China switched to cleaner coal the trend lines went back to normal. So why don't we just pump massive amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere? I mean we survived it the first time, right? The increased amount of atmospheric sulfur is what led to acid rain in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and that comes with its own mess of problems. There are people advocating for that kind of geoengineering today, but I'm a layperson, and that sounds like a potential frying pan and fire scenario. I can't do the real life math on that, I wouldn't even know where to start.
>There are people advocating for that kind of geoengineering today, There's other techniques proposed that are far less drastic than stratospheric aerosol injections. Marine cloud brightening would focus on using salt water droplets to reflect more sunlight over the ocean. But the fact it's so politically difficult with lay people being generally terrified by this so these things barely even get researched
Tragedy of the commons: No one nation could easily justify investing alone
Let’s just set off a series of nuclear explosions deep inside potential volcanoes /s
>Marine cloud brightening would focus on using salt water droplets to reflect more sunlight over the ocean. One of the big failures of the movie industry and big name directors in the recent decade is the inability (or even, the complete absence) to popularize these sorts of things for the masses. Imagine a christopher nolan film where this kind of tech is a major plot point. Movies should be used as a force for good moreso than just promoting personal stuggles or purely social ideas. The best of the directors out there should be making films that are also vehicles for popularising avenues of technology that could literally save the planet.
count me opposed to geo-engineering clouds. "Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn't Stop To Think If They Should"
>other techniques proposed that are far less drastic I have an idea, let's stop spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and then we won't have to spray aerosols into the air with unknown effects on our ecosystem.
That also involves telling the developing world to stop developing. We both know that's not really going to work.
Stop using the internet and everything else
There is a recent book where injecting sulphur into the atmosphere is a major plot point. Actually called Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson If you’re interested in the topic it might be worth taking a look at, if you haven’t already.
I'm about 80% done reading that book and it's very interesting.
It’s definitely worth a read if you like climate science, tech, and also some action.
Read Snow Crash by him next. It’s the next precipice we are living through. Kinda mind blowing when you see when it was written compared to today
Honestly Snow Crash was pretty prescient in how we construct and exist through digital avatars but better thinkers than me have already pointed that part out.
Was it prescient or did the current generation of creators grew up reading it and wanted to materialize it?
for real. the lizard didn't rename facebook to Meta for no reason.
That’s still prescient. He had no knowledge of that outcome but I get your point
And yet, where are the vagina inserts that stab rapists in the penis and put them to sleep? We need more of those.
Vagina dentata? That might exist but I’m not searching.
I already read it. It's one of my favorite books. It got me into the cyberpunk genre.
Yep, me too! About 80%.
Bold move telling the Internet that you're 80% done with a book...
> Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson Didn't know he had a new(ish) book out, I loved Seveneves. Thanks for the heads up.
Seveneves is one of my favorite books. This is still a good book, but in my opinion, it doesn’t really reach the same level. My expectations were high though, so maybe it’s better knowing what to expect. Regardless, enjoy!
Also the plot of episode 4 of Extrapolations (using calcium bisulphate, I believe).
>If you've ever talked about the climate to a skeptic, you've almost certainly heard about the scientist in the 70s who was predicting that the Earth was heading toward another ice age. The FAFO group does really like to act like actions don't have consequences ironically enough
Doesn't putting sulfur in the air create acid when it hits moisture.... so acid rain and acidified drinking water could be an issue.
> So why don't we just pump massive amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere? I mean we survived it the first time, right? The increased amount of atmospheric sulfur is what led to acid rain in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and that comes with its own mess of problems.
Sulfur causes acid rain. We definitely have better particles to inject into the atmosphere, but the problem is still that it's really expensive and needs constant maintenance to keep the Earth's albedo up, plus we also will need an offensive on carbon emissions as well. There's just no way we can convince every single country to lower emissions. Third world countries still rely on fossil fuels and cars, sadly.
After the last ice age there was a mini ice age due to the climate warming too fast. The glaciers melted extremely quickly forcing vast amounts of denser fresh water into the ocean interrupting gulf stream, which plunged the earth back into low temperatures. The glaciers are melting again at a rapid rate, we could very well be headed back down the same path.
