this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Low Suphur Shipping Rules Might be Exacerbating Global Warming (www.carbonbrief.org)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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?