Study: Reduced sulphur content in shipping fuel caused ‘nearly 80%’ of recent atmospheric warming

Due to a 2020 shipping regulation…’The net planetary heat uptake has increased by 0.25 Wm−2 since 2020, making the 0.2 Wm−2 due to IMO2020 nearly 80% of the total increase.’ The study also says: ‘The 2023 record warmth is within the ranges of our expected trajectory. The magnitude of IMO2020 induced warming means that the observed strong warming in 2023 will be a new norm in the 2020 s.’ — Two general comments to make here: (1) cloud physics is admitted to be not well understood, and (2) could night-time clear(er) skies mean (more) cooling, in theory at least?
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An 80% reduction in sulphur dioxide shipping emissions observed in early 2020 could be associated with substantial atmospheric warming over some ocean regions, according to a modelling study published in Communications Earth & Environment.

The sudden decline in emissions was a result of the introduction of the International Maritime Organization’s 2020 regulation (IMO 2020), which reduced the maximum sulphur content allowed in shipping fuel from 3.5% to 0.5% to help reduce air pollution, says EurekAlert.

Fuel oil used for large ships has a significantly higher percentage content of sulphur than fuels used in other vehicles. Burning this fuel produces sulphur dioxide, which reacts with water vapour in the atmosphere to produce sulphate aerosols.

These aerosols cool the Earth’s surface in two ways: by directly reflecting sunlight back to space [Talkshop comment – daytime effect only]; and by affecting cloud cover.

Satellite traffic jams ahead?

Will Satellite Megaconstellations Weaken Earth’s Magnetic Field?

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Researcher: “We absolutely cannot dump endless amounts of conductive dust into the magnetosphere and not expect some kind of impact. Multidisciplinary studies of this pollution are urgently needed.”

Study: Potential Perturbation of the Ionosphere by Megaconstellations and Corresponding
Artificial Re-entry Plasma Dust

Climate’s ‘Catch-22’: Cutting air pollution heats up the planet — more confusion ahead?

Chinese smog
[image credit: BBC]

A choice between overheating and lung damage doesn’t appeal much, giving would-be climate controllers a new conundrum for their models to grapple with. Another excuse to wheel out catastrophe fears again.
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Air pollution, a global scourge that kills millions of people a year, is shielding us from the full force of the sun, says Euractiv.

Getting rid of it will accelerate climate change. That’s the unpalatable conclusion reached by scientists poring over the results of China’s decade-long and highly effective “war on pollution”, according to six leading climate experts.

The drive to banish pollution, caused mainly by sulphur dioxide (SO2) spewed from coal plants, has cut SO2 emissions by close to 90% and saved hundreds of thousands of lives, Chinese official data and health studies show.

Choking on Canada’s ‘Climate Change’ Smoke

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Claims of no evidence of arson were undermined by police arresting someone for starting 32 wildfires on a previous occasion, and this.

PA Pundits International

Our northern neighbor’s wildfires are wreaking havoc on American air quality, and the Left is leaping to the usual conclusions.

DOUGLAS ANDREWS

MORE BY THIS AUTHOR

Listen closely, and you can practically hear him say it: You never want a serious Canadian wildfire crisis to go to waste.

No, Rahm Emanuel isn’t whispering into Joe Biden’s ear these days, but those on the Left know well what Barack Obama’s former chief of staff said in the days just after the 2008 election, and they certainly know “an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before” when they see one.

Take Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, for example, who told her 13 million Twitter followers yesterday: “Between NYC in wildfire smoke and this [heat wave] in [Puerto Rico], it bears repeating how unprepared we are for the climate crisis. We must adapt our food systems, energy grids, infrastructure, healthcare, etc…

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Iveco CEO says Euro 7 vehicle emissions regulation is ‘plain stupid’

European Commission HQ, Brussels [image credit: Em_Dee @ Wikipedia]

The motor industry gets sandwiched between climate obsession and clean air fanaticism.
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The CEO of Italian truck and bus maker Iveco has condemned as “plain stupid” the Euro 7 standards which tighten vehicle emission limits for pollutants including nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide in the European Union from 2025, reports Euractiv.

Iveco Group’s Gerrit Marx said the regulation as currently drafted by the EU required cuts in emissions of nitrogen oxides and particulates which are “technically unfeasible”.

“The effort to get there is huge. And there is no real payback,” he said.

EU countries and lawmakers are due to negotiate the proposed legislation, which is designed to apply to cars and vans from July 1, 2025 and to buses and trucks two years later, this year.

