to drastically cut down on the use of high-sulfur fuels in the shipping industry. It did what it set out to do almost immediately, with NASA scientists finding, those airborne particles, or aerosols, were actually helping to block heat from the Sun. Once they were steeply curtailed, however, more solar radiation was able to stay trapped in our atmosphere — a phenomenon that could help explain why
The findings illustrate the unpredictable complexities of both modeling and combating climate change, while also serving as a preview of the risks ofThe researchers used satellite observations and a chemical transport model to calculate radiative forcing, or the change in energy in the Earth's atmosphere, after the curtailing of sulfur emissions.
They confirmed that the measure reduced human aerosols in the atmosphere along shipping routes. In turn, that caused an average uptick of about 0.2 watts per square meter of radiative forcing — though this strongly varied from region to region.However, some scientists have since pointed out that there are simply too many uncertainties involved to definitively say how much of the heating is attributable to the sulfur drop-off.
"The is certainly a contributing factor to the recent warmth, but it only goes a small way toward explaining the 0.3C, 0.4C, and 0.5C margins of monthly records set in the second half of 2023," Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist from the University of California, Berkley who was not involved in the study, toldEven if these techniques worked, scientists fear that we'd have to keep them up forever.
The abrupt curtailing of sulfur emissions from the shipping industry, the researchers say, inadvertently served as an experiment illustrating this effect. Still, take this as just one piece of the puzzle. It doesn't necessarily mean we should discount these radical methods completely — and it definitely doesn't mean that we should give up on curtailing pollution, either.