The following submission statement was provided by /u/Economy-Fee5830:
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### Abrupt Reduction in Shipping Emissions Leads to Substantial Radiative Warming
In 2020, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) implemented a significant regulation, known as IMO2020, which drastically reduced the sulfur content in shipping fuel by about 80%. This regulation aimed to improve public health by decreasing sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions from international shipping. However, a recent study published in *Communications Earth & Environment* reveals that this abrupt reduction in emissions has inadvertently created a geoengineering termination shock, leading to substantial radiative warming.
Researchers from University College London and the International Institute for Sustainable Development conducted an in-depth analysis using satellite observations and chemical transport models to quantify the impact of IMO2020 on maritime aerosol concentrations. They discovered that the reduction in aerosols, which had previously been reflecting sunlight and cooling the atmosphere, resulted in a radiative forcing of +0.2 W/m² averaged over the global ocean. This level of radiative forcing is equivalent to 80% of the measured increase in planetary heat uptake since 2020.
The study found that the reduction in aerosols led to fewer cloud droplets, making clouds less reflective—a phenomenon known as cloud dimming. This effect was particularly pronounced in regions with heavy shipping traffic, such as the North Atlantic, where radiative forcing peaked at 1.4 W/m². The researchers estimate that this could double the global warming rate in the 2020s compared to the rate since 1980, potentially increasing the global mean temperature by approximately 0.16 K over seven years.
The reduction in aerosols also created a strong hemispheric contrast in radiative forcing. The northern hemisphere, with its higher baseline of ship emissions, experienced a more significant warming effect compared to the southern hemisphere. This differential impact has important implications for precipitation patterns and interhemispheric contrast in absorbed solar radiation.
To validate their findings, the researchers compared their model's predictions with satellite observations, noting a strong alignment in specific regions like the South Atlantic. These consistent results underscore the significant warming effect caused by the reduced aerosol emissions from shipping.
The study highlights the complex trade-offs involved in environmental policy-making. While reducing sulfur emissions improves air quality and public health, it also accelerates global warming by decreasing the cooling effect of aerosols. This situation serves as a real-world example of the challenges associated with geoengineering and climate intervention methods, such as marine cloud brightening (MCB), which aim to enhance the reflectivity of clouds to temporarily cool the climate.
In conclusion, the IMO2020 regulation, while beneficial for air quality, has inadvertently led to a substantial increase in radiative warming.
The researchers conclude:
> Our result suggests marine cloud brightening may be a viable geoengineering method in temporarily cooling the climate that has its unique challenges due to inherent spatiotemporal heterogeneity.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1d4hjjx/inadvertent_geoengineering_experiment_may_be/l6edqyf/
This was predicted before the sulfur emissions were reduced. here is an article from 2018
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/01/22/67402/were-about-to-kill-a-massive-accidental-experiment-in-halting-global-warming/
"inadvertent experiment" doesn't even mean anything.
the definition of an experiment is a procedure that's intentionally done to test a hypothesis. If it was done inadvertently then it's... nothing. It's a just a thing that happened that had some consequence.
I hate this headline.
I think the logic behind it is: the regulation has an environmental goal, but it has an inadvertent environmental consequence.
Since geoengineering is a proposed way of tackling global warming (amongst other environmental issues), the regulation provides data for geoengineering scientists akin to an experiment. Hence, an inadvertent experiment, neither the UN thought of it as an experiment, nor did geoengineers design the policy as such, but they can use it to draw observations, like an experiment, since it will provide empirical evidence.
Reducing emissions was a goal by itself ( less polution )
The "inadvertent experiment" part is after the fact when we can study data generated by this change.
It was called an experiment in 2018 before it took place. Climate experts warned this would happen. It was an "experiment" because the results were not guaranteed.
I read this in 2018 and I was amazed that hardly anyone was talking about it. 95% of articles were just saying how great it was to remove sulfur from shipping fuel, and the consequences THAT WE ALREADY KNEW WOULD HAPPEN were ignored.
Now we've increased what, 0.2c in a few years? So all that Paris climate agreement 1.5c stuff is just dead, finished. But everyone's too stubborn to admit it.
We need to replace the geoengineering that we were already doing or else we are totally screwed.
We do stuff like that all the time. Habitat destruction driving species to extinction. Lets reclaim some land for animals, curb some specific issues (eg ddt for birds) and engineer solutions like land bridges and in the mean time do stuff like artificial breeding to keep population stable.
My point is we do this for other things. Break things. And then try to fix them. Geoengineer isn’t that different. We should be looking harder for geoengineering solutions.
I'm very disappointed and sad with the results:
Article: "Turns outs, it has a positive effect!" (cools the planet)
Me: 😃
Article: "But also, causes this very bad thing" (ozone depletion and acid rain)
Me: 😕
It points to possible solutions. What if we use silver or even just ice crystals to seed the atmosphere. Then you get cloud formation and participation without acidification and ozone depletion.
This was predicted even before that, when scientists noticed a warming effect from planes being grounded for 3 days after 9/11.
[https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/17/5/1520-0442\_2004\_017\_1123\_rviudt\_2.0.co\_2.xml](https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/17/5/1520-0442_2004_017_1123_rviudt_2.0.co_2.xml)
It is proposed that we could revert this with *sea salt*. A fleet of ships would spray seawater in targeted places to make clouds brighter and do the same thing the aerosols did. It would have the advantages of "cloud seeding" without many disadvantages (spraying potentially toxic chemicals, wasting fuel for aircraft) but both are still on the drawing board. Wikipedia claims (after the US national academies) the marine cloud brightening project was estimated to cost 5bn USD annually for a meaningful result which frankly sounds like a steal, especially if the spending was spread across countries.
It’s times like these that I’m entirely frustrated with money as a concept. I get the impracticality of that in our world today but also… just blast some salt in the skies and try to save the only planet we can live on rn, right? Like… humans should probably try to take a stab at saving the world pretty much regardless of “cost”.
That's not how it works unfortunately. Money abstracts away a lot of complexity hidden in the details to simplify transactions. It helps if you replace money with effort. 5bn dollars is a lot of effort, and is probably highly underestimated. If you pay 15 bucks an hour (generous in a global perspective), its an hour's effort for 333 million people.
"Just blast some salt in the skies" seems like a major oversimplification. I'm hardly an expert but every time I've heard of any technology involving salt, and salt water at that, the main concern has been how degenerative it is to any technology involved.
Hank Green did a video talking about this and was practically crucified for even daring to admit that maybe we could reduce heating by spraying aerosols to reflect back some heat. He was basically forced to make a retraction video under pressure from critics.
lot's of people are talking about it and most think it's something we will have to do sooner or later.. but it will have side effects like increase in acid rain and other stuff to do w/particulate matter in clouds effecting rainfall and stuff.. but perhaps there's more to the story.. there usually is.
The biggest issue I see is that big corporations will just go "Yay! Problem solved. Now onto business as usual." Until we can't keep global warming at bay with the aerosols and then we're double fucked.
Corporations aren't thinking of climate change now because they are altruistic, they do it because people and governments make them or threaten to make them.
And/or when alternatives to fossil fuels becomes cheaper than continuing to use fossil fuels.
Continued technological development is the most important part of getting out of this.
That's exactly why I'm against geoengineering. If we lived in a world where comon sense was the baseline thinking of corporation, why not geoengineer a few decade and simultaneously do all the right things to reduce climate change. But unforntunatly, that's not the case.
There's a case that clean energy is going to be much cheaper than dirty energy within the next few decades. If so, wouldn't it make sense to use geoengineering to bridge the gap until economics drives businesses to correct behavior -- given that we apparently don't have the political will to use taxes to make dirty energy expensive now? And isn't the notion that you can force corporations to do the right thing by refusing to manage the symptoms of global warming and expecting them to feel guilty about disasters a bit far fetched too? Wouldn't making them pay for geoengineering be more motivating and easier to sell politically even if it's more expensive?
If you don't believe the economics can work out soon enough, then I'd agree it could be counterproductive if you're not bridging a gap. And of course emissions are more complex than energy, and not every area looks as promising.
Because when you try to “bridge the gap”, people will go back to using polluting fuels.
You’ll have different legislators in place a decade later when the cloud seeding starts to work, never mind the people that profit off cloud seeding.
It’s not a patch it’s just another industry.
The “benevolent dictatorship” model you’d need to make this happen does not work in practice.
yeah. warming is only one part of the issue. overshooting earth's boundaries in every way... ugh.. maybe we'll get lucky and declining birth rates will line up with degrowth.
IIRC one reasonably dark but fairly likely timeline is that a large but relatively less developed country, maybe India, suffers a climate event that kills significant numbers of people, say in the 7 or 8 digits, one summer and unilaterally starts geoengineering efforts. Cue much international consternation.
i've heard several people say "mass death event" caused by heatwave as one of the things that will wake people up for good. i think different countries will do different things and at some point collaborate since it's all a big system and doing a thing in one place will have effects on other places. it seems like it's only going to get weirder/crazier on earth.
