Putting the sulfur back into the fuel is maybe the single most effective thing we can do for the planet right now. Yes, polluting is bad and indirectly harms millions over time — but ocean heat spiking will directly harm billions imminently.
I acknowledge that the phrase “put it back” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. There is no ctrl+z for the fuel manufacturing processes that were changed to accommodate the sulfur ban, but this is such a recent change that there is still an enormous amount of direct subject matter expertise available for a crash-restart. Course correction here, now provides runway for the future.
The industrial capacity of worldwide maritime shipping already exists _and_ is already internationally regulated. There is no other “safer” alternative that could be implemented as quickly, or with less risk.
I believe that using the fuel with lower sulfur required ships to be modified. If I'm right about that then, as you say, it would not just be a case of ctrl+z the manufacturing but also require changes to ships.
Yes, you’re right. There are certainly other aspects that would require change too.
But the point is the same: we only transitioned recently, so going back is a known quantity - and now we know exactly how it will impact the worldwide climate. Do any other current geoengineering projects have a directly tangible blueprint?
There are less harmful ways to accomplish it theoretically, but exactly zero of those methods are as industrialized - or as regulated - on the same scale as the international maritime shipping industry that already exists.
Put the sulfur back in now so we have a few additional years to mobilize a safer replacement.
Your analogy is flawed because knife wound was the original problem that would be exacerbatedby reinsertion.
A better analogy would be having some infection that's somehow preventing a cancer from metastasis - you treat the infection and now you see the cancer spike. Worth risking reinfection to slow down cancer ? Depends on how bad the infection/cancer is I guess.
But that's why the analogy is flawed - it's dealing with a single problem that gets clearly worse by the action.
Global warming and sulphur pollution are two separate (but realated) problems - it's possible that by making one worse you make the other better - and then it's a cost/benefit calculation.
Eg. chemotherapy is destroying a lot of your body - but it also kills cancer.
> Global warming and sulphur pollution are two separate (but realated) problems - it's possible that by making one worse you make the other better - and then it's a cost/benefit calculation
Sure. But I'd argue the case is being made for active cloud seeding. Versus random seeding with commercial vessels with sulphur.
Restoring sulphur in ship fuel would sap the mainline argument of a lot of strength. If the ships can have their sulphur back, why not every industry their [insert ask]. It won't be scientifically valid. But it would win a decade of inaction.
Your failure to understand that the knife remaining in your body is, in fact, going to keep you alive longer than if you pulled it out is exactly the problem.
Leaving the knife in hurts like hell, but maybe it’ll kill you slow enough that you’ll be able to find help before you die.
Pulling out the knife seems right but just means you bleed out quickly.
> Your failure to understand that the knife remaining in your body is, in fact, going to keep you alive longer than if you pulled it out is exactly the problem.
I don’t know why you assume I’m failing to understand that. I’m saying it’s already happened, so here we are.
> ”Putting the sulfur back into the fuel is maybe the single most effective thing we can do for the planet right now”
This would be incredibly idiotic for so many reasons. You’d be condemning millions of people to suffering with crippling respiratory diseases, and harming countless aquatic and coastal ecosystems. All for a relatively modest gain against global heating.
Assuming the positives outweigh the negatives. You can't release tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere without causing acid rain and speeding up ocean acidification.
A powerful example of how well-intentioned regulations -- in this case, a mandate to reduce sulfur content in ship fuel, for environmental reasons -- can lead to unintended consequences that are worse than the original problem -- in this case, the reduction in sulfur led to an increase in the rate of global warming. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Go read the abstract and the introduction. Highly recommended!
It’s not worse than the original problem. SO2 emissions from shipping are a huge problem for human health, and are very damaging to aquatic and coastal ecosystems.
The potential heating effect from reducing atmospheric aerosols was predictable and was a foreseen consequence of this regulation that was considered at the time.
