- cross-posted to:
- science@lemmy.ml
- climate@slrpnk.net
- cross-posted to:
- science@lemmy.ml
- climate@slrpnk.net
The unintentional consequence of lowering sulphur content in marine fuel, as part of clean air regulations, is a weakened cooling effect caused by sulphur particles in ships’ exhaust fumes, according to a new model. This inadvertently exacerbates warming, potentially raising global temperatures by 0.05C by 2050. Other factors, including an underwater volcano eruption, Saharan dust absence, and El Niño, are also contributing to the ongoing ocean heatwave.
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Dr. Robert Rohde did an interesting thread about this on twitter yesterday.
Bottom line, I think there is ample theory & evidence that the reduction of maritime sulfur pollution is having a warming effort.
This warming may be regionally significant, but seems likely to be globally small, e.g. not more than a few years worth of global warming.
Seems to me that if they can empirically show that the effect works; as is apparent here, that it opens the door to SO2 being used as a climate engineering strategy; the EC wants to start talks on geoengineering, so this could be on the table.
Thought occurs to me though; that the more elaborate the solution, the more desperate the problem, so lets hope we can mitigate climate change before it gets to the point of needing space-based sunshades or somesuch.
I personally feel we are at the point where somewhat drastic action is necessary.
People have been talking about marine cloud brightening being one of the more viable geoengineering choices for decades, using a variety of choices for what they add to the air
SO2 sounds like a really unhealthy choice (I was rooting for sea salt being used) but it’s still an interesting hypothetical: if they proved that it SO2 definitely worked better than other compounds, would they still choose to use it?
It’s a similar situation to reducing the CO emissions of cars, meaning you produce more CO2.
When the health benefits outweigh the costs (and ideally, allow us to work on reducing the fossil fuel used altogether), it comes out as a net positive.
And as we’ve seen with cars, improving efficiency has offset the increases with time.
And not to mention that the bulk of the emissions happen when ships are in international waters, and burning bunker oil.