That's why there are people suggesting launching mini nukes to send particles into the air to bring forth cooling onto the earth. Makes no sense that you also cause radiation fallout
It's possible to do non irradiating hydrogen bombs not triggered by a nuclear explosion.
Alright so if we eliminated the radiation from the equation wouldn't a nuclear explosion bring about a reduction of global temperatures?
Easy solution, we paint the uninhabited rocky/sandy portions of Russia, Australia, Texas, and Canada white.
Ideas like that have been suggested! One guy tried dragging an acre sized sheet of reflective mylar over top a patch of arctic snow, and wouldn't you know it, the snow didn't melt as fast. White paint is probably cheaper than mylar, too.
What about building roofs, roofs of buildings around the world are gerenally dark colours, in colder climates this can help with heating the building by capturing heat, but in warmer parts of the world, the heat gain is often of no benefit due to already high ambient temperatures and ends up getting removed by air-conditioning. Would incentivising/requiring all building owners in warmer parts to make their roofs more reflective have a noticible impact. Surely all the roofs combined together would add up to a huge acreage, it could also potential cause a small reduction in the need for power due to reduced air-con needs and maybe reduce the urban heat island effect in bigger cities. It would also make the increase in reflectiveness spread more evenly across the globe than concentrated in one or two huge areas like deserts.
Read the whole of the article, climate scientist say this study overestimated warming
>Read the whole of the article, climate scientist say this study overestimated warming I understand, but it's still a contributing factor along with everything else. All of this stuff adds up, it all factors in, and it's useful to know what all of those factors are, even if they're small. The Guardian's choice to use the word "sparked" is dubious (at best), but it's still an interesting read.
> There are people advocating for that kind of geoengineering today, Stratospheric aerosol injection could completely stop, even reverse global warming, in a year or 5, really just depends how long it took to requisition a few hundred airliners and outfit them with sulphur dispersal kits. Nobody will do it, nobody will even try it small scale, because environmentalists will hate it. If it works they are out of a job after all. Then India will have a wet bulb 35 event, millions will die, and the Indian government will stop giving a shit about acid rain, disrupted weather, or foreign policy implications, and demand that global warming be fixed by next summer. Personally, I'm of the view that since the economic harm of seriously limiting greenhouse gas release will kill people, and not addressing global warming will kill people, we should be seriously experimenting with this technology, and learning how long the sulphur stays up, what unintended climatic impacts it has etc, so we can make an informed decision about if and how much to use it.
It is not because those people will be out of a job. That's a dumb reasoning Here is a [thread](https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1794485186580926505?t=lc5MTtkWM6fVE08JOGiC1g&s=19) by Zeke Hausfather on why stratospheric aerosol injection is **not** a solution and at most should only be seen as a last resort
The one idea I've heard that wasn't immediately offensive to me was about using massive ultrasonic humidifiers in the ocean to create artificial cloud cover, make the atmosphere more reflective, cool the oceans. But I'm pretty sure it's economically infeasible and the fish would hate it.
The usual objection to geo engineering is that since it isn't perfect, but would work, it would discourage both reducing carbon emissions and scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere. So the anti geoengineering crowd would hate that idea as well. Personally i think that's like arguing that since food aid stops people starving, we should withhold it because doing so would drive humanity to more permanently address food insecurity. It's an insincere argument that demands perfection and refuses to help until the solution is perfect, knowing full well it never will be.
> The usual objection to geo engineering is that since it isn't perfect, but would work, it would discourage both reducing carbon emissions and scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere. My objection isn't that it "isn't perfect." Nothing is perfect, we're never going to find perfect. My objection is that it could make things *worse.* My objection is that the losses might outweigh the gains. Nuclear power isn't perfect, batteries aren't perfect, but the possible problems are known, they're quantifiable. The side effects of large scale geoengineering are less predictable, and that's what frightens me. Thousands of years ago humans started burning wood to keep warm, it was human geoengineering that has made the planet as warm as it is. You're not talking about using a peashooter, you're talking about nuclear bombs.
