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

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

#151

Post by steve_adams_86 »

adamisom wrote: post #125
junofan wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I understanding that page correctly? Sounds like 3–4 deg C of cooling for an estimated $5 bn/yr.

Yeah, if climate change really was an “emergency”, mitigation would be extremely cheap. With big side effects. Nevertheless if it really were an emergency … in real emergencies, triage happens, and downsides are taken for granted. Thankful that there’s no real emergency yet, but I suspect governments will drag their feet long enough that there will eventually be one, and then emergency relief will be deployed anyway,…

I don’t know. My province in Canada is experiencing anomalous weather events year after year, and while things still look “okay” we seem to be encroaching on visible threshold events quite rapidly.

Sure, these events could mysteriously stop. Or stay very much the same, acting like a new normal that isn’t so destructive as to be an emergency. But the trend line is there. Fires increasing, biodiversity decreasing, floods occurring more dramatically and frequently, 100 year events predicted to be 10 year events not in decades but right now.

If that’s not an emergency, what is? If you’re thinking something like “when the province is stricken with drought for 10 years and everyone’s starving”, I hate to tell you but that’s well past the emergency date. At that point, you’re already done and the initial emergency happened.

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

#152

Post by adrianN »

RandomLensman wrote: post #76
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…

If it is too late to stop might as well aggressively geoengineer and see if it pans out, no? We sort of know we can cool the planet if we wanted to.

Cooling the planet doesn't make the oceans less acidic.

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

#153

Post by mdekkers »

ido wrote: post #150
mdekkers wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Global overpopulation is absolutely a part of the equation, and everyone is deeply uncomfortable talking about it because there are no palatable solutions to that specific problem. Humans, as a species, exhibit all the damaging properties of a cancerous growth, and our habitat can no longer support us. As George Carlin said: the planet will be fine, it’s the humans that are fucked!

We’re already heading towards a peak mid-century and then a slow decline of global populations based on existing trends.

Correct. As per my edit in my other response in this thread, we would still be at 10+ billion in 2100. It isn’t like “oh, hey, don’t worry, it’s going down guys!” We should absolutely worry.

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

#154

Post by adrianN »

bell-cot wrote: post #104
kouru225 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with all things I feel like a little from column A, a little from column B

Quip: But when the patient's temp is high enough, everyone in the ER knows that you gotta go straight to the ice-water bath. How many square miles of solar reflector could each Starship launch carry to a stable-ish region near the Earth-Sun L1 point?

Reflectors act as solar sails and hence need a fuel supply to stay put.

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

#155

Post by sdenton4 »

mdekkers wrote: post #120
forgetfreeman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Global overpopulation is absolutely a part of the equation, and everyone is deeply uncomfortable talking about it because there are no palatable solutions to that specific problem. Humans, as a species, exhibit all the damaging properties of a cancerous growth, and our habitat can no longer support us. As George Carlin said: the planet will be fine, it’s the humans that are fucked!

The solution is well understood: universal education and readily available birth control. It's already working in the more developed economies.

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

#156

Post by nologic01 »

The enthusiasm with geoengineering among the HN community is worrisome. Not sure which computing analogy would drive home the complete recklessness of this mentality but the Earth is not something you can reboot to the last working state once you harebrained patch implodes.

It is true that we have been slowly geoengineering for ages (initially unwittingly, recently with eyes wide open) and it is also true that our modeling abilities increase but this is quite far from making us experts in geoengineering.

For the short term future (decades) the only strategy that seems to make sense on the face of epistemic uncertainty is to refrain from aggravating the situation while studying ever more deeply the system we are now perturbing so much.

Our biggest mental deficiency when handling complexity is that we cant think holistically in practical ways. Isolating individual factors and applying linear thinking has worked wonders in isolated problems but it is not cutting it here.

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

#158

Post by defrost »

nologic01 wrote: post #156

The enthusiasm with geoengineering among the HN community is worrisome. Not sure which computing analogy would drive home the complete recklessness of this mentality but the Earth is not something you can reboot to the last working state once you harebrained patch implodes. It is true that we have been slowly geoengineering for ages (initially unwittingly, recently with eyes wide open) and it is also true that our mo…

> which computing analogy

Ooops... bricked it :(

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

#159

Post by junofan »

nologic01 wrote: post #156

The enthusiasm with geoengineering among the HN community is worrisome. Not sure which computing analogy would drive home the complete recklessness of this mentality but the Earth is not something you can reboot to the last working state once you harebrained patch implodes. It is true that we have been slowly geoengineering for ages (initially unwittingly, recently with eyes wide open) and it is also true that our mo…

Yeah but I think natural experiments like low-sulfur marine fuel adoption can point to areas where we can find reversible interim solutions.

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

#160

Post by askvictor »

adrianN wrote: post #101
BenFranklin100 wrote: post #23

Either the world accepts that nuclear energy along with wind and solar is part of the solution to climate change, or we will be forced into geoengineering solutions. We may have already reached that point.

There are lots of nuclear reactors being built world wide currently. The problem is that it takes forever to build nuclear reactors and we would need twenty times as much nuclear as we have right now just to replace coal. An additional twenty times as much as we have now to replace oil. And an additional fifteen times as much as we have right now to replace gas. Nuclear is not particularly cheap either.

Where do you get those numbers from? In terms of total energy use, perhaps. But oil accounts for about 3% for electricity generation, compared to coal's 36% [https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-balances-overview/w...]. Most oil is used for transport, so dropping that would increase electricity demand, though a lot of that doesn't need to be dispatchable, and there might be efficiencies gained moving to electric. Similarly with gas and heating (gas is used for electricity generation a lot more than oil though).

Also, the same site shows nuclear as about 10% of the electricity generation mix worldwide; unless there's about 5x as much coal being used for steel-making and other non-electricity purposes, then the numbers would be around 5x instead of 20x.

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