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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

#181
post #19
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

There are people saying we should not just not stop, but even increase sulfur injection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio... The thing is, this is not a one time solution. We would have to do it continuously, or else the temperature would quickly rise again. And we would have to increase sulphur injection if the CO2 level keeps rising. It could be a temporary solution though, e.g. until al…

We do this until CO2 levels come down. Hopefully 20-30 years. Regardless this is really a series of crazy experiments we are proposing doing on a very complicated system.

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is just unhappiness with how and when it's tackled not that it won't be tackled.

I mean if you want to proceed from a faith-based position that's a personal choice. Personally I'll start believing in bigfoot 2 seconds after I see one.

I have honestly no idea how that relates to my post. There are enormous amounts of money flowing into net zero, for example. There are people working on fusion, there is more thought given to geoengineering - to name just a couple of things.

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

#183

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…

The more radical geoengineering ideas, like deflecting sunlight from space, are truly potential extinction level events that should be regulated out of existence. This should not be some VC funded endeavor.

I'm no great fan of geoengineering, however ...

The idea to inflate space foam reflective bubbles to reduce incoming sunlight is one of the saner geoengineering proposals:

* It can start small and grow to measure incremental effect,

* It's orthogonal to any unintended effects as it happens in isolation and isn't deeply coupled to things unknown in the same sense as aerosols and atmospheric chemistry is.

* It's reversable as bubbles can be popped and no longer exist to reflect and have an effect.

> This should not be some VC funded endeavor.

Yeah, on this we can agree- a high degree of global nation state consensus is what's called for with most climate action .. like the 1970s UN agreements that got effectively sunk by unending Koch et al oil bro's negative media campaigning and lobbying.

'Lone' capitalists do seem to have undue sway in matters that impact billions.

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

#184

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.

I think you are miss remembering what climategate was. Climategate deniers where saying "There is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change" and they released some out of context emails to support their claims. How does finding out sulphur reduction was masking actual warming effect make climate science any wrong.

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

#185
post #170

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…

There is no alternative. We have "aggravated the situation" (as you put it) beyond recovery. Doing nothing will now surely lead to an unacceptable outcome. We are going to have to fix it, or resign ourselves to a huge shrinking of the habitable region of the planet, with the hunger/famine/war that will accompany that. Obviously we can always make things worse. But when doing nothing is unacceptable, we have to start…

This is a good example of the lack of epistemic humility OP was taking about.

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

#186
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people saying we should not just not stop, but even increase sulfur injection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio... The thing is, this is not a one time solution. We would have to do it continuously, or else the temperature would quickly rise again. And we would have to increase sulphur injection if the CO2 level keeps rising. It could be a temporary solution though, e.g. until al…

The Earth's greatest temperature was before humans ever existed

And it took way longer than a few decades to get there hmm...? Systems had time to adapt, including new animals evolving. For example trees species habitable zones migrate north or south in response to a changing climate, but to do that the northern most edge of the habitable zone for that species at the time a tree starts is life needs to stay within the southernmost edge until that trees dies, otherwise they can't move fast enough. So the whole zone can't move further than the width of it within, what 500 years? At a wild guess. Depending in the average lifetime of the tree species. Other systems involve evolution to adapt which takes a lot longer. That's an over simplification of course, and I'm not a scientist, but those are not timescales we've got.

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

#187
post #170

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…

There is no alternative. We have "aggravated the situation" (as you put it) beyond recovery. Doing nothing will now surely lead to an unacceptable outcome. We are going to have to fix it, or resign ourselves to a huge shrinking of the habitable region of the planet, with the hunger/famine/war that will accompany that. Obviously we can always make things worse. But when doing nothing is unacceptable, we have to start…

[flagged]

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

#188
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Also contributes to ocean acidification which isn't great.

Specifically because it kills sea life which reduces the amount of carbon the sea can hold. And for a lot more reasons.

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

#189
post #170

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…

There is no alternative. We have "aggravated the situation" (as you put it) beyond recovery. Doing nothing will now surely lead to an unacceptable outcome. We are going to have to fix it, or resign ourselves to a huge shrinking of the habitable region of the planet, with the hunger/famine/war that will accompany that. Obviously we can always make things worse. But when doing nothing is unacceptable, we have to start…

The only viable alternative to doing nothing is stopping our quest for infinite growth in all sectors.

You're the proverbial boiling frog

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, floo…

Fires are actually decreasing.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/climate-change-hasnt-set-th...

https://archive.li/WfDJh

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