Oops... NASA scientists believe environmental policies may be causing global warming

The 1970s saw scientists warning of a coming Ice Age in which “arctic cold and perpetual snow could turn most of the inhabitable portions of our planet into a polar desert.”

At the end of the twentieth century it was the threat of the exact opposite, “global warming,” that accompanied government campaigns urging the adoption of new regulations. Then, at the start of the twenty-first century, so-called experts ambiguously warned of “climate change” to cover all eventualities, including temperatures that sometimes went down…

Now, NASA scientists claim to have discovered the primary cause of (alleged) global warming in the past few years: “environmental ” policies. (Understandably, they do not address the controversial question of whether or not global warming is actually occurring.)

Air pollution down, temperatures up

Specifically, curbs placed on sulfur dioxide emissions in 2020 by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) forced the sulfur content in shipping fuel to drop from 3.5 percent to no more than 0.5 percent. Sulfur dioxide is one of the gases targeted by Green activists as it is considered a pollutant contributing to acid rain as well as and various respiratory problems.

Environmentalists appear, however, to have been taken off-guard by one consequence of the drop in atmospheric sulfur dioxide: a potential global increase in temperatures.

The NASA scientists note in their research paper that,

While IMO2020 [the new regulation] is intended to benefit public health by decreasing aerosol loading, this decrease in aerosols can temporarily accelerate global warming by dimming clouds across the global oceans. IMO2020 took effect in a short period of time and likely has global impact. 

80 percent of recent global warming due to drop in pollution

The process is relatively easy to understand. Sulfate particles, formed from sulfur dioxide, can mingle with clouds and make them brighter. These bright clouds then reflect some of the sun's rays back out to space, so that less heat reaches Earth.

The scientists estimate that the drop in sulfur dioxide emissions means fewer bright clouds with the result, they claim, of a doubling (or more) of the warming rate:

Here we estimate the regulation leads to a radiative forcing of +0.2±0.11Wm⁻² averaged over the global ocean. The amount of radiative forcing could lead to a doubling (or more) of the warming rate in the 2020 s compared with the rate since 1980 with strong spatiotemporal heterogeneity. 

They claim that we have already seen this rise in temperatures last year, and attribute 80 percent of recent global warming to the drop in sulfur dioxide emissions:

The warming effect is consistent with the recent observed strong warming in 2023 and expected to make the 2020s anomalously warm. The forcing is equivalent in magnitude to 80% of the measured increase in planetary heat uptake since 2020. 

All that freak weather? That's explained too

The study also mentions the implications for general weather patterns across the globe, making the weather more unstable, particularly this decade:

The radiative forcing also has strong hemispheric contrast, which has important implications for precipitation pattern changes … [and] can create significant perturbations in precipitation patterns. 

Mainstream news (intentionally) misses the point

Had they not been scientists from NASA, media would probably have ignored the findings. After all, a recent study (covered by Frontline News) that revealed how carbon dioxide's current and future impact on global warming is likely nil was not picked up by a single mainstream news outlet.

This time around, the study was published in Nature and picked up by no less than 120 news sites, most of them admittedly not mainstream.

Meanwhile, what the mainstream sites focused on was a tangential issue raised by the research findings. The NASA scientists had mentioned in their work a process called marine cloud brightening. This involves spraying sea salt into the clouds to create a similar bright-cloud effect to that created by sulfates, possibly cooling the planet.

Thus, The Washington Post headlined its article, “Could spraying sea salt into the clouds cool the planet?” as if the idea were novel. In fact, it dates back to 1990 and has been investigated for almost two decades.

WaPo did not make a single reference to the discovery that carbon emissions are not, after all, the main driver of recent increases in temperature.

New York Times quotes unnamed ‘scientists’ to cast doubt on NASA's findings

No more did the New York Times, which hid the (partial) results of the study in an obscure paragraph tucked away in an article headlined, “Hanging by a Thread: U.N. Chief Warns of Missing a Key Climate Target.”

In fact, NYT omitted to mention that the study was conducted by NASA scientists, only mentioning that,

Other contributors [to global warming] might stick around for longer. In a study published last week, a team of scientists led by Tianle Yuan, a geophysicist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, estimated that the planet could be experiencing additional warming right now for a counterintuitive reason: recent regulations that slashed air pollution from ships.

NYT then dashed back to the accepted narrative of normal, everyday human activity being the main driver of alleged global warming, stressing that,

To scientists, the foremost driver of warming remains clear: Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, the three most important human-caused heat-trapping gases, have continued their steady upward climb. At current rates of emissions, it might only be five or so more years before humans have altered the atmosphere’s chemistry so significantly that it becomes extremely difficult to stop warming from surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius, scientists have estimated [emphasis added].

Evidently, NYT esteems the views of scientists from Imperial College London and other institutes more than the views of researchers from NASA. Forbes, too, in an article titled, “Shipping Pollution Curbs Made Climate Change Worse, Controversial NASA Study Claims,” quotes random climate scientists who cast doubt on the study's findings.

News? From the 1990s…

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the research findings is that they shouldn't have been news at all.

The effects of sulfates in the atmosphere have been known for decades. An article dating back to 1999 describes how,

… the effects of the sulfur dioxide from industry might be countering the greenhouse effect created by carbon dioxide … When fossil fuels are burned, both carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide are released. As demonstrated in the ship tracks study, sulfate particles produced from sulfur dioxide create brighter clouds, which may cool the atmosphere. 

Any light that is reflected cannot reach the ground and heat the surface of the Earth. This means there is less heat for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to trap in the atmosphere.

This article was written by NASA scientists.

What this means for future ‘geoengineering’ projects (if only)

Today's NASA scientists suggest in their study that the important question to address now is the “trade-off” between improving air quality and global warming. They also imply that, in the future, scientists should exercise more caution in their efforts to control the climate, given the complex and often contradictory issues involved:

Finally, an important open question for policy makers to consider is the trade-off between the benefits of better air quality and the potential cost of additional warming as different parts of the world have reduced and are going to reduce aerosol pollution. The trade-off consideration is also relevant for deliberate geoengineering schemes to select the right properties of emitted aerosols.

Whether or not their findings will induce a sense of humility and awe at the complexity of Creation in the scientists of the future remains to be seen.