But it’s important to remember that this is a “one time bump” to global heating, not cumulative like GHG emissions. In the overall context of global heating it’s pretty insignificant in the longer term.
That's not entirely accurate. Short lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) that are being continuously emitted (e.g. SO4, NOx, contrail-cirrus) have cumulative effects. The heat trapped on earth is cumulative with a long equilibration time constant, and SO4 (not just from ships) has wiped out a huge fraction of the warming up to now.
(disclaimer that I manage a climate research group)
I think the one time bump could be a fair description in that is doesn't add to the long term warming rate in the same way GHGs do. The cumulative effect here is pretty much all realised within about 20 years (so not an instantaneous effect, but it could be considered a one time one?)
There is heat being continually trapped by the SLCP, which analogous to a one-time (large) release of CO2. The earth will warm up in response, and will keep absorbing heat from the SLCP as long as the pollutant is being emitted.
As we heat up, though, we'll radiate more heat back into space (blackbody) leading to a new equilibrium temperature (the trapped flux and outgoing flux are now both larger, but balanced).
If you think about it as heat, it's cumulative. If you think about it as temperature, it'll effectively lead to a ~fixed bump (not quite a fixed one-time bump, as the effects are not linear, but one can think of it that way).
>SO2 emissions from shipping are a huge problem for human health
This is one question I have regarding stratospheric sulfide injection. What goes up must come down right? What are the population wide effects of having higher concentrations of sulfide in the atmosphere?
The wording is "could lead to a doubling (or more) of the warming rate" which suggests a one-time bump to the slope and a significant long-term impact on global heating.
The wording of the article and the paper are a bit misleading here. It is definitely a one time even (although it plays out over 20 years)
The doubling of the rate of warming only applies for the first year or two. Based on this paper, over the period 2020-2030, the impact of ship fuel regulations is warming of about 0.12K. The long term temperature trend is around +0.19K over this 10 year period.
When I was a kid, acid rain was destroying forests and lakes in Europe and North America. It was an immediate and obvious problem with catastrophic consequences. We managed to deal with it, which is why we can now afford to think about longer-term environmental issues, such as climate change.
The problem remains in large parts of Asia, where sulfur emissions have continued rising. These emission caps are necessary. They may make climate change a more urgent problem, but that's not a valid excuse to repeal the caps.
I read somewhere that sulphur emissions over the oceans aren't really a big problem. Don't know if it just the old "the solution to pollution is dilution" or if there is something more to it.
Banning sulfur isn't "good intentions". It is a quite necessary step for protecting the environment. It is just that it for a while downplayed the severity of the climate change already happening. So of course the right step now is to intensify the fight against climate change, that is, reduce our CO2 output even quicker.
Why is banning sulfur in container ship fuel necessary for protecting the environment? It seems like it might make sense to use sulfur as an additive to fuel, if it helps reduce warming.
A very good book, I highly recommend it. Once I finished it I was very interested in finding more research regarding geoengineering as a method to fight climate change. Both the good and the bad are presented in the book, hence the title.
> The amount of radiative forcing could lead to a doubling (or more) of the warming rate in the 2020 s compared with the rate since 1980 with strong spatiotemporal heterogeneity. The warming effect is consistent with the recent observed strong warming in 2023 and expected to make the 2020 s anomalously warm. The forcing is equivalent in magnitude to 80% of the measured increase in planetary heat uptake since 2020.
Truly, all bets are off for being able to predict the climate going forward
This wasn't unpredicted, at least not in principle. Sulfur aerosols have been a component of climate models for decades, and were already known to be a major negative forcing term counteracting something like 1/3 of human-caused warming. See for example [1], an IPCC report from 2021 that shows sulfur aerosols contributing 0.5 C of cooling in the industrial era.
Deliberately adding such aerosols to the upper atmosphere (where they're less harmful than ground-level pollution), which volcanic eruptions already do, is one of a few major geoengineering proposals to counteract climate change.