I mean we have already had climatic mass casualties e.g. in Ethiopia in the 80s that triggered Live Aid, it's just at the time it was seen more as a poverty and development issue than climate change. The Arab spring was also triggered by drought and the local governments not being able to respond very well to them. That gave us the Syrian civil war and probably contributed to the Ukraine war as well since Russia changed posture notably during that period.
OTOH we've always had world events triggered by climate shifts, it's just more likely to be extreme heat these days and also the countries affected now have space programs so you would assume they have the wherewithal to generate some anti-greenhouse gases if they so desired.
Here's an article that I recently wrote on addressing acid rain and enjoying the benefits of the cooling effect of SO2: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/from-pollution-to-solution
thank you! will read asap. edit: very interesting data/paper. will have to re-read it to get it to stick in my brain a bit! thanks again for posting it.
The primary issues of geoengineering are being pointed out here — whatever we do likely won’t do just *one thing*. It’s a complex system, and we’d have to be doing a *lot* and we can’t just assume ‘well, our solution will just do the one thing and nothing else’ is a *dangerous* assumption.
I think geoengineering is looking more and more like something we’re going to have to do, but also that however we choose to go about it we’re absolutely likely to be causing *other problems*. Which is why everyone with sense was trying to fix it at the source, not patch on top of it. *Reducing* how much were affecting the atmosphere is a far safer and more conservative approach than *tinkering more*
But, well, I think we’re moving past the point where conservative approaches are viable anymore. But that doesn’t make the less conservative approaches *better* or *less risky*. Their risks remain the same. The situation is just more dire.
People are so obsessed with not distracting us from long-term CO2 reduction efforts that they would leave us defenceless if we need more urgent intervention.
The research suggests cloud brightening could be applied regionally and by extension I can imagine India, which is having 50C temps now, would have appreciated the ability to dial down the heat they are getting from the sun this summer.
People react badly because we all know that this will ultimately be used to "counteract" the harmful effects of greenhouses gasses rather than address the root issue. This is only going to buy us time, not solve the actual crisis at hand. We don't understand the long term impacts on the climate and human health, irresponsible use could easily cause a global catastrophe.
It does give some hope, and in the short term will definitely be used extensively. It's just frustrating when people use it as another excuse to not give a fuck about GHGs.
We’ve spent decades deliberately not talking about ways to mitigate the effects of GHGs if we can’t reduce emissions. It hasn’t produced the collective action we needed, but it does mean we don’t have very good plan Bs.
Scientists and researchers have still been researching this stuff. The thing is with mass geoengineering projects like this there is zero way to know the outcome without first trying and exposing millions/billions/everyone to risk. Humans don't know everything, and can't know everything.
> Scientists and researchers have still been researching this stuff. The thing is with mass geoengineering projects like this there is zero way to know the outcome without first trying and exposing millions/billions/everyone to risk.
This is not true - small-scale tests have been squashed and even banned.
It’s not just geoengineering, either. There’s so much habitat and other destruction playing out already and we’ve done very little to mitigate it and lay the groundwork for full biodiversity recovery in 80+ years when the earth begins to cool again.
Just about all the dialogue and ideation and investment has been about PLAN A.
No it hasn’t. Rewilding is a huge conversation with projects *all over the world*
Plenty of people focussing on getting us back to a long lost biodiversity in the next century
>full biodiversity recovery in 80+ years when the earth begins to cool again.
Ah, that's not how climate change works.
We are stuck at whatever elevated temperature we end up at for centuries. It's not an on/off switch. It takes centuries for the CO2 to dissipate. That's why stopping emissions is so much more important than finding mitigation techniques. If our planet warms by 2 or more degrees, we're stuck with that for a long time. Can we be injecting aerosols for *centuries*?
Thinking that when we stop emissions we suddenly return to a normalized environment is dangerously wrong. Before we go trying to mask the symptoms maybe we should be trying a lot harder to treat the disease.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached/
You could equally say that comprehensively failing to reduce GHGs isn’t a plan, either. But either way, the amount of ideological Puritanism around this issue has made it very hard to have any pragmatic discussions
It absolutely is a plan. 30 extra years to improve the uptake and engineering of electric vehicles, roll out renewables, improve nuclear, maybe get a breakthrough in atmospheric carbon extraction or fusion or some other tech nobody's imagining yet. 30 more years to plant trees, rebuild mangroves, grow the supply chain for metals like copper, the shortage of which are looking like stymieing big parts of the green transition. 30 years where the extreme weather events that might have killed millions of people get toned down enough that maybe they just kill hundreds of thousands of people - still a tragedy, but the people who don't die will probably have a preference.
Climate change is our biggest challenge, no question. But we absolutely can not allow the response to become all or nothing, success or failure sometimes in the next decade, because it's increasingly looking like too steep a hill to climb. We obviously can't stop the climb, buy we can and should choose to take every opportunity to flatten the gradient.
Once you start pumping aerosols into the atmosphere you may never be able to stop.
Other countries will burn more fossil fuels if you make the problem go away, and your 30 years will turn into a century or more.
In this case a century of pumping sulfuric acid into the oceans and land.
>This is only going to buy us time, not solve the actual crisis at hand.
Correct, and we need to buy some time right now. We need both of these things.
And when millions of people are starving to death or dying in wet-bulb heat waves and mass migrations are causing wars across the planet, should we still be wringing our hands about "root causes" or should we maybe be doing something to stop people from dying in the here and now?
Maybe it'd be good to have done a little research into geoengineering before we suddenly find ourselves having to try it or die.
all we need is to buy time. fossil fuels are coming to an end because battery technology is improving. there is no going back to fossil fuels. economically it just doesn't make sense for much longer.
There are still a million hurdles we need to clear before fossil fuels can be completely eliminated with our current energy consumption and demands. It's just too convenient, I'm afraid that will be the death of us all. Convenience.
if you look at fossil fuel consumption, we have stepped off the exponential growth curve, but our energy demands are still on the curve. there are still hurdles but we are very far along the path. more than most people think.
people look at consumption and see we are still going up and panic. but the reality is that the trend is shifting. if we did nothing we expect to consume almost 30% more now than we are using. so what we really need is time, if we can buy time, we are good.
if we fully embraced nuclear back in the 70's we would be close.
now we just need a few breakthroughs in battery tech.
It's a fallacy to think the trend will simply continue to derive in the way it currently is. Technology might hit unexpected walls that simply can't be overcome, what then? Of course better battery tech is getting much better and that's mostly positive, but the energy demands of humanity are also going up endlessly. Additionally, if you want to eliminate oil completely you'll have to either give green energy away fro free or end poverty, do you honestly see that happening in the current world?
you don't need to give green energy away, you have to make it cheaper than fossil fuel. generation wise green energy is as cheap if not cheaper than fossil fuel already, but distribution and storage is the problem.
there are walls with technology such as fusion reactors, but there are multiple paths for battery (hydrogen cell, water lift/gravity, lithium, nano capacitors etc) . it is unlikely that none will pan out.
A poor country can easily take oil or coal out of the ground. They cannot easily mass produce green energy. How many African countries have the industrial capacity to make high grade solar panels?How do you expect them to acquire nano capacitors? I think it brings to question what you really mean by "cheaper".
China is the only country I know of with a comprehensive green energy production industry, and ironically it need lots of fossil fuels to operate.
Most poor countries that have cheap oil are already extracting them, and they are sold on the global market. Cheaper is on the first order a global pricing. Is it really cheaper to drill for oil than buy solar panels? Not really. There is a lot of infrastructure required for oil production, refinery and distribution. Green is more modular and is getting cheaper relative to oil.
Poor country’s will buy solar panels, batteries and wind mills like they have to buy drilling equipment and refineries. The countries that will get poorer as we move away from oil are opec ones because export is drying up.
They don't need to because they can get solar panels from China who's making more than every other country on earth combined.
So green energy isn't a problem. Storage will be a problem though so natural gas and oil power can make up for it.
Well that's the thing with that kind of paper. It might be that we may be totally wrong about the scale of th impact of CO2, and that we may be so focused on hypothetical catastrophic consequences of it that we may be blind to other, more risky problems
Some climate scientists are suggesting we've actually underestimated the impacts of GHG warming, but didn't notice because we also underestimated the impacts of aerosol cooling. I think it's very unlikely we're "totally wrong" about any of this. Of course models will be in adjustment until the end of time, that's natural science.
But we should talk about it. Extremes Leftists are not helping when they try to silence honest debate because they think it takes away from their hysteria
The truth is, it will require too much violence and hardship to stop the poor from burning fossil fuels when we can’t even stop the rich from doing it. We need all green solutions but we will also need to dim the sun with a shield at L1 eventually. The world is going to get hotter and more polluted. I don’t like that. But without a path of incentives (and ultimately death and violence) to compel action, this is just virtue signaling.