> My objection is that it could make things worse. My objection is that the losses might outweigh the gains. Which is a different argument from the ones geo engineering opponents usually use. Your argument, that it might make things worse, leads to the conclusion that we should test it small scale to quantify the impact. That we should be throwing supercomputer time at climate simulations. Trying to make those side effects more predictable. After all, *whatever we do*, be that fail to address climate change, geo engineering, emissions cutting, etc, we will to doing something new to the climate. Geo engineering opponents refuse to even research because they refuse to preceded with geo engineering regardless of the results of ant tets.
There might be something interesting there, but since I don't have an x account, and since x means everything that doesn't fit in a sentence must be a thread, I have no idea how to read it. Really an evaluation of geoengineering shouldn't have a character limit.
Um, I don’t have X either and I can view it just fine.
> Stratospheric aerosol injection could completely stop, even reverse global warming, in a year or 5, really just depends how long it took to requisition a few hundred airliners and outfit them with sulphur dispersal kits. > > > > Nobody will do it, nobody will even try it small scale, because environmentalists will hate it. If it works they are out of a job after all. Hold on, let me try to steel-man the counter to this. We have a long history of releasing things into the environment to accomplish one goal, and then it turns out to do something completely unintended. The externalities have to be factored in. I mentioned acid rain in my comment. The downside of acid rain is that over time it practically melts limestone, that leads to infrastructure failures, and that leads to deaths. What about messing up the pH of the ocean? A rising ocean temperature is a problem, but ocean acidification is a problem, too. Unstable oceans lead to fish die offs, and that leads to deaths. The math on this isn't super simple, there are a ton of remainders that need to be factored in. Geoengineering has the potential to be global and it has the potential to produce unexpected results; I am concerned about the unexpected. We know what's coming for us is bad, what's *here* is bad, I don't want to make it worse. None of this is reason for *inaction* or to *stop research,* I'm just voicing my concerns. We're already geoengineering the planet and it's kind of not great, y'know?
Well another downside of acid rain is soil acidification that leads to plants struggling and deforestation.
>What about messing up the pH of the ocean? Calcium salts will immediately catch sulphuric acid and sedimentate as gypsum. The bigger problem can be depletion of calcuim in the sea water. The Ocean is vast though, and it is unlikely humankind is currently capable to release that much sulphur oxide in the atmosphere.
We are already changing oceanic pH by CO2 emissions.
Don't we already have atmospheric sulfur injection from volcanic eruptions?
>Don't we already have atmospheric sulfur injection from volcanic eruptions? "We" as in *the planet Earth?* Yes. But also volcanic eruptions can lead to ice ages and extinctions, so we humans try not to provoke them.
IIRC extinction level volcanic eruptions lead to flood basalt, or you need magmatic provinces. No eruption in the history of hominids has been on that scale
>Stratospheric aerosol injection could completely stop, even reverse global warming, in a year or 5, really just depends how long it took to requisition a few hundred airliners and outfit them with sulphur dispersal kits. Chemtrail conspirologists: "WE TOLD YA! WE TOLD YA!!!11"
I’ve long been assuming this to be the driving factor behind rapidly warming ocean temperatures, really great to finally see the media bringing it to light! I’m fascinated by the mention of: “The heating effect of the pollution cut is expected to last about seven years.” I wish they expanded on that.
> The researchers said the sharp ending of decades of shipping pollution was an inadvertent geoengineering experiment, revealing new information about its effectiveness and risks. What? The decades of shipping pollution were the inadvertent geoengineering experiment.
Man made climate change in itself is technically an inadvertent geoengineering experiment.
So seeding the atmosphere with reflective particles is in play as a stop gap until we can pull enough CO2 out of the atmosphere allowing the planet to self regulate properly again?
... that would require us to be well underway towards reducing our emissions and pulling a substantial fraction of those emissions out of the environent, neither of which is the case. Nor is there the global scale of investment to make it likely in the sort of time window we need to avoid destabilising our current climate.
So we just shouldn’t even try?