Scientists evaluate Earth-cooling strategies with geoengineering simulations

Layers of Earth’s atmosphere

Q: What could possibly go wrong? A: Even the sky’s not the limit.
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A group of international scientists led by Cornell University is—more rigorously and systematically than ever before—evaluating if and how the stratosphere could be made just a little bit “brighter,” reflecting more incoming sunlight so that an ever-warming Earth maintains its cool, says Phys.org.

Their work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Solar radiation modification—or solar geoengineering, as it is sometimes called—is a potential climate change mitigation strategy that involves injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, so more sunlight bounces off the Earth’s atmosphere.

NOAA study finds reducing particulate air pollution in N America & Europe increases hurricanes in N Atlantic

The theme here is that aerosols have to some extent been having the opposite of the alleged effect of so-called greenhouse gases. This study, based on climate modelling, suggests at least some recent warming is linked to reductions in atmospheric aerosol content.
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A new NOAA study covering four decades of tropical cyclones found that reducing particulate air pollution in Europe and North America has contributed to an increase in the number of tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic basin and a decrease in the number of these storms in the Southern Hemisphere, says Green Car Congress.

The open-access study, published in Science Advances, also found that the growth of particulate pollution in Asia has contributed to fewer tropical cyclones in the western North Pacific basin.

While a number of recent studies have examined how increasing greenhouse gas emissions are impacting global tropical cyclone activity, Hiroyuki Murakami examined the less studied and highly complex area of how particulate pollution in combination with climate changes is affecting tropical cyclones in different areas of the planet.

If That Tesla Battery Could Talk

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Replacing combustion with combustibility doesn’t make EV batteries as clean or green as is claimed.

Science Matters

Let’s imagine what an EV battery could tell us about its reality. A short story.  H/T Graeme Weber

The packed auditorium was abuzz; nobody seemed to know what to expect. The only hint was a large aluminum block sitting on a sturdy table on the stage.

When the crowd settled down, a scholarly-looking man walked out and put his hand on the shiny block, “Good evening,” he said, “I am here to introduce NMC532-X,” and he patted the block, “we call him NM for short,” and the man smiled proudly. “NM is a typical electric vehicle (EV) car battery in every way except one; we programmed him to send signals of the internal movements of his electrons when charging, discharging, and in several other conditions. We wanted to know what it feels like to be a battery. We don’t know how it happened, but NM began to talk after we…

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Clean energy’s dirty secret: How push for modern technology has made Chinese pond toxic

Image credit: researchgate.net

The report says ‘Water is still leaching from the tailings pond towards the nearby Yellow River – China’s “mother river”, its basin home to 160 million people’. Are climate obsessives and those in renewables-hungry governments content to look the other way?
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There is an open wound in Baotou, says Sky News.

This city in Inner Mongolia, northern China, is home to more than two million people.

A lake lies on the west of the city, one filled with a black grey sludge of toxic and radioactive material.

This is a tailings pond, a quaint name for what is really a dumping ground.

Scientists map Arctic aerosols to better understand regional warming

Arctic sea ice [image credit: Geoscience Daily]

Funny how climate science is so insistent on its dogma without knowing enough about aerosol effects, or cloud cover effects for that matter. Talk of ‘better understanding climate change’ is fine, but all we hear in the media is that the debate is over and it’s all cut and dried as far as alarmists are concerned?
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Scientists at EPFL and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) have studied the chemical composition and origin—whether natural or anthropogenic—of aerosols in a region spanning from Russia to Canada, says Phys.org.

Their findings provide unique insights for helping researchers better understand climate change in the Arctic and design effective pollution-mitigation measures.

The work was made possible thanks to the joint effort of scientists from three continents.

NotZero: just 3% of air passengers use voluntary tuppence for ten miles miles carbon offset scheme.

We’re told that the majority of people in the UK are very concerned about global warming and climate change. But only 3% are so concerned that they are willing to pay even a trifling sum to offset their air miles. The Sunday Times carried a story about this and told us:

The airline offers all customers who are about to buy a ticket the chance to “fully offset your CO2 emissions for this flight” by paying a fee. The 730km journey from Dublin to Paris can be offset for €1.20, while a 486km journey from Dublin to London, one of the world’s busiest air routes, can be offset for 78c. Ryanair said: “The 3 per cent of customers that chose to go greener in 2019 has yet to substantially increase, with the impact of the pandemic on air travel potentially playing a part. To date, these customers have contributed €3.5 million to support environmental projects.”