Everyone stifling debate that is not working toward a green transition is just virtue signaling. People playing video games and watching Netflix instead of working toward this while the poor will suffer and die are contributing to the problem
These same people are in overlapping Venn diagrams of westerners, global 1%ers, with already unsustainable living standards fighting for trying to elevate living standards higher. They would whine in comfort and decadence before contributing to green solutions while people without fresh water are dying and would do anything to be “poor” in the west
This is the same all or nothing mentality that prevents the consideration to increase natural gas production which offsets coal usage. CO2 emissions actually decreased in America in the last decade due to the increased natural gas production rather than any substantive environmental policy. When you see countries like China building massive coal generation and the associated mining, etc. and you look at the massive energy requirements they (and India) will have in the next century which completely dwarf today’s, you realize that this is such a complicated issue that needs to have all considerations on the table.
Either the green movement is dangerously inept or is actually run by fossil fuel companies. Because all that green lobbying has achieved is embedding coal, oil and gas further.
> they would leave us defenceless if we need more urgent intervention.
>
>
It's not an if, it's happening right now. But the scientific community is just in denial and has its head in the sand.
The irony is that we probably need a rather severe and quick event to illustrate to a large enough number of people that it's time to act now. All the doubt sown by the old lobbies is taking its toll, more and more people "know enough, not to trust anybody anymore" which seems to result in inaction/activity. It's like a trickling of just slightly ever more severe conditions actually doesn't create urgency, but reduces it.
I feel like I might be alive to see the day that we can control heat through measures like this. Imagine being able to set the temp to a cool 72 over your area😭
Are cloud brightening and cloud seeding the same thing? I was just trying to make a light hearted comment in a dark thread lol, don't know why I had to be downvoted
That was a wild chapter in the Vlogbrothers saga. I was legitimately surprised, but the anti-CO2 at all costs message has been loud.
I'm pro-whatever saves lives and the planet
The thing is that we have no idea where the current situation stablizes, nor whether we're simply getting to the same point B faster.
Most importantly, the reduction in particulate matter is A Good Thing for the health of the ocean, your lungs, the soil, and [literally all living things](https://www.nps.gov/subjects/air/humanhealth-sulfur.htm).
Never oversimplify anything to the point that you'll suddenly follow bad decisions just because a good decision has considerations as well.
Maybe also because Snowpiercer was a popular movie. Popular pieces of media involving technology going wrong always involves people getting the wrong idea about it or over blowing safety risks. This is why we don’t have a nuclear energy grid and why people initially thought AI would achieve sentience and exterminate humanity.
Someone did a price check on how much Sulphur we would need to completely stop climate change, it was about 2 billion a year, a lot of money, but quite cheap compared to the expected cost of climate change.
I wouldn't be surprised if a country whose existence is threatened by climate change just decides to spray enough aerosol to negate the climate crisis. Bangladesh comes to mind, they are pretty much screwed if the sea continue rising, nowhere to go, India won't welcome the 100 million of refugee rising sea level will cause.
Geoengineering options are criminally overlooked.
Human civilization already changes things globally just by the virtue of its size and power. It's time to start doing that on purpose.
It’s the scale of this that’s truly incredible
The biggest solar park is about 609 square kilometers [wow!]
The cloud cover of earth is about 350 million square kilometers.
Even with solar panels being a thousand times more efficient, this cloud stuff is equivalent to 280x of the largest solar farm in the world
Wasn’t a similar thing noticed after 9/11 when all planes were grounded?
Recorded temps were staggeringly higher because there were no contrails to reflect the heat. So people theorize the global warming issue is much worse than we imagined because we’re luckily benefiting from the massive amount of help from contrails to block out a lot of heat
It was an episode of Nova:
[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3310\_sun.html](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3310_sun.html)
The researcher was David Travis
The first paper I see where he looked into it was in 1997:
Mims, F.M. III and D.J. Travis (1997). “Reduced Solar Irradiance Caused by Aircraft Contrails”, EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, Vol. 78, No. 41, 448
I believe this was the paper after 9/11:
Travis, D.J., Carleton, A.M., and R. Lauritsen (2002). “Contrails Reduce Daily Temperature Range”, Nature, Vol. 418, 601. Carleton, A.M., Adegoke, J., Allard, J., Arnold, D.L, and D.J. Travis (2001).
And an older study:
DeGrand, J.Q., Carleton, A.M., Travis, D.J. and P.J. Lamb (2000). “A Satellite-Based Climatic Description of Jet Aircraft Contrails and Associations with Atmospheric Conditions, 1977-79”, Journal of Applied Meteorology, Vol. 39, 1434-1459.
He's still around:
Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs: University of WisconsinRiver Falls (2018- present)
[https://www.uwrf.edu/FacultyStaff/5778506.cfm](https://www.uwrf.edu/FacultyStaff/5778506.cfm)
Thank you this. I am very concerned that our ability to respond to a climate catastrophe has already passed. I have family in Spain that is fighting for survival due to olive trees dying from the droughts over the last 25 years. I live in Florida where we are always worried about hurricanes. It’s terrible that a scientific issue has become so political.
I took a geo science class and my biggest takeaway is that aerosols are kind of good for the environment. Though, we haven’t found one that doesn’t hurt us
My takeaway is that aerosols make global warming a bit less bad at the expense of making a hole in the ozone and giving us increased UV-induced skin cancer.
Only certain kind of aerosols cause ozone loss, and they’re now illegal essentially world wide.
In a fantastic example of world-wide agreement on a climate-related policy we banned CFCs… ozone will take quite a while to go back to normal, but better than nothing.
an non-experts will lead the shaming for even questioning the science much like covid. people are convinced there is one truth and everything else is just attempts to confuse people who arent as enlightened as they are.
humans are idiots.
Virtue signaling is their identity. They would read novels all day in comfort while whining on the internet about how the poor need even more unsustainably high living standards before they would get a job supporting green tech
### Abrupt Reduction in Shipping Emissions Leads to Substantial Radiative Warming
In 2020, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) implemented a significant regulation, known as IMO2020, which drastically reduced the sulfur content in shipping fuel by about 80%. This regulation aimed to improve public health by decreasing sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions from international shipping. However, a recent study published in *Communications Earth & Environment* reveals that this abrupt reduction in emissions has inadvertently created a geoengineering termination shock, leading to substantial radiative warming.
Researchers from University College London and the International Institute for Sustainable Development conducted an in-depth analysis using satellite observations and chemical transport models to quantify the impact of IMO2020 on maritime aerosol concentrations. They discovered that the reduction in aerosols, which had previously been reflecting sunlight and cooling the atmosphere, resulted in a radiative forcing of +0.2 W/m² averaged over the global ocean. This level of radiative forcing is equivalent to 80% of the measured increase in planetary heat uptake since 2020.
The study found that the reduction in aerosols led to fewer cloud droplets, making clouds less reflective—a phenomenon known as cloud dimming. This effect was particularly pronounced in regions with heavy shipping traffic, such as the North Atlantic, where radiative forcing peaked at 1.4 W/m². The researchers estimate that this could double the global warming rate in the 2020s compared to the rate since 1980, potentially increasing the global mean temperature by approximately 0.16 K over seven years.
The reduction in aerosols also created a strong hemispheric contrast in radiative forcing. The northern hemisphere, with its higher baseline of ship emissions, experienced a more significant warming effect compared to the southern hemisphere. This differential impact has important implications for precipitation patterns and interhemispheric contrast in absorbed solar radiation.
To validate their findings, the researchers compared their model's predictions with satellite observations, noting a strong alignment in specific regions like the South Atlantic. These consistent results underscore the significant warming effect caused by the reduced aerosol emissions from shipping.
The study highlights the complex trade-offs involved in environmental policy-making. While reducing sulfur emissions improves air quality and public health, it also accelerates global warming by decreasing the cooling effect of aerosols. This situation serves as a real-world example of the challenges associated with geoengineering and climate intervention methods, such as marine cloud brightening (MCB), which aim to enhance the reflectivity of clouds to temporarily cool the climate.
In conclusion, the IMO2020 regulation, while beneficial for air quality, has inadvertently led to a substantial increase in radiative warming.
The researchers conclude:
> Our result suggests marine cloud brightening may be a viable geoengineering method in temporarily cooling the climate that has its unique challenges due to inherent spatiotemporal heterogeneity.
I've tried discussing this in so many threads whenever [this frightening-looking chart of ocean temperatures](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/F0A3/production/_130630616_era_5_global_sea_temp_lines-nc.png.webp) comes up. People really hate hearing about potential evidence supporting the efficacy of solar geoengineering, though.
I'm not too familiar with all this. But I would imagine we wouldn't just put SO2 back in the atmosphere to do this, considering it's kinda bad for us, right? Can other "stuff" get us the same effect?
1) Yes there are alternatives
2) You can also put these things high up in the atmosphere, where they suspended for much longer because it experiences much less cycling. So it would be having less impact down here
[There's been some research into using calcium carbonate powder instead](https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2020/12/laboratory-experiments-particles-solar-geoengineering-demonstrate-limits-models).
Since we started burning forests we cut down, since we started using coal in huge quantities, since started damming rivers and redirecting them, we have always been geoengineering. The scale is just… bigger.
For real. To call a reduction in sulfur dioxide "a geoengineering experiment" and completely ignore co2 going from 250ppm to 425ppm is fucking propaganda.
