By Jo Nova
The evil shipping smoke was shielding us from global warming…
You’ll never guess but it’s worse than we thought, and we are more to blame than we thought, kiss my government grant and pray to Gaia.
Wouldn’t you know — shipping smoke was polluting the world, but the smoke also seeded clouds, which cooled the Earth, and undid some of the global warming we caused with CO2. Now that we are finally fixing up the dirty ships, oh no, we’ve accidentally unleashed the global warming which the ship smoke was hiding. So there is about to be another wave of global bad news. And for some reason we didn’t see it coming, even though we’ve known for decades that sulfate aerosols caused cooling (and we had those expert climate models all along, didn’t we?)
Remember all those other times they said disaster would strike, and it didn’t, well, they were right. It would have happened, we just couldn’t see it because of the shipping pollution.
See how perfect this is for The Climate Industrial Complex?
We’ve been accidentally cooling the planet — and it’s about to stop
By Shannon Osaka, Washington Post
Tiny particles from the combustion of coal, oil and gas can reflect sunlight and spur the formation of clouds, shading the planet from the sun’s rays. Since the 1980s, those particles have offset between 40 and 80 percent of the warming caused by greenhouse gases.
“We’re starting from an area of deep, deep uncertainty,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and research lead for the payments company Stripe. “It could be a full degree of cooling being masked.”
These moves have saved lives — according to estimates, around 200,000 premature deaths have already been avoided in China, and the new shipping regulations could save around 50,000 lives per year. But they have also boosted global temperatures. Scientists estimate that the changes in aerosols from the new shipping rule alone could contribute between 0.05 and 0.2 degrees Celsius of warming over the next few decades.
Some researchers have suggested that the changes to ocean shipping regulations may have been a big contributor to last year’s record heat…
All of which begs the question, if shipping-smoke solves global warming, shouldn’t we just go with it then?
I mean, let the ships rip, and skip the whole hair-shirt sacrifice — we could fly in planes, eat meat, and keep the air con on? But ‘no’ say the puritans, the new shipping regulations might save 50,000 people a year. (And heck, it’s not like we face the sixth mass extinction, boiling oceans, or something truly awful is it? ) So onward we go, renewables to the rescue, living the life of the perfect climate apostles.
The fact that the Ecoworriers won’t even consider this to save the world tells us exactly how afraid they are (not) of the man-made climate catastrophe.
And the other problem is “the numbers” — despite climate experts being 99% certain of what controls our climate, scientists estimate the changes in aerosols could have anything from 0.05°C to “a full degree” (so sayth Zeke Hausfather). So aerosols might explain a lot, or nothing at all, but it’s another excuse to parade a climate scientist on the news, and they can pick whatever flavour of “aerosol” cooling fits the theme of the day. Would you like to hide past model failures or scare the horses? Adjust to fit.
Watch the evil shipping smoke fighting off the Global Warming Monster
We are reminded yet again of the primitive belief that humans are really Gods that control the climate…
Some version of the shipping story keeps doing the rounds every few months for at least the last year, because it has a strong Climate Bingo score:
- It’s worse than we thought. The new bad effect is almost upon us (yet again!)
- It’s the perfect excuse to cover the warming that didn’t happen, wasn’t predicted, may not come, or might suddenly appear.
- It’s advertising for “Geoengineering Projects” where people throw salt, dust, or particulates in the sky and try to cool the Earth. (See, they say, Geoengineering works, give us your money!)
- It fits the religion — mankind controls the climate (not God or the Sun). This feeds a whole new wing of bureaucracy, and briefly distracts people from asking whether recent warming has anything to do with solar activity or space weather.
- Ultimately it bestows more power on the high priesthood of lab-coats and climate models — as long as the weather is controlled by man-made things of some sort, the IPCC anointed masters sit at the centre of this Global Warming Control Tower and issue the orders and collect the funds. They shall have their two-week UN junkets, their Nobel Pizzas, and their moment of fame in the nightly news.
But lift the hood, and this engine is a mass of contradictions. They didn’t see this “shipping” warming coming, and can’t agree on how much warming it does, but they want us to believe their models are accurate. And they don’t think the climate emergency is important enough to let ships keep shipping as they were, just to buy us some time. There are no hard trade-offs in these life and death decisions, only 50 shades of advertising for the renewables industry and the UN.