NOT Zero: Less than 3% of Ryanair flyers willing to pay carbon offset
The Sunday Times, 6 February 2022

All of which begs two questions:

Firstly, why have polling organisations not asked consumers how much they’re will to pay to alleviate global warming before? Is it because the answers would reveal how unconcerned the large majority actually are?

Spain’s rare earths pit greens against tech security—and profit

Green blob [credit: storybird.com]

Messing up the local environment for whatever reason is always best done somewhere else. As government-mandated pursuit of renewable [sic] technologies ramps up, ever more industrial dirt-digging aka mining to meet demand is obviously inevitable. 
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Spain’s untapped rare earths are stoking tensions between mining companies and environmentalists and farmers who fear the devastating impact from extracting the minerals considered as essential for a high-tech and low-carbon economy, says Phys.org.

The group of 17 minerals are—despite their name—widely distributed across the globe, but exist in such thin concentrations that extracting even small quantities requires the processing of enormous quantities of ore.

Still, they are key ingredients in a range of high-tech and cutting-edge products, from wind turbines and electric vehicles to smart phones, medical devices and missile-guidance systems.

Heat pumps may cause dangerous water pollution, report warns

Domestic Air Source Heat Pump [image credit: UK Alternative Energy]

Forcing householders to replace gas boilers that release the harmless and vital trace gas CO2 with expensive heat pumps, to conform to curious and unproven climate-related ideas, may be an even worse plan than originally thought.
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Heat pumps are widely regarded as a silver bullet to the problem of decarbonising heating systems, but a new report from the German government suggests the refrigerants used in many units may have serious environmental impacts, particularly on water, says Renew Economy.

The findings do not spell doom for the heat pump revolution many climate activists want to see, but they would require a significant overhaul in the way many air conditioner and heat pump manufacturers build their systems.

The report, the result of a two year study by the German Environment Agency, concerns the use of halogenated refrigerants – known in the English speaking world as hydrofluoroolefins (HFOs) – in air conditioners and heat pumps.

It concludes that their use is already adding significant amounts trifluoroacetate acid (TFA) to the atmosphere, contaminating rain and water supplies, and potentially causing health problems such as liver and kidney damage.

Climate spies: Has new MI6 boss read the Paris Agreement?

Another climate job creation scheme gets launched at public expense. Not understanding the clear difference between climate and pollution issues is a poor start.
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Richard Moore, the new chief of the UK’s secret service, suggests countries such as China will be watched to ensure climate commitments are kept, says The Daily Telegraph (via The Global Warming Policy Forum).

What climate commitment? Has nobody at MI6 informed Mr Moore about the Paris Agreement?

After all, under international law, China, India, and all emerging and developing nations are exempt from any CO2 emission cuts until 2030 or later.

MI6 is placing the climate emergency at the forefront of its international espionage with “green spying” on the world’s big polluters, its new chief has revealed.

Richard Moore, head of the UK’s foreign intelligence service, described climate change as the “foremost international foreign policy item for this country and for the planet”.

It means the big industrial countries will be monitored by MI6 to ensure they are upholding their commitments to combating rising global temperatures.

Mr Moore, known as ‘C’, took charge of the intelligence agency in October and has become the first head of the service to ever give a broadcast interview.

He indicated that British spies will make China the focus of much of their climate-related espionage by pointing out that Beijing is “certainly the largest emitter” of carbon.

. . .

Continued here.

Aerosol particles cool the climate less than we thought

Another pillar of ‘settled’ climate science trembles. It’s described as ‘one of the largest uncertainties faced by climate scientists.’ Is there a list of these uncertainties somewhere?
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The impact of atmospheric aerosols on clouds and climate may be different than previously thought, reports Phys.org.

That is the conclusion of cloud researcher Franziska Glassmeier from TU Delft. The results of her study will be published in Science on Friday, January 29th.

Cloud decks cover vast stretches of the subtropical oceans. They cool the planet because they reflect incoming sunlight back to space.

Air pollution in the form of aerosols—particles suspended in the atmosphere—can increase this cooling effect because it makes clouds brighter.

The cooling effect of pollution offsets part of the warming effect of greenhouse gases. How much exactly, is one of the largest uncertainties faced by climate scientists.

Ship tracks

A striking illustration of clouds becoming brighter as a result of aerosols, is provided by shipping emissions in the form of “ship tracks.” These are visible as bright lines within a cloud deck that reveal the paths of polluting ships that travel beneath the clouds.