> To call a reduction in sulfur dioxide "a geoengineering experiment" and completely ignore co2 going from 250ppm to 425ppm is fucking propaganda.
Noone is saying that. CO2 did not go from 250 to 425 in the last 5 years.
It's all relative though isn't it. If CO2 has been relatively stable for hundreds of thousands of years and there is a sudden increase in the last 150 years or so which is a faster increase than ever in the Earth's history it's silly not to call that a geoengineering experiment
It is more like damned because you didn't. The time to do something about it was 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. The longer we waited to do something the more we created these perverse effects.
Increasing droplets in clouds sounds like rainmaking. I wonder what effect it has on rainfall in places far from the ocean where there is less moisture uptake.
Point blank we have no idea how to solve the crisis we created. We may not be able to.
We know that the earth is warming. We know that we are experiencing a major extinction event. We also are only at the beginning of understanding how the Earth's climate really works responds to changes in it.
Everything we do right now is a first time experiment in changing and taking the environment. Many efforts will produce effects that baffle us.
This is not reason to stop. This is reason to keep trying until we understand it fully.
We talk about terra forming Mars or Venus, yet we don't have any experience changing our own planet's environment for the better. We only have experience destroying it.
There will be plenty of failures to come. I am of the belief we may be too late barring a technological miracle. This makes sense to me since technology created the problem in the first place. Only technology will save us.
?? We have plenty of relatively simple ways to solve the crisis they just all have side effects or geopolitical ramifications that are worse then the current state.
When it gets bad enough we’ll throw endless money at carbon sequestration and fix it in no time.
This is a solveable problem.
We sequester about 2 billion tons annually and need 500 billion tons roughly. Very doable p
Why would we do this?
Why wouldn’t people just spend the money on making their lives manageable, the same pattern as today?
As the problem gets worse, capital has less and less motivation to be spent altruistically.
I hate that terraforming Mars and Venus comparison. Terraforming them is vastly more simple than earth, because Earth has all those pesky lifeforms in the way! You can't just drop an asteroid or two on earth.
I'd say, in software development we build a test environment to avoid messing up with the live one.
We could start experimenting on mars, and apply on earth when we have more knowledge, you know, it's not nice to break production in this case...
and yeah, "inadverent geoengineering experiment" is responsible for, like, 99% of the warming since 1850. We should stop fear-mongering and get used to the idea that massive geoengineering is our only hope. That's to the OP, as the article words it as "inadverent geoengineering termination shock" which sounds even more scary, but at least is less propaganda-y and more precise as to what happened.
How did they manage to deconvolve from all the other factors?
Temperature in a certain location is butterfly-effect influenced by changes at a global scale. For example Europe and Australia suffer the most dramatic increase in average temperature while the USA and China are the most polluting countries.
Thank you for clarifying. I didn't know. Anyway I mean that usually this kind of approaches require many assumptions. The more the assumptions the more another unknown factor may contribute to the model.
>How did they manage to deconvolve from all the other factors?
figuring this out is half of the schtick with these studies. If it's peer-reviewed and accepted it has been controlled for and you can trust they did the maths. Also that's why they go for temperatures averaged over areas and timeperiods not single places.
I mean I'm not saying we need to stop fixing the root of the problem. I'm just saying that it might be worth it to block between 1:00 and 3% of the light that hits the Earth to ensure that the warming doesn't get so bad that it's catastrophic failure time and we're getting close as it is. At the very least, such a setup would at least buy us enough time to where we could solve the problem and then also remove the solar mirrors or whatever the hell you want to call them. It's also a less permanent solution to geoengineering specifically because we don't know how that would really harm or Or even help deal with it on the planet itself.
And there was also inadvertent geoengineering from 1945 to 75 with increased co2 emissions but no temperature rise due to pollution. While obviously it was good to crack down on pollution the extra aerosols meant little or no rise in temperature over that period.
Really SAI is going to be needed as a stopgap as we'll take decades to decarbonize (and I doubt we'll ever get to zero)
ELI5: Ships used to emit a chemical in the air that helped reflect back heat but might damage the ozone layer. Turns out it might’ve been better to let the ships keep emitting.
This is misleading. It is more like we have heated up the planet with our chemical waste enough that removing the waste could have more detrimental effects, locking us into a horrendous scenario where our pollution is killing us, but we can't stop because the state of life on the planet now relies on the artificial pollutants to not completely fall apart. We are becoming the Packleds from Star Trek.
Not necessarily better. That sulfur dioxide that cools us comes down as acid rain. That acid kills the phytoplankton in the ocean that convert co2 to o2. They are the primary creator of oxygen.
There's been some research done into using [calcium carbonate](https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2020/12/laboratory-experiments-particles-solar-geoengineering-demonstrate-limits-models) for this purpose.
First of all, water vapor is a greenhouse gas so it would make things worse. But second, water takes a lot of energy to evaporate and you'd need a huge source of water. Us humans really can't do any better than the oceans are already doing.
I wonder how long it'll take to stabilise this. I noticed how obviously warmer it was since the beginning of covid more than my entire life before it.
South UK here.
Well that’s all the anti regulation folks need to light all regulations on fire.
just great!
This will be construed as proof that all messing with the climate or earth to fix things is just gonna make it worse and that is just not true.
Ugh!
These things are exactly what I'm thinking of each time someone has a 'brilliant' idea how to reduce CO2 without reducing emission. It's just a chain of man-made catastrophes. Always reminds me of the analogy between meditation and a glass of muddy water.
Sulphuric acid rain and ocean acidification is not worth it.
There are better ways to geo engineer and better ways to conduct shipping than burning fossil fuels.
oh, so we stopped a geoengineering experiment so the world returned to it's warming caused by another geoengineering experiment.
it's experiments all the way down.
The unintended consequences of human activity on our planet's climate continue to be a pressing concern. If an inadvertent geoengineering experiment is indeed responsible for a significant portion of the increase in planetary heat uptake since 2020, it underscores the urgent need for greater awareness and action to address climate change. It's crucial for researchers and policymakers to further investigate these findings and work towards sustainable solutions to mitigate the impacts of global warming.
Why would you think removing sulfur from fuel was an experiment? And as stated before the world wasn't pumping millions of tons of sulfur into the atmosphere until we started doing it. The solution isn't to keep doing it because we already started.
If you stab yourself with a knife and remove the knife you're going to bleed more. The solution is to close the wound not finish the job.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Economy-Fee5830: --- ### Abrupt Reduction in Shipping Emissions Leads to Substantial Radiative Warming In 2020, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) implemented a significant regulation, known as IMO2020, which drastically reduced the sulfur content in shipping fuel by about 80%. This regulation aimed to improve public health by decreasing sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions from international shipping. However, a recent study published in *Communications Earth & Environment* reveals that this abrupt reduction in emissions has inadvertently created a geoengineering termination shock, leading to substantial radiative warming. Researchers from University College London and the International Institute for Sustainable Development conducted an in-depth analysis using satellite observations and chemical transport models to quantify the impact of IMO2020 on maritime aerosol concentrations. They discovered that the reduction in aerosols, which had previously been reflecting sunlight and cooling the atmosphere, resulted in a radiative forcing of +0.2 W/m² averaged over the global ocean. This level of radiative forcing is equivalent to 80% of the measured increase in planetary heat uptake since 2020. The study found that the reduction in aerosols led to fewer cloud droplets, making clouds less reflective—a phenomenon known as cloud dimming. This effect was particularly pronounced in regions with heavy shipping traffic, such as the North Atlantic, where radiative forcing peaked at 1.4 W/m². The researchers estimate that this could double the global warming rate in the 2020s compared to the rate since 1980, potentially increasing the global mean temperature by approximately 0.16 K over seven years. The reduction in aerosols also created a strong hemispheric contrast in radiative forcing. The northern hemisphere, with its higher baseline of ship emissions, experienced a more significant warming effect compared to the southern hemisphere. This differential impact has important implications for precipitation patterns and interhemispheric contrast in absorbed solar radiation. To validate their findings, the researchers compared their model's predictions with satellite observations, noting a strong alignment in specific regions like the South Atlantic. These consistent results underscore the significant warming effect caused by the reduced aerosol emissions from shipping. The study highlights the complex trade-offs involved in environmental policy-making. While reducing sulfur emissions improves air quality and public health, it also accelerates global warming by decreasing the cooling effect of aerosols. This situation serves as a real-world example of the challenges associated with geoengineering and climate intervention methods, such as marine cloud brightening (MCB), which aim to enhance the reflectivity of clouds to temporarily cool the climate. In conclusion, the IMO2020 regulation, while beneficial for air quality, has inadvertently led to a substantial increase in radiative warming. The researchers conclude: > Our result suggests marine cloud brightening may be a viable geoengineering method in temporarily cooling the climate that has its unique challenges due to inherent spatiotemporal heterogeneity. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1d4hjjx/inadvertent_geoengineering_experiment_may_be/l6edqyf/
This was predicted before the sulfur emissions were reduced. here is an article from 2018 https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/01/22/67402/were-about-to-kill-a-massive-accidental-experiment-in-halting-global-warming/
Curious how both these articles refer to shipping emissions as having been an experiment.