But the mechanism is different, so far as I understand. The sulfur rich fuels supports marine cloud brightening and ship tracks. (Low clouds reflect heat, while high clouds absorb) The loss of the ship tracks accounts for a big jump in the warming effects of shipping.
The mechanism is different from the impact of sulphur in the stratosphere (where there are no clouds), but it is the same as the mechanisms that have caused the majority of the aerosol cooling (a brightening of clouds).
The same ze of the cooling has long been uncertain though. It depends a lot on assumptions you make about the pre-industrial atmosphere,something that we don't have great observations of.
The numbers in this study need to be interpreted carefully, the way the authors presented them doesn't really help this.
The warming rate they quote (0.24K per decade) is the instantaneous warming, which decreases over time. The warming over 10 years is actually about half of this (0.12K). While still significant, it's not a doubling of the warming rate (which is around 0.19K per decade).
The forcing being equal to 80% of the heatuptake is also interesting, but we have not seen such a large step change in energy imbalance in the Earth system. This doesn't mean they are wrong about the forcing estimate, but it does not mean that 80% of the warming since 2020 has been due to ship fuel regulations either.
This makes me just want to go stare into the middle distance for awhile, if I'm honest. The steps back always seem faster and further than the steps forward to averting catastrophe.
so we were accidentally seeding clouds to be brighter and reflect more light, which was reducing the global warming impact, which has how ceased so the climate is warming up faster now because we aren't accidentally slowing it down.
I might be wrong, but think Sulfur in upper atmosphere can be ok and sulfur in lower atmosphere causes acid rain. The sulfur from pollution was just going everywhere, so we should definitely stop doing it, Acid rain is real, and is bad.
But Sulfur might be a solution if we can loft it into the upper atmosphere and bypass where the acid rain forms. - subject of book Termination Shock proposed this.
This is an awful idea. It's like people who do a 30 day liquid only diet to lose weight. Sure they'll lose 15lbs, and feel good about themselves. But it isn't healthy or sustainable, it'll have unintended side effects, and it'll prevent them from doing the very real and necessary work to change their lives to lose weight naturally.
It's honestly scary howany people think that this is reasonable; I'd be horrified if it wasn't so damn human.
Not sure it is 'awful', it doesn't solve the underlying problem. But could be temporary solution amongst a lot of bad options if/when things get bad enough for people to generally wake up and need to do something fast.
Lets say a few more decades go by, we make no progress on 'non-awful' options.
Then suddenly we get a summer where a few 10k's or millions die, and suddenly politicians/public are like 'wow, guess this is real after all, lets do something. Guess we can start spreading sulfur around pretty quickly'.
Wouldn't be surprised if this happens, and then we over-compensate and create an ice age.
the politicians are in denial or are choosing short-term gains over the future the rest of us have to live in. we even have agreements to do something, but then don't. we're operating on copium and delusion right now and many parts of the US are facing climate change related disasters already, but it doesn't move the needle. i don't have any answers, but i don't think any particular disaster is going to change people's minds.
Isn't Sulfur ok if it is in upper atmosphere, but in lower atmosphere causes acid rain???
So we could seed the upper atmosphere by shooting rockets into it (as in book Termination Shock), and thus bypass the layer where the sulfur was being added by pollution and causing acid rain.
I don't want to breath sulfur, I'm not a Klingon. We just need to accept that we will not be able to transition into non-co2 emitting energy and production fast enough (We MUST still do it!) and that co2 removal on a planetary scale is just not going to happen. Start the Geoengineering now and figure out the bugs so it's ready when we need it. If it's really true that billions of lifes depend on it, maybe it's time to grow up and do the necessary evil.
"Unfortunately, while their radiative forcing estimate is well within the range of others in the literature, their calculation of the resulting warming relies on an overly simplified model that results in a substantial overstating of current warming impacts.", https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/a-problematic-estimate-of-...