“Such ship tracks are a good example of how aerosol effects on clouds are traditionally thought of, and of how they are still represented in most climate models,” says Glassmeier.

But according to the cloud researcher, ship tracks do not tell the whole story.

Continued here.

Biden Should Help Clean Up The Developing World’s Exotic Mining Tragedy

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Cobalt was declared as ‘reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen’ in 2016.

PA Pundits International

By Ronald Stein ~

Reducing America’s emissions (if that’s your thing) is a major goal of President Elect Biden’s platform, but it should not be implemented by “leaking” environmental degradation and human atrocities to foreign countries that are supplying the exotic minerals and metals to support green electricity. Biden has an opportunity to follow the lead of the United Nations and Amnesty International as the efforts to achieve net zero emissions must not be built on human rights abuses or on non-existent environmental regulations in foreign countries.

Biden’s “war on pollution”, will require worldwide transparency of supply chains, and environmental and labor protection laws and standards to control the environmental degradation and humanity atrocities occurring around the world from the mining in the foreign countries that dominate the supply chain of the exotic minerals and metals to support wind turbines, solar panels and EV battery construction.

The dark side of…

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France plans to jail ‘ecocide’ offenders for up to 10 years under new laws

CO2 is not pollution

A selected handful of the citizens of France have spoken, so the die is cast. No-one wants pollution, but do they intend to classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant (like the USA), or even as a ‘danger to the environment’? Tell it to the plants and vegetation that rely on CO2 from photosynthesis to produce glucose, essential to survival.
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Environmental offenders could be handed a fine of up to €4.5 million, or 10 years in prison. The law is meant to punish those who commit a “general crime of pollution” or “endanger the environment”, says DW.com.

France is set to make serious intentional damage to the environment punishable by up to 10 years in prison, as part of a planned “ecocide” law, government ministers said in remarks published on Sunday.

The law was proposed following a recommendation made by the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate, an environmental committee of 150 people, created by the government a year ago.

Brexit: Ireland’s land bridge to the continent boosts UK ’emissions’

Dublin-Holyhead ferry link [image credit: Stena Line]

The report below refers to air pollution but ignores carbon dioxide emissions, which are *supposed to be* a much bigger problem according to climate obsessives.
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A no-deal Brexit could cost up to 5,000 jobs in Ireland’s fisheries, but it’s not just access to the UK’s coastal waters that the country is hoping to hold on to in any post-Brexit arrangement, says The Conversation @ Phys.org.

Perhaps more important to Ireland is the UK’s motorway network.

Every year, more than 150,000 trucks transport over 3 million tons of freight to and from Ireland to the rest of the single market across the UK land bridge.

One route involves goods being shipped from Dublin to Holyhead by ferry and then by road to Dover before being shipped to Calais.

It’s difficult to overestimate the importance of this land bridge for Ireland.

Ian Plimer: The Australian Press Council is a hive of climate zealots

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

Truth-starved climate propaganda and its backers get a good going-over from the ever-robust Professor.

H/T Climate Change Dispatch
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As a result of an activist campaign, the Australian Press Council took exception to my article in The Australian on November 22, 2019, says Ian Plimer @ Spectator AU.

They claimed that my statement that there “are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black. Such terms are deliberately misleading, as are many claims” was false.

Journalists in the Press Council should know basic English and the difference between an element (carbon) and a compound (carbon dioxide).

This is elementary schoolkid’s science. For the Press Council to claim that this is factually incorrect shows breathtaking ignorance.

Road plans will scupper CO2 targets, report says

Image credit: RAC

Hardly a day goes by without a climate propaganda item from the BBC, and here’s another one, laced with pollution claims as well. Now it’s claimed even electric cars are bad for the environment, if not for the climate. No mention of trucks, buses, taxis, tractors, vans and the like, which can’t work from home or switch to cycling. The madness never ends.
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The vast majority of emissions cuts from electric cars will be wiped out by new road-building, a report says.

The government says vehicle emissions per mile will fall as zero-emissions cars take over Britain’s roads.

But the report says the 80% of the CO2 savings from clean cars will be negated by the £27bn planned roads programme, reports BBC News.

It adds that if ministers want a “green recovery” the cash would be better spent on public transport, walking, cycling, and remote-working hubs.

And they point out that the electric cars will continue to increase local air pollution through particles eroding from brakes and tyres.