Follow Science (the Journal): 'Pollution Cuts add to Global Warming' and are 'Fueling Record Ocean Warmth'

Thus the Science Wars Enter a New Phase, with Science Revealing the Shenanigans of 'The Science™'

Today’s blasphemy comes straight from Science (the Journal), specifically Paul Voosen who, on 2 Aug. 2023, put most, if not all, ‘climate scientists™’ and their cheerleaders in legacy media to shame. Here’s the original source, with emphases and bottom lines mine.

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‘We’re changing the clouds.’ An unforeseen test of geoengineering is fueling record ocean warmth

Pollution cuts have diminished ‘ship track’ clouds, adding to global warming

By Paul Voosen, Science, 2 Aug 2023

Orig. caption: ‘Crisscrossing clouds known as ship tracks can be seen off the coast of Spain in this 2003 satellite image. With the phasing out of high-sulfur ship fuel, these reflective clouds have become scarcer, leading to ocean warming. Credit: ACQUES DESCLOITRES/MODIS LAND RAPID RESPONSE TEAM; MARK GRAY/MODIS

The Atlantic Ocean is running a fever. Waters off Florida have become a hot tub, bleaching the third-largest barrier reef in the world. Off the coast of Ireland, extreme heat was implicated in the mass death of seabirds. For years, the north Atlantic was warming more slowly than other parts of the world. But now it has caught up, and then some. Last month, the sea surface there surged to a record 25°C—nearly 1°C warmer than the previous high, set in 2020—and temperatures haven’t even peaked yet. ‘This year it’s been crazy’, says Tianle Yuan, an atmospheric physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The obvious and primary driver of this trend is society’s emissions of greenhouse gases, which trap heat that the oceans steadily absorb. Another influence has been recent weather, especially stalled high-pressure systems that suppress cloud formation and allow the oceans to bake in the Sun. [so far, so conventional, although it shall be noted that such statements that cannot be falsified, are indicative of being: un-scientific, according to Karl Popper’s falsification theorem]

But researchers are now waking up to another factor, one that could be filed under the category of unintended consequences: disappearing clouds known as ship tracks. Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule ‘is a big natural experiment’, says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. ‘We’re changing the clouds.’

By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster, several new studies have found. That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions. It’s as if the world suddenly lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year, says Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University.

The natural experiment created by the IMO rules is providing a rare opportunity for climate scientists to study a geoengineering scheme in action—although it is one that is working in the wrong direction. Indeed, one such strategy to slow global warming, called marine cloud brightening, would see ships inject salt particles back into the air, to make clouds more reflective. In Diamond’s view, the dramatic decline in ship tracks is clear evidence that humanity could cool off the planet significantly by brightening the clouds. ‘It suggests pretty strongly that if you wanted to do it on purpose, you could’, he says.

The influence of pollution on clouds remains one of the largest sources of uncertainty in how quickly the world will warm up, says Franziska Glassmeier, an atmospheric scientist at the Delft University of Technology. Progress on understanding these complex interactions has been slow. ‘Clouds are so variable’, Glassmeier says. [no shit analysis, Ms. Climate Expert™]…

Even before the IMO regulations, ship tracks have been a target for researchers to test these [geo-engineering] ideas. Given their striking appearance, these linear clouds were a natural candidate for artificial intelligence–based image recognition, Yuan says. Using such techniques, and 2 decades of calibrated imagery from NASA’s ailing Terra and Aqua satellites, Yuan and co-authors discovered 10 times more ship tracks than previously identified using manual techniques. In their study, published last year in Science Advances, they also found these tracks decreased by more than 50% in the main shipping corridors after the IMO regulations.

In more recent work, they take this analysis a step further, calculating the amount of cooling associated with the tracks’ brightening effect and the way the pollution extended the lifetime of the clouds. IMO rules have warmed the planet by 0.1 watts per square meter—double the warming caused by changes to clouds by airplanes, they conclude in a paper under review. The impact is magnified in regions of heavy shipping, like the north Atlantic, where the disappearing clouds are ‘shock to the system’, Yuan says. The increase in light, which was worsened by a lack of reflective Saharan dust over the ocean this year, ‘can account for most of the warming observed’ in the Atlantic this summer, he says. [thus Paul Voosen falsifies his opening assertion of human-made climate change; I stand corrected]

Instead of focusing on visible tracks, Watson-Parris and his colleagues started with ship location data, combining those coordinates with weather records to project where the ships’ pollution traveled. They compared clouds at these locations with nearby clouds free of any ship pollution. In Nature last year, they reported that these ‘invisible’ ship tracks not only enhanced low lying marine clouds, as usual, but also markedly increased the volume of puffy cumulus clouds higher in the atmosphere, previously thought to be immune to the influence of ship pollution. They concluded that air pollution could be causing clouds to cool the climate at roughly double the previously projected strength.

