[HN Gopher] 2023 planetary heat uptake from termination shock of...
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2023 planetary heat uptake from termination shock of inadvertent
geoengineering?
Author : smartmic
Score : 83 points
Date : 2024-05-30 19:43 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| mentalpiracy wrote:
| 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.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| It doesn't sound like much lifting compared to huge cannons
| that launch sulfur shells into the upper atmosphere!
| onetimeuse92304 wrote:
| Yeah... we kind of already have billions of machines
| efficiently spreading it all over the globe.
| glaucon wrote:
| 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.
| mentalpiracy wrote:
| 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?
| audunw wrote:
| If we're going to go back to geoengineering the atmosphere
| there are probably much less harmful ways to do it.
|
| I believe there's a solution where ships just spray sea water
| into the atmosphere.
| mentalpiracy wrote:
| 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.
| Carrok wrote:
| This is a completely insane take on this.
|
| 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| You should never pull out a knife until you're ready to
| stop the bleeding that will follow.
| Carrok wrote:
| Well the knife has already been pulled, and they are
| suggesting stabbing it back in.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Once the knife is out, however, you don't win points for
| putting it back in.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| 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.
| mentalpiracy wrote:
| 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.
| Carrok wrote:
| > 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.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"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.
| calibas wrote:
| 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.
| grecy wrote:
| Plenty of countries I drove through in Africa have over 2000
| parts per million sulphur in their diesel - just use their
| refineries.
|
| Check the last page -
| https://sustmob.org/PCFV/GlobalSulphurStatus_Progress2006-20...
| snitzr wrote:
| We can't do anything right.
| cs702 wrote:
| 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!
| conaclos wrote:
| What do you propose? No regulations?
| whycome wrote:
| They weren't saying they had other suggestions or options.
| They just pointed out the irony of this situation.
|
| What do you propose?
| klipt wrote:
| How about getting more scientific input on regulations?
| Wasn't the cooling effect of sulfur already well known?
| Reason077 wrote:
| 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.
| chris_va wrote:
| > "one time bump" to global heating
|
| 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)
| aeroman wrote:
| 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?)
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >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?
| nycdatasci wrote:
| 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.
| aeroman wrote:
| 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.
| jltsiren wrote:
| 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.
| _ph_ wrote:
| 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.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 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.
| onelesd wrote:
| Neal Stephenson wrote a book in 2021 aptly named "Termination
| Shock" where sulfur is intentionally added to the atmosphere to
| influence the climate.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| 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.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This is wild:
|
| > 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
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]
| https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220015136/downloads/Yu.
| ..
| aeroman wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Deliberately adding such aerosols to the upper atmosphere_
|
| Sulfur in the atmosphere causes acid rain. We can
| deliberately seed clouds much less damagingly than by
| encouraging sulphur emissions.
| vintermann wrote:
| Artificial volcanic winters, that's something.
| aeroman wrote:
| 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.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| 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.
| r14c wrote:
| 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.
|
| am i parsing this correctly?
| Veliladon wrote:
| Well we stopped doing it because the things that were causing
| the clouds to be nice and shiny caused acid fucking rain but
| yeah.
| dottjt wrote:
| Couldn't we just replace the sulphur with some other kind of
| element?
| _Microft wrote:
| Salt/seawater is a possibility. The proposed method is called
| marine cloud brightening.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
| pjerem wrote:
| Interesting ! Thank you !
| dtx1 wrote:
| 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.
| NikkiA wrote:
| It's alright, it mixes with water vapour to become Sulphuric
| acid long before you breathe it anyway.
| dtx1 wrote:
| That... Does not sound much better?
| StephenSmith wrote:
| This video explains this fairly well (Hank Green).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk8pwE3IByg
| _Microft wrote:
| _" 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.
| firecraker wrote:
| Disputing is always part of science.
|
| For balance: Nature (the journal) does have a high bar for
| entry.. but also a high number of retractions...
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