AI pictures of smoking ships and camel in bone dry desert
Controlling Air Pollution – Well It’s Complicated
By I.H.Jarss staff writer
From a climate point of view, shipping is a dirty business injecting around 800 million tonnes of CO2 each year into the atmosphere. To reduce that total is not easy because big ships need the dense energy that is packed into oil-based fuels. These heavy oils also include many other pollutants, including, in particular, sulphur. Until recently, shipping produced about 10 million tonnes per annum of sulphur oxides (SO2, SO3) which are environmentally damaging.
In 2020 the International Maritime Organisation introduced rules limiting the amount of sulphur in most shipping fuel oils. The result has been, already, a 75% drop in the production of SOx. That is great news for both the marine and land environments.
But there is a snag.
SOx combines with water in the atmosphere to produce aerosols, tiny blobs that float high up in the sky. These are highly reflective of sunlight. They help to cool the Earth. Since 2020 the atmospheric temperature has increased substantially causing global warming to increase more rapidly. *A new study suggests that the recent reduction in SOx may have contributed up to 0.16̊C to that warming. You might think that 0.16 is an insignificant number but consider that the weight of the final straw which broke the camel’s back was also insignificant.
Dealing with the climate well – It’s Complicated.
*As reported in The New Scientist Magazine 08.06.2024
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So much of our tinkering seems to result in unintended consequences! Nature is much better at this stuff than we are. We can only try to minimise the damage we do, maybe by living much simpler, more local lives…..