Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures • Hacker News Board

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#61

Post by brutusborn » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 3:45 AM UTC

jonathankoren wrote: post #26

brutusborn wrote: post #7

Not a bad thread but misses a critical point. If the Sulfur emissions policies were known for >5 years and discussed for >10 years why aren’t they part of mainstream climate models? The best answer I could find was essentially that models use a proxy for aerosols and so including the new policy might cause “double counting” of this forcing. This ‘conservatism’ caused this effect to be left out of the models. So the s…

What? How are you equating a misinformation plot that at its core was promoting the lie that the climate wasn’t actually warming, but rather cooling with a web celeb alleging that models underestimated the amount amount of warming ? How are these even in the same galaxy, let alone the same thing?

I’m not sure what you’re referring to. ClimateGate was about the quality of evidence for early global warming studies. It claimed that scientists were hiding bad data and evidence that their models had problems.

This seems very similar: models missing data and forcing but not being criticised when they miss a once in a century confirmation event.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#62

Post by paulmd » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 3:46 AM UTC

brutusborn wrote: post #57

paulmd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you assume the missing effects will make the situation worse? > If the model is missing positive forcings, what makes you so sure that they have included all the negative forcings? I don't think they have included all the negative forcings, but I think that's irrelevant because the observed evidence is that the unincluded positive forcings are significantly larger than the unincluded negative forcings. All t…

What’s the evidence for “observed evidence is that the unincluded positive forcings are significantly larger than the unincluded negative forcings”?

The fact that we're continually exceeding the most pessimistic projections the models can produce on a yearly basis, even after repeatedly recalibrating it to build in even more pessimistic assumptions, and that we're tending to depart more strongly from even the pessimistic models.

This implies that the models are broadly understating these feedback loops, that they are net-balance in the positive-feedback direction, and that they are becoming more active in the current climate behavior regime.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#63

Post by RandomLensman » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 3:46 AM UTC

nequo wrote: post #52

RandomLensman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It came broken in the mail?

It broke many times throughout its history. There is just zero evidence that we cannot adjust, mitigate, prevent etc. - otherwise we might as well do nothing because we are all doomed anyway.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#64

Post by junofan » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 3:49 AM UTC

It does sound like a relatively small change yielded an outsized impact on the climate. This gives me hope for future climate solutions.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#65

Post by jonathankoren » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 3:51 AM UTC

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #44

jonathankoren wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re past the point that nuclear can help. We broke the planet. But hey. “Needs more study.” and academics are living large, unlike the poor billionaires.

This is defeatist and also not true. We adopt nuclear, invest in carbon capture technologies, and employ geoengineering strategies as needed until fusion comes online. This is a solvable technical problem with significant political hurdles.

Dude. Nuclear takes decades to build, and that’s IF you can even build it. There’s zero appetite for it in the US or even formerly nuclear happy Europe. We’re literally decommissioning more reactors than we build.

Carbon capture doesn’t work. Even if you did manage to capture it from a coal plant, that’s not enough. You have to suck it from the air, and a scalable technology doesn’t exist, and even if it did, we’d need massive amounts of power to do it, because you’re literally up against the second law of thermodynamics.

And even if you did have all that stuff today, you’d have to deploy it faster than exponential growth!

I’m aorry, but you can’t just yell, “SCIENCE!” and expect it work. It ain’t magic, and the clock has expired. If we listened 50 years ago, and started then, yeah, maybe we’d be in a fighting chance. It’s sure as hell like we didn’t know that check was coming due. Now acting like we can just reverse a century and a half of exponential growth in a weekend is naïve at best, and “thoughts and prayers” level of “fuck you” at worst.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#66

Post by forgetfreeman » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 3:52 AM UTC

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #44

jonathankoren wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re past the point that nuclear can help. We broke the planet. But hey. “Needs more study.” and academics are living large, unlike the poor billionaires.

This is defeatist and also not true. We adopt nuclear, invest in carbon capture technologies, and employ geoengineering strategies as needed until fusion comes online. This is a solvable technical problem with significant political hurdles.

[flagged]

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#67

Post by jonathankoren » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 3:52 AM UTC

czbond wrote: post #58

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is defeatist and also not true. We adopt nuclear, invest in carbon capture technologies, and employ geoengineering strategies as needed until fusion comes online. This is a solvable technical problem with significant political hurdles.

Thank you for being optimistic and realistic concurrently. We need more people to have such approaches to the topic.

Optimism != realistic.

Optimism is what got us in this mess.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#68

Post by hotdogscout » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 3:52 AM UTC

brutusborn wrote: post #54

MattGaiser wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ClimateGate alleged a conspiracy. This is a difference of assumptions.

I’m saying I used to think climategate was all conspiracy theory nonsense. Now I think there was likely an attempt to hide unhelpful data.

Climategate was definitely real even if it obviously does not disprove or relate to human-driven climate change.

Scientists are sometimes politically motivated and will resort to lying to push their point. This romanticization of scientists and scientific institutions as inherently above lying and fraud is mythological. I see it happening on engineering research that has zero political relevance, imagine research that does.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#69

Post by nosefurhairdo » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 3:53 AM UTC

hnuser0000 wrote: post #56

This lacks scientific models or sources that quantify the magnitude of the reduction in ship tracks and the resulting impact on sea temperatures. They are not in the science.org article[1] he links either. Usually posts with little evidence and the use of the phrase "may be causing" result in flagged posts, but not when it fits a certain narrative? [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/changing-clouds-unfo...

Towards the end of that article were links to a few studies. Here's the first linked study I found: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05122-0

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#70

Post by paulmd » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 3:54 AM UTC

ChatGTP wrote: post #10

stephen_g wrote: post #8

I can’t remember who (maybe he’s quoted further in the thread than I quickly scrolled) but there’s a scientist who has been talking about this on Twitter for a long time (when I used to use it). Pretty scary these things can happen, but he was warning basically we are further along with global heating than we thought and this pollution was just masking some of the effect in the Northern Hemsiphere of CO2 we’d already…

Sorry if it's a naive question but if it was actually helping the situation, why do we need to stop? So it seems the sulfur was removed for the obvious season that it's not good for respiratory health, but it may be a necessary evil for sometime ?

because sulfur causes acid rain and respiratory problems and infrastructure damage etc. you're putting sulfuric acid into the atmosphere, just like carbonating water produces carbonic acid that eats your teeth.

It's not fundamentally different from burning coal, and coal obviously had to be stopped too, I don't know why it's really a question that we need to avoid harmful pollutants even if they have a fringe benefit.