The conclusions of this paper are being disputed. Read more about that at the page linked above.
1. Nature really does value getting studies correct, and thus is probably even more stringent about retractions. They will retract studies for smaller problems than other journals. So, high bar of entry, and also highly focused on vetting any challenges that would cause a retraction.
2. There are anti-climate change groups that challenge everything. So just some random link to someone challenging this, doesn't immediately make me doubt it. The trust in Nature is high enough that the challenger must be pretty good, not just saying "well this model looks too simplistic too me, thus it is false".
tl;dr - New emissions standards reduced sulfur dioxide emissions from cargo ships.
The emissions were seeding reflective white clouds that were offsetting up to half the temperature increase that would have occurred without them. Now all that warming is happening at full strength.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadI acknowledge that the phrase “put it back” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. There is no ctrl+z for the fuel manufacturing processes that were changed to accommodate the sulfur ban, but this is such a recent change that there is still an enormous amount of direct subject matter expertise available for a crash-restart. Course correction here, now provides runway for the future.
The industrial capacity of worldwide maritime shipping already exists _and_ is already internationally regulated. There is no other “safer” alternative that could be implemented as quickly, or with less risk.
But the point is the same: we only transitioned recently, so going back is a known quantity - and now we know exactly how it will impact the worldwide climate. Do any other current geoengineering projects have a directly tangible blueprint?
I believe there’s a solution where ships just spray sea water into the atmosphere.
Put the sulfur back in now so we have a few additional years to mobilize a safer replacement.
Akin to saying "You pulled the knife out of my torso, and now I'm bleeding more! Put it back!"
Putting it back will certainly cause more harm than just leaving it out.
A better analogy would be having some infection that's somehow preventing a cancer from metastasis - you treat the infection and now you see the cancer spike. Worth risking reinfection to slow down cancer ? Depends on how bad the infection/cancer is I guess.
Global warming and sulphur pollution are two separate (but realated) problems - it's possible that by making one worse you make the other better - and then it's a cost/benefit calculation.
Eg. chemotherapy is destroying a lot of your body - but it also kills cancer.
Sure. But I'd argue the case is being made for active cloud seeding. Versus random seeding with commercial vessels with sulphur.
Restoring sulphur in ship fuel would sap the mainline argument of a lot of strength. If the ships can have their sulphur back, why not every industry their [insert ask]. It won't be scientifically valid. But it would win a decade of inaction.
Leaving the knife in hurts like hell, but maybe it’ll kill you slow enough that you’ll be able to find help before you die.
Pulling out the knife seems right but just means you bleed out quickly.
I don’t know why you assume I’m failing to understand that. I’m saying it’s already happened, so here we are.
This would be incredibly idiotic for so many reasons. You’d be condemning millions of people to suffering with crippling respiratory diseases, and harming countless aquatic and coastal ecosystems. All for a relatively modest gain against global heating.
Check the last page - https://sustmob.org/PCFV/GlobalSulphurStatus_Progress2006-20...
Go read the abstract and the introduction. Highly recommended!
What do you propose?
The potential heating effect from reducing atmospheric aerosols was predictable and was a foreseen consequence of this regulation that was considered at the time.
But it’s important to remember that this is a “one time bump” to global heating, not cumulative like GHG emissions. In the overall context of global heating it’s pretty insignificant in the longer term.
That's not entirely accurate. Short lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) that are being continuously emitted (e.g. SO4, NOx, contrail-cirrus) have cumulative effects. The heat trapped on earth is cumulative with a long equilibration time constant, and SO4 (not just from ships) has wiped out a huge fraction of the warming up to now.
(disclaimer that I manage a climate research group)
There is heat being continually trapped by the SLCP, which analogous to a one-time (large) release of CO2. The earth will warm up in response, and will keep absorbing heat from the SLCP as long as the pollutant is being emitted.