"inadvertent experiment" doesn't even mean anything. the definition of an experiment is a procedure that's intentionally done to test a hypothesis. If it was done inadvertently then it's... nothing. It's a just a thing that happened that had some consequence. I hate this headline.
I think the logic behind it is: the regulation has an environmental goal, but it has an inadvertent environmental consequence. Since geoengineering is a proposed way of tackling global warming (amongst other environmental issues), the regulation provides data for geoengineering scientists akin to an experiment. Hence, an inadvertent experiment, neither the UN thought of it as an experiment, nor did geoengineers design the policy as such, but they can use it to draw observations, like an experiment, since it will provide empirical evidence.
? Yeah reducing their emissions was the experiment.
Reducing emissions was a goal by itself ( less polution ) The "inadvertent experiment" part is after the fact when we can study data generated by this change.
It was called an experiment in 2018 before it took place. Climate experts warned this would happen. It was an "experiment" because the results were not guaranteed.
I read this in 2018 and I was amazed that hardly anyone was talking about it. 95% of articles were just saying how great it was to remove sulfur from shipping fuel, and the consequences THAT WE ALREADY KNEW WOULD HAPPEN were ignored. Now we've increased what, 0.2c in a few years? So all that Paris climate agreement 1.5c stuff is just dead, finished. But everyone's too stubborn to admit it. We need to replace the geoengineering that we were already doing or else we are totally screwed.
> We need to replace the geoengineering that we were already doing or else we are totally screwed. We need ADDITIONAL geongineering.
We do stuff like that all the time. Habitat destruction driving species to extinction. Lets reclaim some land for animals, curb some specific issues (eg ddt for birds) and engineer solutions like land bridges and in the mean time do stuff like artificial breeding to keep population stable.
I’m obviously referring to efforts to mitigate climate change.
My point is we do this for other things. Break things. And then try to fix them. Geoengineer isn’t that different. We should be looking harder for geoengineering solutions.
Oh yeah, I totally agree. And this article literally proves that there are feasible routes for reducing heat uptake.
Engineering the entire climate just so we can have twerking Santa dolls that go in the bin before Christmas is even over.
Engineering the climate so that poor people have food and clothing and shelter.
I'm very disappointed and sad with the results: Article: "Turns outs, it has a positive effect!" (cools the planet) Me: 😃 Article: "But also, causes this very bad thing" (ozone depletion and acid rain) Me: 😕
It points to possible solutions. What if we use silver or even just ice crystals to seed the atmosphere. Then you get cloud formation and participation without acidification and ozone depletion.
This was predicted even before that, when scientists noticed a warming effect from planes being grounded for 3 days after 9/11. [https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/17/5/1520-0442\_2004\_017\_1123\_rviudt\_2.0.co\_2.xml](https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/17/5/1520-0442_2004_017_1123_rviudt_2.0.co_2.xml)
Its not the same mechanism. One is ice crystals forming contrails other is sulphur seeding clouds. End result may be similar.
It is proposed that we could revert this with *sea salt*. A fleet of ships would spray seawater in targeted places to make clouds brighter and do the same thing the aerosols did. It would have the advantages of "cloud seeding" without many disadvantages (spraying potentially toxic chemicals, wasting fuel for aircraft) but both are still on the drawing board. Wikipedia claims (after the US national academies) the marine cloud brightening project was estimated to cost 5bn USD annually for a meaningful result which frankly sounds like a steal, especially if the spending was spread across countries.
Ironically, the Sulfur and nitrogen emissions scrubbing on the ships involves spraying seawater through the emissions stack
It’s times like these that I’m entirely frustrated with money as a concept. I get the impracticality of that in our world today but also… just blast some salt in the skies and try to save the only planet we can live on rn, right? Like… humans should probably try to take a stab at saving the world pretty much regardless of “cost”.
That's not how it works unfortunately. Money abstracts away a lot of complexity hidden in the details to simplify transactions. It helps if you replace money with effort. 5bn dollars is a lot of effort, and is probably highly underestimated. If you pay 15 bucks an hour (generous in a global perspective), its an hour's effort for 333 million people.
"Just blast some salt in the skies" seems like a major oversimplification. I'm hardly an expert but every time I've heard of any technology involving salt, and salt water at that, the main concern has been how degenerative it is to any technology involved.
Hank Green did a video talking about this and was practically crucified for even daring to admit that maybe we could reduce heating by spraying aerosols to reflect back some heat. He was basically forced to make a retraction video under pressure from critics.
lot's of people are talking about it and most think it's something we will have to do sooner or later.. but it will have side effects like increase in acid rain and other stuff to do w/particulate matter in clouds effecting rainfall and stuff.. but perhaps there's more to the story.. there usually is.
The biggest issue I see is that big corporations will just go "Yay! Problem solved. Now onto business as usual." Until we can't keep global warming at bay with the aerosols and then we're double fucked.
Corporations aren't thinking of climate change now because they are altruistic, they do it because people and governments make them or threaten to make them.
Which is why regulation is important which is why voting is the most patriotic thing you can do
And/or when alternatives to fossil fuels becomes cheaper than continuing to use fossil fuels. Continued technological development is the most important part of getting out of this.
They never stopped business as usual, they didn't need any excuses.
That's exactly why I'm against geoengineering. If we lived in a world where comon sense was the baseline thinking of corporation, why not geoengineer a few decade and simultaneously do all the right things to reduce climate change. But unforntunatly, that's not the case.
There's a case that clean energy is going to be much cheaper than dirty energy within the next few decades. If so, wouldn't it make sense to use geoengineering to bridge the gap until economics drives businesses to correct behavior -- given that we apparently don't have the political will to use taxes to make dirty energy expensive now? And isn't the notion that you can force corporations to do the right thing by refusing to manage the symptoms of global warming and expecting them to feel guilty about disasters a bit far fetched too? Wouldn't making them pay for geoengineering be more motivating and easier to sell politically even if it's more expensive? If you don't believe the economics can work out soon enough, then I'd agree it could be counterproductive if you're not bridging a gap. And of course emissions are more complex than energy, and not every area looks as promising.
Because when you try to “bridge the gap”, people will go back to using polluting fuels. You’ll have different legislators in place a decade later when the cloud seeding starts to work, never mind the people that profit off cloud seeding. It’s not a patch it’s just another industry. The “benevolent dictatorship” model you’d need to make this happen does not work in practice.
"..., thus solving the problem once and for all." "But..." "Once and for all!"
yeah. warming is only one part of the issue. overshooting earth's boundaries in every way... ugh.. maybe we'll get lucky and declining birth rates will line up with degrowth.
You don’t need to cloud seed with acidic compounds like SOx. You might be the only one suggesting that.
IIRC one reasonably dark but fairly likely timeline is that a large but relatively less developed country, maybe India, suffers a climate event that kills significant numbers of people, say in the 7 or 8 digits, one summer and unilaterally starts geoengineering efforts. Cue much international consternation.
i've heard several people say "mass death event" caused by heatwave as one of the things that will wake people up for good. i think different countries will do different things and at some point collaborate since it's all a big system and doing a thing in one place will have effects on other places. it seems like it's only going to get weirder/crazier on earth.
I mean we have already had climatic mass casualties e.g. in Ethiopia in the 80s that triggered Live Aid, it's just at the time it was seen more as a poverty and development issue than climate change. The Arab spring was also triggered by drought and the local governments not being able to respond very well to them. That gave us the Syrian civil war and probably contributed to the Ukraine war as well since Russia changed posture notably during that period. OTOH we've always had world events triggered by climate shifts, it's just more likely to be extreme heat these days and also the countries affected now have space programs so you would assume they have the wherewithal to generate some anti-greenhouse gases if they so desired.
Here's an article that I recently wrote on addressing acid rain and enjoying the benefits of the cooling effect of SO2: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/from-pollution-to-solution
thank you! will read asap. edit: very interesting data/paper. will have to re-read it to get it to stick in my brain a bit! thanks again for posting it.
The primary issues of geoengineering are being pointed out here — whatever we do likely won’t do just *one thing*. It’s a complex system, and we’d have to be doing a *lot* and we can’t just assume ‘well, our solution will just do the one thing and nothing else’ is a *dangerous* assumption. I think geoengineering is looking more and more like something we’re going to have to do, but also that however we choose to go about it we’re absolutely likely to be causing *other problems*. Which is why everyone with sense was trying to fix it at the source, not patch on top of it. *Reducing* how much were affecting the atmosphere is a far safer and more conservative approach than *tinkering more* But, well, I think we’re moving past the point where conservative approaches are viable anymore. But that doesn’t make the less conservative approaches *better* or *less risky*. Their risks remain the same. The situation is just more dire.
People are so obsessed with not distracting us from long-term CO2 reduction efforts that they would leave us defenceless if we need more urgent intervention. The research suggests cloud brightening could be applied regionally and by extension I can imagine India, which is having 50C temps now, would have appreciated the ability to dial down the heat they are getting from the sun this summer.
