Termination Shock Now: Reducing air pollution is accelerating global warming
Greenhouse gases are no longer the main reason the planet is warming
Two-thirds of global warming this century is the result of cleaning up air pollution. Do not adjust your sets, your screen is not malfunctioning. If Professor Peter Cox, of the University of Exeter, and his colleague Margaux Marchant are right, greenhouse gases are no longer the main driver of global warming.
The mechanism is no mystery: albedo is well understood. Some portion of the sun’s energy that reaches the Earth bounces right back out to space, that’s albedo. The rest of the energy is absorbed. The balance between the two is not fixed. Sulfur pollution in the atmosphere increases albedo. The more sulfur pollution, the less solar energy reaches the atmosphere in the first place.
The truth that dare not speak its name is that sulfur pollution counteracts global warming, so when you clean it up, the globe warms up faster.
Let me be clear, SO₂ in the air sucks: it causes acid rain, it’s bad for your lungs, it messes with terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in all kinds of ways. We have very good reasons to clean it up.
But when we do clean it up, we diminish albedo. And that speeds up climate change.
That this could happen isn’t at all news to climate researchers, but Cox and Marchant’s research shows this effect is possibly quite a lot bigger than we’d grasped.
And this isn’t some fringe theory from some internet rando: Professor Cox is one of the most senior climate researchers in the world. He’s a lead author on the 4th, 5th and 6th Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a member of the UK Government’s Defra Scientific Advisory Council, as well as leading one of the world’s top centers for Climate Research.
Guys like Peter Cox don’t imperil reputations built painstakingly over decades on an explosive result like this unless they’re pretty darn sure. You can learn about his research in all its gory details in this podcast he did with Leon Simons.
This is big news. And yet, I bet you haven’t heard about it. The mainstream media hates to cover this kind of story. There’s a strong bias towards climate stories that are morally tidy. Stories where pollution is bad and kills the earth, and stopping pollution is good and saves the earth. There’s a panicked unwillingness to acknowledge the messy reality the story of SO₂ abatement brings, where we help mother earth by cleaning up a pollutant and it thanks us by kicking us in the groin.
The reality is, the atmosphere isn’t interested in your morality play. The laws of thermodynamics couldn’t care less if they line up with your NGO’s Vision statement. Sulfur dioxide in the air will keep both acidifying the rain and cooling the planet whether we like it or not.
If we were generally saner about climate change, we’d recognize this story for what it is: a loud, blaring siren telling us we’ve spent decades actually doing geoengineering, without ever quite acknowledging it to ourselves.
Now we’re stopping, and the result is what we always knew it would be: Termination Shock.
I believe I read somewhere that SO2 in low atmosphere leads to acid rainand other unwanted outcomes... But if released high in the atmosphere (ie deliberately using eg high altitude balloons) we can get the global cooling benefit without the negative effects.
IMO2020 - instead of switching to low sulfur fuel ships installed stack scrubbers to remove the sulfur and meet the new standard.. Cleaner air but it caused ocean pollution as the scrubbers discharged to the ocean. And the reduction in sulfur in the atmosphere increased global warming. Sigh! Side note: I once was told that most of the crude oil from Venezuela was high in sulfur.