China reduced sulphur dioxide emissions by more than two-thirds in past 15 years
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
However given the strong role SO2 can play in reducing global warming, and that there are even proposals to introduce more SO2 to the atmosphere to achieve the Paris objectives, like most things in our complex interconnected world it gets a bit more complex.
Of course one hopes there are better responses to the changing climate than reactively doubling down on polluting contaminants into the atmosphere when that has contributed to the current mess and we clearly have narrow and incomplete understandings of systemic intervention.
Climate change is accompanied by an incredible amount of doomerism. I've had lots of people tell me variations of "we're all doomed anyway, I'm going to vote for the drill drill drill party and party until the world ends".
If we don't celebrate the wins we do have, everybody will give up.
Your doomerism argument is a strawman, it is fact that we are still accelerating the current temperature excursion. If it helps you, we are at one of the coldest moments in earth's history, so most of what climate change will cause will have been there before.
Wait... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_annual_CO2_em...
It might help but most of the world is still considered "in development", we need for that development to happen with sustainable energy sources, and for that it needs to be as simple and cheap to be harvested and used as it is for those countries to use fossil fuels today.
If that doesn't happen then these countries will use fossil fuels to develop, and the population peaking won't be of much help when those countries start emitting more per capita like many developed countries.
There is no such thing as polluting substances, only an accumulation of those. The problem lies in the fact that our technological process graph has too many sinks leading to an accumulation of 'dead-end' by-products. There is almost never such occurrences in nature, and when it does (great oxygenation event), the system manages to circle it back into the process graph.
Contrast this with current ecological recommendations: they boil down to reducing the production rate of such substances, which can only asymptotically delay the looming apocalypse.
It is actually recent earth's biosphere with its many negative feedback loops which is the exception here. Earth could have turned into a Venus or Mars if conditions were just slightly different, and it almost did several times.
The question I want to ask is: why is there almost no existential pollution problems in nature ? Why does the way civilization lays out its own process graph lends itself so easily to dead ends ?
"I believe the only true hope is mass sabotage of fossil-fuel producing infrastructure."
Terrorism talk should not be part of HN.
Marine fuels were the last remaining stronghold of anthropogenic SO2.
The two large scale changes in recent years of atmospheric makeup were the SO2 generation reduduction from marine fuel phase outs and the unuual high altitude water vaper injection from a volcanic eruption.
Atmospheric gas makeup changes are mapped from a number of global sites, and recently mutlispectral orbiting gas sensors have been fine scale mapping sources.
* https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
* https://research.noaa.gov/hunga-tonga-2022-eruption/
* https://research.csiro.au/acc/capabilities/cape-grim-baselin...
With complex systems touching a variable impacts a lot of places, something that may become obvious in hindsight. Undoing how we triggered climate change, that is first drastically reducing emissions and then capturing the excess of greenhouse gases, looks like a less disruptive way to effectively solve the problem.