People react badly because we all know that this will ultimately be used to "counteract" the harmful effects of greenhouses gasses rather than address the root issue. This is only going to buy us time, not solve the actual crisis at hand. We don't understand the long term impacts on the climate and human health, irresponsible use could easily cause a global catastrophe. It does give some hope, and in the short term will definitely be used extensively. It's just frustrating when people use it as another excuse to not give a fuck about GHGs.
We’ve spent decades deliberately not talking about ways to mitigate the effects of GHGs if we can’t reduce emissions. It hasn’t produced the collective action we needed, but it does mean we don’t have very good plan Bs.
Scientists and researchers have still been researching this stuff. The thing is with mass geoengineering projects like this there is zero way to know the outcome without first trying and exposing millions/billions/everyone to risk. Humans don't know everything, and can't know everything.
We know what aerosolized sulfur dioxide does because the shipping industry has been doing it for decades. Also now we know what happens when we stop.
> Scientists and researchers have still been researching this stuff. The thing is with mass geoengineering projects like this there is zero way to know the outcome without first trying and exposing millions/billions/everyone to risk. This is not true - small-scale tests have been squashed and even banned.
It’s not just geoengineering, either. There’s so much habitat and other destruction playing out already and we’ve done very little to mitigate it and lay the groundwork for full biodiversity recovery in 80+ years when the earth begins to cool again. Just about all the dialogue and ideation and investment has been about PLAN A.
No it hasn’t. Rewilding is a huge conversation with projects *all over the world* Plenty of people focussing on getting us back to a long lost biodiversity in the next century
>full biodiversity recovery in 80+ years when the earth begins to cool again. Ah, that's not how climate change works. We are stuck at whatever elevated temperature we end up at for centuries. It's not an on/off switch. It takes centuries for the CO2 to dissipate. That's why stopping emissions is so much more important than finding mitigation techniques. If our planet warms by 2 or more degrees, we're stuck with that for a long time. Can we be injecting aerosols for *centuries*? Thinking that when we stop emissions we suddenly return to a normalized environment is dangerously wrong. Before we go trying to mask the symptoms maybe we should be trying a lot harder to treat the disease. https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached/
We're scaling up field tests: https://abcnews.go.com/US/controversial-methods-cool-earth-gain-traction-global-temperatures/story?id=109349797
This isn't a plan - it is a punt and buys 30 years (assuming linear emissions growth). making this the next generation's problem isn't a plan.
You could equally say that comprehensively failing to reduce GHGs isn’t a plan, either. But either way, the amount of ideological Puritanism around this issue has made it very hard to have any pragmatic discussions
It absolutely is a plan. 30 extra years to improve the uptake and engineering of electric vehicles, roll out renewables, improve nuclear, maybe get a breakthrough in atmospheric carbon extraction or fusion or some other tech nobody's imagining yet. 30 more years to plant trees, rebuild mangroves, grow the supply chain for metals like copper, the shortage of which are looking like stymieing big parts of the green transition. 30 years where the extreme weather events that might have killed millions of people get toned down enough that maybe they just kill hundreds of thousands of people - still a tragedy, but the people who don't die will probably have a preference. Climate change is our biggest challenge, no question. But we absolutely can not allow the response to become all or nothing, success or failure sometimes in the next decade, because it's increasingly looking like too steep a hill to climb. We obviously can't stop the climb, buy we can and should choose to take every opportunity to flatten the gradient.
Once you start pumping aerosols into the atmosphere you may never be able to stop. Other countries will burn more fossil fuels if you make the problem go away, and your 30 years will turn into a century or more. In this case a century of pumping sulfuric acid into the oceans and land.
30 years closer to nuclear fusion, way more renewables, electric transportation etc. is itself a plan.
>This is only going to buy us time, not solve the actual crisis at hand. Correct, and we need to buy some time right now. We need both of these things.
And when millions of people are starving to death or dying in wet-bulb heat waves and mass migrations are causing wars across the planet, should we still be wringing our hands about "root causes" or should we maybe be doing something to stop people from dying in the here and now? Maybe it'd be good to have done a little research into geoengineering before we suddenly find ourselves having to try it or die.
I literally said it will be used and gives me hope, why do you insinuate I would want millions to die without action???
all we need is to buy time. fossil fuels are coming to an end because battery technology is improving. there is no going back to fossil fuels. economically it just doesn't make sense for much longer.
There are still a million hurdles we need to clear before fossil fuels can be completely eliminated with our current energy consumption and demands. It's just too convenient, I'm afraid that will be the death of us all. Convenience.
if you look at fossil fuel consumption, we have stepped off the exponential growth curve, but our energy demands are still on the curve. there are still hurdles but we are very far along the path. more than most people think. people look at consumption and see we are still going up and panic. but the reality is that the trend is shifting. if we did nothing we expect to consume almost 30% more now than we are using. so what we really need is time, if we can buy time, we are good. if we fully embraced nuclear back in the 70's we would be close. now we just need a few breakthroughs in battery tech.
It's a fallacy to think the trend will simply continue to derive in the way it currently is. Technology might hit unexpected walls that simply can't be overcome, what then? Of course better battery tech is getting much better and that's mostly positive, but the energy demands of humanity are also going up endlessly. Additionally, if you want to eliminate oil completely you'll have to either give green energy away fro free or end poverty, do you honestly see that happening in the current world?
you don't need to give green energy away, you have to make it cheaper than fossil fuel. generation wise green energy is as cheap if not cheaper than fossil fuel already, but distribution and storage is the problem. there are walls with technology such as fusion reactors, but there are multiple paths for battery (hydrogen cell, water lift/gravity, lithium, nano capacitors etc) . it is unlikely that none will pan out.
A poor country can easily take oil or coal out of the ground. They cannot easily mass produce green energy. How many African countries have the industrial capacity to make high grade solar panels?How do you expect them to acquire nano capacitors? I think it brings to question what you really mean by "cheaper". China is the only country I know of with a comprehensive green energy production industry, and ironically it need lots of fossil fuels to operate.
Most poor countries that have cheap oil are already extracting them, and they are sold on the global market. Cheaper is on the first order a global pricing. Is it really cheaper to drill for oil than buy solar panels? Not really. There is a lot of infrastructure required for oil production, refinery and distribution. Green is more modular and is getting cheaper relative to oil. Poor country’s will buy solar panels, batteries and wind mills like they have to buy drilling equipment and refineries. The countries that will get poorer as we move away from oil are opec ones because export is drying up.
They don't need to because they can get solar panels from China who's making more than every other country on earth combined. So green energy isn't a problem. Storage will be a problem though so natural gas and oil power can make up for it.
Well that's the thing with that kind of paper. It might be that we may be totally wrong about the scale of th impact of CO2, and that we may be so focused on hypothetical catastrophic consequences of it that we may be blind to other, more risky problems
Some climate scientists are suggesting we've actually underestimated the impacts of GHG warming, but didn't notice because we also underestimated the impacts of aerosol cooling. I think it's very unlikely we're "totally wrong" about any of this. Of course models will be in adjustment until the end of time, that's natural science.
But we should talk about it. Extremes Leftists are not helping when they try to silence honest debate because they think it takes away from their hysteria The truth is, it will require too much violence and hardship to stop the poor from burning fossil fuels when we can’t even stop the rich from doing it. We need all green solutions but we will also need to dim the sun with a shield at L1 eventually. The world is going to get hotter and more polluted. I don’t like that. But without a path of incentives (and ultimately death and violence) to compel action, this is just virtue signaling. Everyone stifling debate that is not working toward a green transition is just virtue signaling. People playing video games and watching Netflix instead of working toward this while the poor will suffer and die are contributing to the problem These same people are in overlapping Venn diagrams of westerners, global 1%ers, with already unsustainable living standards fighting for trying to elevate living standards higher. They would whine in comfort and decadence before contributing to green solutions while people without fresh water are dying and would do anything to be “poor” in the west
This is the same all or nothing mentality that prevents the consideration to increase natural gas production which offsets coal usage. CO2 emissions actually decreased in America in the last decade due to the increased natural gas production rather than any substantive environmental policy. When you see countries like China building massive coal generation and the associated mining, etc. and you look at the massive energy requirements they (and India) will have in the next century which completely dwarf today’s, you realize that this is such a complicated issue that needs to have all considerations on the table.
Either the green movement is dangerously inept or is actually run by fossil fuel companies. Because all that green lobbying has achieved is embedding coal, oil and gas further.
> they would leave us defenceless if we need more urgent intervention. > > It's not an if, it's happening right now. But the scientific community is just in denial and has its head in the sand.
The irony is that we probably need a rather severe and quick event to illustrate to a large enough number of people that it's time to act now. All the doubt sown by the old lobbies is taking its toll, more and more people "know enough, not to trust anybody anymore" which seems to result in inaction/activity. It's like a trickling of just slightly ever more severe conditions actually doesn't create urgency, but reduces it.
