Good Morning John, It’s been a very busy science week
and I feel as if a particular science story has been totally missed
but maybe in fact, the biggest one of all of them.
Like, bigger than maybe a room-temperature superconductor.
Bigger than maybe a really powerful solid tumor cancer treatment.
It’s hiding and nobody’s talking about it
and it is that we might now understand what caused this.
Which is a graph of the temperature of the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean.
Many different years, uh, and this year in red.
Which isn’t particularly fun to look at.
Like, it’s scary times here on planet earth. But before I jump into all this John,
I want to thank you for your lovely Esther Day video.
I love you too, it’s been quite a year.
Though I am happy with the current trajectory, at least.
So geoengineering is this fairly controversial idea
that you could intentionally change the climate of the planet.
Now that is different from when you accidentally change the climate of the planet
which is just the last 100 years.
This conversation is gonna be a big deal. It’s gonna be a bigger and bigger
and bigger deal over the next few decades.
As we have to make really hard decisions about what to do about the actual impacts
we are experiencing from climate change. We have very clearly been doing a lot
of accidental and reckless and haphazard geoengineering over the past 100 years.
The biggest piece of that is dumping a whole lot of carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere and thus decreasing
the amount of heat that can radiate back out into space.
That means more heat in the system and a hotter planet.
But there’s also a lot of other pieces of geoengineering that we’ve been doing.
For example,
we release a lot of sulfur dioxide when we burn dirty fuels like coal and fuel oil.
And sulfur dioxide actually temporarily, for a very short period of time
much shorter than the impacts of carbon dioxide,
can decrease the temperature of an area of the planet.
It does this because it’s good at seeding clouds.
It does that by combining by moisture in the atmosphere to form droplets
of sulfuric acid, which you know, you don’t really want in the air.
But, it does create more and fluffier clouds.
This is a known effect. This is not new information.
This happens when volcanoes erupt and sulfur dioxide comes out.
It can cool the planet with the dust and with the sulfur dioxide.
Now, one really big source of sulfur dioxide is those big ships that carry cargo containers
from one continent to another.
They burn the kind of oil that’s left oil after every one’s done taking
the fraction they want out of it. It’s like the worst, cheapest oil.
That’s what they use. It has a lot of sulfur in it.
They burn it, and that sulfur dioxide goes into the atmosphere and it seeds clouds.
You can actually see them from space. They’re called ship tracks and they
are clouds that are created by sulfur dioxide being spat up
from the stacks of these big ships.
Now I don’t know if you already see where I’m going with this,
but this is absolutely wild.
But because sulfur dioxide is bad for people, and animals and the earth,
the UN’s international maritime organization passed a new rule that said
you have to burn low sulfur fuels in these big ships.
That rule went into effect in 2020 and over the last few years there
have been significantly fewer ship tracks.
Scientists have been looking at this really carefully, and their models
are showing that almost all of the new warming of the
North Atlantic's surface of the sea can be attributed to
just new light hitting it that wouldn’t normally be hitting it.
Now, that’s mostly because of ship tracks, and partially because this year there’s
less dust from the Sahara, for I think unrelated reasons.
So in one way, this is very bad news. Like, it turns out global warming is worse
than we thought it was.
We were just being shielded from some of its effects
by other pollution that we were throwing up into the atmosphere.
But in another way,
and I think in a bigger way in the long term this is good news
because the experiment that we just ran here is priceless.
And also impossible to pull off. Like, if we had wanted to run
this experiment it would have been
so expensive that we never could have done it.
But also it would have been
politically impossible to pull off because geoengineering is such a hot button issue.
Instead we got a perfect experiment showing us the effects
of local geoengineering on this area,
and the thing is, you don't’ have to use sulfur dioxide to see cloud.
There’s other ways to do it that don’t involve a bunch
of acid rain and giving people asthma.
One of the ways is to just shoot seawater into the air.
Like there’s a bunch of sea water around. You shoot it up into the air with like, misters.
That makes it super tiny so it can float in the atmosphere just
like any other particle, most of the water evaporates
leaving behind little crystals of salt that then can seed clouds
and then it falls back down, and the ocean is like,
yeah that was the salt that was here in the first place.
Some people say we can’t discuss geoengineering because people will see it
as an excuse to continue to just keep burning fossil fuels.
I don’t think anybody’s going to see it that way
in 10 or 20 years. It’s gonna be very hot.
It’s gonna get hot enough that we’re gonna see
a lot of marine extinctions, it’s gonna get hot enough
that we’re going to see a lot of humans dying.
Those stories are going to be very big in other parts of the world,
but they’re also gonna be like local stories in the US.
We’re gonna have people here dying of heat.
And we have to do like three things at the same time.
We have to stop putting new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
We have to start taking old Co2 out of the atmosphere.
And we have to deal with the impacts
of the current warming which exist now and we cannot avoid.
We are entering into the overlap period. The period during which the problem
is big enough that we can’t ignore it anymore,
and when we still can do things to solve it.
And that means all three of those things. So to have a natural decades long experiment
like this is priceless.
And maybe even more than that, we can see that we’re already doing it.
Instead of saying-- Should humanity take this giant step forward
and begin geoengineering the planet? What we’re saying is--
Should we take a giant step forward and do it
instead of accidentally and haphazardly and in the most reckless manner possible?
Do it intentionally and carefully.
John, I'll see you on Tuesday
Intentional and careful is also what a lot of the
Awesome Coffee Club is doing.
So, lot of places and a lot of people just sort of look for the certifications,
but we’ve actually gone to talk to and visit with the people
who make this coffee.
Cause coffee is one of the great joys of life and this coffee is amazing
because it is extraordinarily high quality, because it is taken care of from the moment
the tree is planted in Colombia to the moment it is shipped
out of our warehouse in Missoula MT.
There’s a link in the description or you can just google Awesome Coffee Club,
you know how the internet works!