However, when the team then looked at the effect of the IMO rules on these invisible tracks, they received a shock: The decline in pollution didn’t make the cumulus clouds any less puffy, they report in a new preprint in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP). It suggests these clouds have a saturation point, after which added pollution does little to increase their depth, Watson-Parris says. ‘We removed 80% of the aerosols, but that’s still not taking us close to the preindustrial state.’ [please allow me to translate: our hypothesis was dead-wrong, and we struggle to abandon our preconceived ideas as this would, in all likelihood, make our funding streams dry up; again, not science]

[the next one is the money paragraph. hence I’ve blown it up a bit]

A third way to explore the impact of ship pollution on clouds is not to study them in aggregate, but rather to zoom in on ocean stretches where winds flow in parallel with shipping lanes, keeping the pollution tightly corralled. Such a stretch exists in the southeast Atlantic, off the coast of Angola. Observing this region with the Terra satellite, Diamond found that, with lower pollution, the cloud droplet sizes had grown to the largest size, by far, in the past 2 decades. Extrapolating from there, Diamond estimates in a paper last week in ACP that the IMO rules have caused warming globally at levels like those seen by Yuan.

Later this year, Diamond, Yuan, and others will begin to compare their techniques for studying the interaction of pollution and clouds, under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s small geoengineering research program. After a few more years, Wood says, ‘We’re really going to have something to say about these cloud adjustments.’

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Bottom Lines

I won’t hold my breath about that last paragraph.

Yuan and colleagues already showed that ‘the IMO rules have caused warming globally’ to explain virtually all the bruahahaha in the most-educated, best-informed quarters of climate doomers and their amplifiers in legacy media. They all stand naked before us, like the proverbial emperor wearing no clothes.

Eric Sevareid, a known US TV presenter of yesteryear, coined the following infamous statement:

The chief source of problems is solutions.

[For the quote, seeStan COX, Losing our Cool. The Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer), New York, N.Y., 2010, p. 150.]

We as societies have apparently breached the reality horizon. We know that the above-sketched ‘environmental’ regulations are having the unintended effect of warming the planet.

Instead of revoking these regulations, we’re now doubling and quadrupling down on this insanity: ‘serious’ scientists are now calling for the artificial recreation of the cooling effects of air pollution. You couldn’t make this up. This is not asylum-committal insanity; it is arguably much worse, especially as we have no idea of the possible consequences, to say nothing about unintended consequences.

Mind you, I’m not in favour of returning to pre-regulation issues of virtually unlimited pollution, but as a short-term fix it looks a better idea than anything else.

Yet, while the implications are staggering to mind-boggling, there is one other aspect I wish to comment on, however briefly, as it’s much closer to my own ‘expertise’ (muahahahahaha), which is post-mediaeval, pre-industrial European history:

Back in the olden days, those who espoused controversial ideas or ‘heretical’ thinking often were persecuted viciously by local officials, Church masters, and state actors. This is literally true of the likes of Galileo Galilei (15641642) and, especially so, of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) who was burned at the stake in Rome.

Today’s cancel culture is perhaps less obviously vicious, but it also stands in the starkest possible contrast to what is arguably one of Europe’s great accomplishments: the scientific method.

And while I remain somewhat uneasy about its at time quasi-religious ersatz function for traditional religious and/or philosophical lines of argumentation, science has given us a more objective way of understanding our planet, for better (e.g., sanitation, astronomy) and worse (nukes, modRNA Covid ‘vaccines’).

What we’re currently living through this year is the negation of science, though, or anti-science, with the above piece a rare glimpse of sanity in what otherwise appears a deluge of disinformation.

When we as society rush to judgement, change policy for decades to come, and do so based on (at best) flawed hypotheses, we’re entering the danger zone.

Here’s hoping that it won’t take centuries for the official soothsayers to correct their wrongful assessments.

It took the Catholic Church until 1835 to drop Galileo’s treatise from the index of prohibited literature.

If we fail to restore science, disaster will arrive in the most ancient forms of four horsemen: pestilence (Sars-Cov-2 and its ‘cures’), war (Ukraine and/or elsewhere, e.g., Niger, with Western allies calling for ‘intervention’), famine (remember the ‘grain deal’?), and death.

All of these will be amplified if we don’t move to call out the false prophets and publicly chastise them.

The clock is ticking.