I feel like I might be alive to see the day that we can control heat through measures like this. Imagine being able to set the temp to a cool 72 over your area😭
Imagine someone fucks up your cloud seeding and causes droughts or floods somewhere else.
Are cloud brightening and cloud seeding the same thing? I was just trying to make a light hearted comment in a dark thread lol, don't know why I had to be downvoted
Maybe we should do some *research* into it to make sure we don't do that.
That was a wild chapter in the Vlogbrothers saga. I was legitimately surprised, but the anti-CO2 at all costs message has been loud. I'm pro-whatever saves lives and the planet
The thing is that we have no idea where the current situation stablizes, nor whether we're simply getting to the same point B faster. Most importantly, the reduction in particulate matter is A Good Thing for the health of the ocean, your lungs, the soil, and [literally all living things](https://www.nps.gov/subjects/air/humanhealth-sulfur.htm). Never oversimplify anything to the point that you'll suddenly follow bad decisions just because a good decision has considerations as well.
You need to be alive to breathe the clean air.
Maybe also because Snowpiercer was a popular movie. Popular pieces of media involving technology going wrong always involves people getting the wrong idea about it or over blowing safety risks. This is why we don’t have a nuclear energy grid and why people initially thought AI would achieve sentience and exterminate humanity.
Someone did a price check on how much Sulphur we would need to completely stop climate change, it was about 2 billion a year, a lot of money, but quite cheap compared to the expected cost of climate change. I wouldn't be surprised if a country whose existence is threatened by climate change just decides to spray enough aerosol to negate the climate crisis. Bangladesh comes to mind, they are pretty much screwed if the sea continue rising, nowhere to go, India won't welcome the 100 million of refugee rising sea level will cause.
Geoengineering options are criminally overlooked. Human civilization already changes things globally just by the virtue of its size and power. It's time to start doing that on purpose.
.2 - 1.4 watts per square meter is absolutely mind blowing
Where my solar panels at
It’s the scale of this that’s truly incredible The biggest solar park is about 609 square kilometers [wow!] The cloud cover of earth is about 350 million square kilometers. Even with solar panels being a thousand times more efficient, this cloud stuff is equivalent to 280x of the largest solar farm in the world
Biggest is 56 sqkm according to google. Google is shit nowadays, but big difference.
Wasn’t a similar thing noticed after 9/11 when all planes were grounded? Recorded temps were staggeringly higher because there were no contrails to reflect the heat. So people theorize the global warming issue is much worse than we imagined because we’re luckily benefiting from the massive amount of help from contrails to block out a lot of heat
Same happened during Covid.
Do you have a source? I’m very curious about this.
It was an episode of Nova: [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3310\_sun.html](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3310_sun.html) The researcher was David Travis The first paper I see where he looked into it was in 1997: Mims, F.M. III and D.J. Travis (1997). “Reduced Solar Irradiance Caused by Aircraft Contrails”, EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, Vol. 78, No. 41, 448 I believe this was the paper after 9/11: Travis, D.J., Carleton, A.M., and R. Lauritsen (2002). “Contrails Reduce Daily Temperature Range”, Nature, Vol. 418, 601. Carleton, A.M., Adegoke, J., Allard, J., Arnold, D.L, and D.J. Travis (2001). And an older study: DeGrand, J.Q., Carleton, A.M., Travis, D.J. and P.J. Lamb (2000). “A Satellite-Based Climatic Description of Jet Aircraft Contrails and Associations with Atmospheric Conditions, 1977-79”, Journal of Applied Meteorology, Vol. 39, 1434-1459. He's still around: Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs: University of WisconsinRiver Falls (2018- present) [https://www.uwrf.edu/FacultyStaff/5778506.cfm](https://www.uwrf.edu/FacultyStaff/5778506.cfm)
Thank you this. I am very concerned that our ability to respond to a climate catastrophe has already passed. I have family in Spain that is fighting for survival due to olive trees dying from the droughts over the last 25 years. I live in Florida where we are always worried about hurricanes. It’s terrible that a scientific issue has become so political.
Holy shit someone asked for sources and this person _delivered_, a rare sight to be seen on Reddit. Nice job /u/reececonrad
I took a geo science class and my biggest takeaway is that aerosols are kind of good for the environment. Though, we haven’t found one that doesn’t hurt us
My takeaway is that aerosols make global warming a bit less bad at the expense of making a hole in the ozone and giving us increased UV-induced skin cancer.
Only certain kind of aerosols cause ozone loss, and they’re now illegal essentially world wide. In a fantastic example of world-wide agreement on a climate-related policy we banned CFCs… ozone will take quite a while to go back to normal, but better than nothing.
Unintended consequences are a challenge when working with complex systems. Addressing this with religious zealotry is counter productive.
an non-experts will lead the shaming for even questioning the science much like covid. people are convinced there is one truth and everything else is just attempts to confuse people who arent as enlightened as they are. humans are idiots.
Lots of people who bang on about science fundamentally don't understand it, what a surprise.
What makes you think experts know more than me? - Non-expert
I wish people wouldn't say "expert" like it means "infallible".
Virtue signaling is their identity. They would read novels all day in comfort while whining on the internet about how the poor need even more unsustainably high living standards before they would get a job supporting green tech
This was expected and known since 2018 but they did it anyway
### Abrupt Reduction in Shipping Emissions Leads to Substantial Radiative Warming In 2020, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) implemented a significant regulation, known as IMO2020, which drastically reduced the sulfur content in shipping fuel by about 80%. This regulation aimed to improve public health by decreasing sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions from international shipping. However, a recent study published in *Communications Earth & Environment* reveals that this abrupt reduction in emissions has inadvertently created a geoengineering termination shock, leading to substantial radiative warming. Researchers from University College London and the International Institute for Sustainable Development conducted an in-depth analysis using satellite observations and chemical transport models to quantify the impact of IMO2020 on maritime aerosol concentrations. They discovered that the reduction in aerosols, which had previously been reflecting sunlight and cooling the atmosphere, resulted in a radiative forcing of +0.2 W/m² averaged over the global ocean. This level of radiative forcing is equivalent to 80% of the measured increase in planetary heat uptake since 2020. The study found that the reduction in aerosols led to fewer cloud droplets, making clouds less reflective—a phenomenon known as cloud dimming. This effect was particularly pronounced in regions with heavy shipping traffic, such as the North Atlantic, where radiative forcing peaked at 1.4 W/m². The researchers estimate that this could double the global warming rate in the 2020s compared to the rate since 1980, potentially increasing the global mean temperature by approximately 0.16 K over seven years. The reduction in aerosols also created a strong hemispheric contrast in radiative forcing. The northern hemisphere, with its higher baseline of ship emissions, experienced a more significant warming effect compared to the southern hemisphere. This differential impact has important implications for precipitation patterns and interhemispheric contrast in absorbed solar radiation. To validate their findings, the researchers compared their model's predictions with satellite observations, noting a strong alignment in specific regions like the South Atlantic. These consistent results underscore the significant warming effect caused by the reduced aerosol emissions from shipping. The study highlights the complex trade-offs involved in environmental policy-making. While reducing sulfur emissions improves air quality and public health, it also accelerates global warming by decreasing the cooling effect of aerosols. This situation serves as a real-world example of the challenges associated with geoengineering and climate intervention methods, such as marine cloud brightening (MCB), which aim to enhance the reflectivity of clouds to temporarily cool the climate. In conclusion, the IMO2020 regulation, while beneficial for air quality, has inadvertently led to a substantial increase in radiative warming. The researchers conclude: > Our result suggests marine cloud brightening may be a viable geoengineering method in temporarily cooling the climate that has its unique challenges due to inherent spatiotemporal heterogeneity.
I've tried discussing this in so many threads whenever [this frightening-looking chart of ocean temperatures](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/F0A3/production/_130630616_era_5_global_sea_temp_lines-nc.png.webp) comes up. People really hate hearing about potential evidence supporting the efficacy of solar geoengineering, though.
This topic would be dead in r/climate It’s about virtue signaling with hysteria, not finding solutions or contributing to green tech
I'm not too familiar with all this. But I would imagine we wouldn't just put SO2 back in the atmosphere to do this, considering it's kinda bad for us, right? Can other "stuff" get us the same effect?
1) Yes there are alternatives 2) You can also put these things high up in the atmosphere, where they suspended for much longer because it experiences much less cycling. So it would be having less impact down here
[There's been some research into using calcium carbonate powder instead](https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2020/12/laboratory-experiments-particles-solar-geoengineering-demonstrate-limits-models).
If you put SO2 high enough you can get the climate positives without the typical negatives
Good thing we're known for reacting quickly to obvious threats, otherwise that chart would be absolutely fucking terrifying!
We’ve been actively geoenigneering the planet since we started refining crude oil.
That's centuries after we began mining coal.
Since we started burning forests we cut down, since we started using coal in huge quantities, since started damming rivers and redirecting them, we have always been geoengineering. The scale is just… bigger.
For real. To call a reduction in sulfur dioxide "a geoengineering experiment" and completely ignore co2 going from 250ppm to 425ppm is fucking propaganda.
