We need to put the sulfur back in the cargo ship fuel ASAP. Since the ban ocean water and global air temps have shot up like a rocket, far beyond the normal swings in El Niño weather patterns .
For one, there’s a significant lag which means that we’re only seeing a fraction of the effect from the drop in emissions. To attribute the majority of this year’s warming would suggest an enormous effect size that’s not supported by our best models.
The majority of models suggest between 0.03 and 0.06 degrees of warming over the next 30 years, due to the drop in SO2 from marine shipping. At the very top end, models which anticipate a large amount of radiative forcing at the end of the confidence ranges still only anticipate around +0.18C by 2030.
Carbon Brief suggests other factors being more influential:
> [drop in marine shipping SO2] is unlikely to be sufficient to explain the spike in global sea surface temperature in recent weeks, which is around 0.2C above the prior record for this time of year.
> Rather, there are a number of other factors likely contributing to current record-warm ocean temperatures. These include the end of a moderate La Niña event at the start of the year and a developing El Niño, a shift which tends to result in higher global temperatures.
> Stratospheric water vapour from the 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano and an unusual absence of dust from the Sahara Desert over the tropical North Atlantic may also be helping drive the ocean heatwave.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
https://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Sulphur-2...
/s, and I dearly hope that doesn’t happen, but these days it feels like it’s just a matter of time.