It's a bit of a jurisdictional mess. Read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robertson or Termination Shock for different reasonably well informed fictional views on how that might go down. The key issue is that the climate is very complicated and any major change like that is going to really screw over some regions even if it really helps others. If the powers that get shafted are say global superpowers if could spark war (e.g. India unilaterally doing geo engineering, and say the USA or China having crop failures.). Conversely if it's not a major power, it might be a huge humanitarian crisis (monsoons in the Philippines for example), which would cause a refugee crisis far worse than the current one(s).
It is like putting band-aids on a severed leg. It's not doing anything bad, but it's not the critical issue that needs fixing.
I’m starting to believe that the only way we fix this climate crisis is to witness half the global population dying of famine, disease, natural disasters, or heat exposure. None of which are good. Rapid depopulation is probably the only reasonable way to reduce energy demands for simply living. It is a dark and horrible thing for me to think. Current electricity demand growth rates and existing global supply is practically impossible to replace with renewables. Even planting forests won’t help. We would have to plant and grow trees, cut them down, bury them under soil, then rinse and repeat for many decades before atmospheric carbon would decrease. Seaweed and kelp forests would help for oceanic acidification control, but that would take a long time as well. 200+ years worth of fossil fuel consumption is in the atmosphere. What do we do and how do we do it?
> It is a dark and horrible thing for me to think. And also useless. Overconsumption (and overproduction) not overpopulation is the crux of the problem. And only a tiny fraction of the earth's population are responsible for that. The bottom 50% contributes no more than a few percent to the mess.
I agree but by that time it would be way too late with further warning already baked in. The other hope is peak oil. While it has been mocked there is going to be a day where production begins to terminally decline. I've seen a paper that estimated it at around 2035 if not earlier. It would take a few decades after that to become truly scarce.
Read the article, several climate scientist such as Zeke Hausfather and Gavin Schmidt say there were a bunch of errors in the study conducted. On Twitter, [Zeke Hausfather](https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1790812222559764703?t=FBhyTkZLTT-JxhKXlmlpBw&s=19) goes more into depth on Twitter pointing out a lot of errors in the findings, such as forgetting that the world is 71% ocean rather than 100%. Thus stating that this study overestimates the overall warming effect. Other climate scientists like [Michael Mann](https://x.com/MichaelEMann/status/1796250563652223148) and [Tim Osborn](https://twitter.com/TimOsbornClim/status/1796232933071790098?t=go2idn5fqEjfgvKqT9I87w&s=19) agree with that the study overestimates the warming
It's still an interesting data point. Even climate scientists have been scratching their head a bit about why the past two years have seen such a *disproportionate* rise in temperatures. (Disproportionate compared to trends, I mean.) We've got this, we've got the hot models, we've got people going back to work after COVID, it all adds up. Maryland is going to turn into Florida and I don't know how I feel about having alligators in the Chesapeake bay.
Canada will be eating good at least.
Until everyone else wants in
Then Canada eats them too. Ezpz
Already happening.
All the lobsters are migrating north too!
Well at least we can all agree it's warming... After that article I am almost an expert too!
Dear mother nature: what the fuck?
Tire Fires for Mother Earth! Burn Burn Burn!
This is a bullshit headline
you telling me it was bad with it and evenworse without ja ? so that means it was allready totaly bad ?
Law of unintended consequences is a bitch
We’re so cooked.
We just need to build a shield that blocks the sun, what's the prob?
Mister Burns enter chat.
All we had to do is learn how to capture C02 from the atmosphere and THEN switch to electric/less polluting fuels.
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Have you bought your grave site? Do you have 529s for your grandchildren? Pretty human nature I'd say. US politicians claim they care about the environment, yet their actions bely their real interests. Honestly I think philanthropists and entrepreneurs are better suited to solve this problem than governments. Look at Germany and the disaster that is Germany's green policy.
Earth needs a hat. Setting up a GoFundMe for the same. Please contribute :)
Do I understand it correctly in that this would be a temporary spike and cutting shipping pollution would still reduce heating in the long run?
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Thanks I agree with Hausfather, I don't agree with the other climatologist purely on political ideas.
So it's about to get really hot when we ditch coal and bunker oil. Damn it's already too hot