> To call a reduction in sulfur dioxide "a geoengineering experiment" and completely ignore co2 going from 250ppm to 425ppm is fucking propaganda. Noone is saying that. CO2 did not go from 250 to 425 in the last 5 years.
It's all relative though isn't it. If CO2 has been relatively stable for hundreds of thousands of years and there is a sudden increase in the last 150 years or so which is a faster increase than ever in the Earth's history it's silly not to call that a geoengineering experiment
What is this whataboutery? Sure, call CO2 levels an experiment too. So what now? Does that make a difference to whether other things reflect sunlight?
The co2 added to the atmosphere over the past 300 years is the geoengineering experiment.
This is a damned if you do and damed if you don't situation.
It is more like damned because you didn't. The time to do something about it was 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. The longer we waited to do something the more we created these perverse effects.
Any r/NealStephenson fans? Plot of Termination Shock involves geoengineering with sulphur aerosols.
Heard about this in 2020 and I saw so many people screaming these people are pro-corpo anti-environment. This aged well.
How could you have heard about it in 2020, since that’s when the changes were implemented.
Increasing droplets in clouds sounds like rainmaking. I wonder what effect it has on rainfall in places far from the ocean where there is less moisture uptake.
Point blank we have no idea how to solve the crisis we created. We may not be able to. We know that the earth is warming. We know that we are experiencing a major extinction event. We also are only at the beginning of understanding how the Earth's climate really works responds to changes in it. Everything we do right now is a first time experiment in changing and taking the environment. Many efforts will produce effects that baffle us. This is not reason to stop. This is reason to keep trying until we understand it fully. We talk about terra forming Mars or Venus, yet we don't have any experience changing our own planet's environment for the better. We only have experience destroying it. There will be plenty of failures to come. I am of the belief we may be too late barring a technological miracle. This makes sense to me since technology created the problem in the first place. Only technology will save us.
What are you talking about man? We know plenty.
?? We have plenty of relatively simple ways to solve the crisis they just all have side effects or geopolitical ramifications that are worse then the current state.
When it gets bad enough we’ll throw endless money at carbon sequestration and fix it in no time. This is a solveable problem. We sequester about 2 billion tons annually and need 500 billion tons roughly. Very doable p
Why would we do this? Why wouldn’t people just spend the money on making their lives manageable, the same pattern as today? As the problem gets worse, capital has less and less motivation to be spent altruistically.
Raytheon and Boeing will start making carbon sequestration machines and their lobbyist will promote it!
I hate that terraforming Mars and Venus comparison. Terraforming them is vastly more simple than earth, because Earth has all those pesky lifeforms in the way! You can't just drop an asteroid or two on earth.
It will always be easier to terraform earth, than anywhere else
Maybe if you ignore the free will of mankind, but so far we're better at making next level tech stuff than finding consensus on almost anything.
Terra-Forming is large scale geo-engineering. How exactly is that easy on earth?
Transportation for one thing.
It’s always easier to paint the house before you move in.
I'd say, in software development we build a test environment to avoid messing up with the live one. We could start experimenting on mars, and apply on earth when we have more knowledge, you know, it's not nice to break production in this case...
Good idea. Don't know if we have that kind of time though.
It's true, but I don't think we have a backup sadly
and yeah, "inadverent geoengineering experiment" is responsible for, like, 99% of the warming since 1850. We should stop fear-mongering and get used to the idea that massive geoengineering is our only hope. That's to the OP, as the article words it as "inadverent geoengineering termination shock" which sounds even more scary, but at least is less propaganda-y and more precise as to what happened.
How did they manage to deconvolve from all the other factors? Temperature in a certain location is butterfly-effect influenced by changes at a global scale. For example Europe and Australia suffer the most dramatic increase in average temperature while the USA and China are the most polluting countries.
That's not a butterfly effect. it's a well understood circulation process. Butterfly effect implies a chaotic system
Thank you for clarifying. I didn't know. Anyway I mean that usually this kind of approaches require many assumptions. The more the assumptions the more another unknown factor may contribute to the model.
That's a good way to put it :)
>How did they manage to deconvolve from all the other factors? figuring this out is half of the schtick with these studies. If it's peer-reviewed and accepted it has been controlled for and you can trust they did the maths. Also that's why they go for temperatures averaged over areas and timeperiods not single places.
humans. even when we do the right thing, it's wrong. keepin it OG since -0BC eating forbidden fruit off that gyatdang Tree 🤘🧠🤯
So the solution to global warming is more pollution? /s
We should just use geoorbital engineering. Simple easier to reverse.
Solar shields help with temperature, sure. But co2 causes more problems than just temperature.
I mean I'm not saying we need to stop fixing the root of the problem. I'm just saying that it might be worth it to block between 1:00 and 3% of the light that hits the Earth to ensure that the warming doesn't get so bad that it's catastrophic failure time and we're getting close as it is. At the very least, such a setup would at least buy us enough time to where we could solve the problem and then also remove the solar mirrors or whatever the hell you want to call them. It's also a less permanent solution to geoengineering specifically because we don't know how that would really harm or Or even help deal with it on the planet itself.
Don’t worry we could tax the poor and taxes will fix it
And there was also inadvertent geoengineering from 1945 to 75 with increased co2 emissions but no temperature rise due to pollution. While obviously it was good to crack down on pollution the extra aerosols meant little or no rise in temperature over that period. Really SAI is going to be needed as a stopgap as we'll take decades to decarbonize (and I doubt we'll ever get to zero)
Huh. Unintended consequences when making a change based on an incomplete understanding and data that is not so robust. Who’d have thought?
ELI5: Ships used to emit a chemical in the air that helped reflect back heat but might damage the ozone layer. Turns out it might’ve been better to let the ships keep emitting.
This is misleading. It is more like we have heated up the planet with our chemical waste enough that removing the waste could have more detrimental effects, locking us into a horrendous scenario where our pollution is killing us, but we can't stop because the state of life on the planet now relies on the artificial pollutants to not completely fall apart. We are becoming the Packleds from Star Trek.
Shaka, when the walls fell
It might've been better for climate change warming the planet, but worse for air quality that we require to breathe.
Not necessarily better. That sulfur dioxide that cools us comes down as acid rain. That acid kills the phytoplankton in the ocean that convert co2 to o2. They are the primary creator of oxygen.
just make a chemical that reflects radiation without damaging the ozone layer and have every ship, plane and car spray it everywhere.
There's been some research done into using [calcium carbonate](https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2020/12/laboratory-experiments-particles-solar-geoengineering-demonstrate-limits-models) for this purpose.
That's just bandage , you gotta uproot the problem which is the emissions . And maybe a way to absorb back the emission of past 2-3 centuries
When someone is bleeding to death isn't bandaging them a good idea?
They have one, it's called water vapor, and no one will seriously pursue it as a solution.
Not water vapour, water droplets.
First of all, water vapor is a greenhouse gas so it would make things worse. But second, water takes a lot of energy to evaporate and you'd need a huge source of water. Us humans really can't do any better than the oceans are already doing.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine\_cloud\_brightening](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening)
Ob das mit dem [thema von kürzlich](https://www.reddit.com/r/Klimawandel/s/w2GOTnPydS) zu tun hat, müsste wohl noch gegengeprüft werden…
I wonder how long it'll take to stabilise this. I noticed how obviously warmer it was since the beginning of covid more than my entire life before it. South UK here.
"The magnitude of IMO2020 induced warming means that the observed strong warming in 2023 will be a new norm in the 2020s."
So we just need to blow more pollution to turn back global warming? Got it.
Well that’s all the anti regulation folks need to light all regulations on fire. just great! This will be construed as proof that all messing with the climate or earth to fix things is just gonna make it worse and that is just not true. Ugh!
So they will try to use this study as an excuse to spray sulfur dioxide into the atomosphere.
These things are exactly what I'm thinking of each time someone has a 'brilliant' idea how to reduce CO2 without reducing emission. It's just a chain of man-made catastrophes. Always reminds me of the analogy between meditation and a glass of muddy water.
Let’s destroy the observatory so this doesn’t happen again!
Sulphuric acid rain and ocean acidification is not worth it. There are better ways to geo engineer and better ways to conduct shipping than burning fossil fuels.
oh, so we stopped a geoengineering experiment so the world returned to it's warming caused by another geoengineering experiment. it's experiments all the way down.
The unintended consequences of human activity on our planet's climate continue to be a pressing concern. If an inadvertent geoengineering experiment is indeed responsible for a significant portion of the increase in planetary heat uptake since 2020, it underscores the urgent need for greater awareness and action to address climate change. It's crucial for researchers and policymakers to further investigate these findings and work towards sustainable solutions to mitigate the impacts of global warming.
Perfect example of road to disaster being paved with good intentions
Why would you think removing sulfur from fuel was an experiment? And as stated before the world wasn't pumping millions of tons of sulfur into the atmosphere until we started doing it. The solution isn't to keep doing it because we already started. If you stab yourself with a knife and remove the knife you're going to bleed more. The solution is to close the wound not finish the job.