As we heat up, though, we'll radiate more heat back into space (blackbody) leading to a new equilibrium temperature (the trapped flux and outgoing flux are now both larger, but balanced).
If you think about it as heat, it's cumulative. If you think about it as temperature, it'll effectively lead to a ~fixed bump (not quite a fixed one-time bump, as the effects are not linear, but one can think of it that way).
This is one question I have regarding stratospheric sulfide injection. What goes up must come down right? What are the population wide effects of having higher concentrations of sulfide in the atmosphere?
The doubling of the rate of warming only applies for the first year or two. Based on this paper, over the period 2020-2030, the impact of ship fuel regulations is warming of about 0.12K. The long term temperature trend is around +0.19K over this 10 year period.
The problem remains in large parts of Asia, where sulfur emissions have continued rising. These emission caps are necessary. They may make climate change a more urgent problem, but that's not a valid excuse to repeal the caps.
> The amount of radiative forcing could lead to a doubling (or more) of the warming rate in the 2020 s compared with the rate since 1980 with strong spatiotemporal heterogeneity. The warming effect is consistent with the recent observed strong warming in 2023 and expected to make the 2020 s anomalously warm. The forcing is equivalent in magnitude to 80% of the measured increase in planetary heat uptake since 2020.
Truly, all bets are off for being able to predict the climate going forward
Deliberately adding such aerosols to the upper atmosphere (where they're less harmful than ground-level pollution), which volcanic eruptions already do, is one of a few major geoengineering proposals to counteract climate change.
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220015136/downloads/Yu...
The same ze of the cooling has long been uncertain though. It depends a lot on assumptions you make about the pre-industrial atmosphere,something that we don't have great observations of.
Sulfur in the atmosphere causes acid rain. We can deliberately seed clouds much less damagingly than by encouraging sulphur emissions.
The warming rate they quote (0.24K per decade) is the instantaneous warming, which decreases over time. The warming over 10 years is actually about half of this (0.12K). While still significant, it's not a doubling of the warming rate (which is around 0.19K per decade).
The forcing being equal to 80% of the heatuptake is also interesting, but we have not seen such a large step change in energy imbalance in the Earth system. This doesn't mean they are wrong about the forcing estimate, but it does not mean that 80% of the warming since 2020 has been due to ship fuel regulations either.
am i parsing this correctly?
But Sulfur might be a solution if we can loft it into the upper atmosphere and bypass where the acid rain forms. - subject of book Termination Shock proposed this.
It's honestly scary howany people think that this is reasonable; I'd be horrified if it wasn't so damn human.
Lets say a few more decades go by, we make no progress on 'non-awful' options.
Then suddenly we get a summer where a few 10k's or millions die, and suddenly politicians/public are like 'wow, guess this is real after all, lets do something. Guess we can start spreading sulfur around pretty quickly'.
Wouldn't be surprised if this happens, and then we over-compensate and create an ice age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
So we could seed the upper atmosphere by shooting rockets into it (as in book Termination Shock), and thus bypass the layer where the sulfur was being added by pollution and causing acid rain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk8pwE3IByg
The conclusions of this paper are being disputed. Read more about that at the page linked above.
For balance: Nature (the journal) does have a high bar for entry.. but also a high number of retractions...
1. Nature really does value getting studies correct, and thus is probably even more stringent about retractions. They will retract studies for smaller problems than other journals. So, high bar of entry, and also highly focused on vetting any challenges that would cause a retraction.
2. There are anti-climate change groups that challenge everything. So just some random link to someone challenging this, doesn't immediately make me doubt it. The trust in Nature is high enough that the challenger must be pretty good, not just saying "well this model looks too simplistic too me, thus it is false".
The emissions were seeding reflective white clouds that were offsetting up to half the temperature increase that would have occurred without them. Now all that warming is happening at full strength.
Great topic, why bury it in verbosity?
Surface water slightly warmer
...
Damn humans