Geoengineering Cooling Planet Ahead of Coming Ice Age
Geoengineering, Bunker Fuel & Ship Tracks
From accident to intent: how international shipping blocks sunlight.
Ship tracks and contrail-cirrus clouds are a nuisance at best, and a killer at worst. The pollution from jet aircraft and international shipping exhaust directly affects human health and despite moves to curtail these silent killers, scientist activists are calling for more sulfur emissions in the name of global warming and geoengineering. Propaganda media outlets label this as “Accidental Geoengineering” however, it’s no longer an accident, it’s intentional geoengineering.
Ship Tracks and Bunker Fuel
In 2020, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) banned bunker fuel, or heavy fuel oil. This bottom-of-the-barrel fuel has a high concentration of sulfur and produced huge marine stratocumulus clouds called ship tracks.
Global warming scientists and geoengineering activists were stunned by the IMO’s decision to ban bunker fuel and take away their “accidental geoengineering” clouds.
Their pushback tells us everything we need to know: cooling the planet is more important than human health and sunlight.
Bunker Fuel and Geoengineering: A History Lesson
In 2009, Ken Caldeira, John Nissen, and David Keith all commented an article by Oliver Morton on the forthcoming reduction of shipping fuel sulfur:
Yesterday Dan Lack of NOAA gave a talk to the NCAR media fellows about his work on pollution from shipping, and told us something I found pretty flabbergasting. Last year the International Maritime Organisation, as part of a number of measures aimed at air pollution, decided to do something about the sulphur emissions from shipping by reducing the amount of sulphur dioxide permissible from 4.5% today to 0.5% in 2020. This would have great benefits; sulphate pollution, and associated particulate matter, cause significant health problems. According to a new paper in Environmental Science and Technology by Winebrake et al, if in 2012 the world’s shipping complied with this requirement, the associated sulphate pollution would cause 46,000 premature deaths; if that shipping used today’s higher sulphur fuels the death toll would be 87,000.
The International Maritime Organisation’s plans to warm the world – August 20, 2009
NOTE: John Nissen was part of this discussion with Ken Caldeira in 2009.
Next in 2011, John Nissen’s Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG) sent a letter to world leaders claiming that the poles would be ice free by 2015 unless we conducted massive geoengineering schemes immediately.
The trend is for September ice to fall to zero by 2015. Thus we can expect one month without sea ice in 2015, with the possibility for this event in 2014 or even in 2013.
Among their proposals (which were rejected, at least by the UK Parliament) was an increased use in bunker fuels:
There is one thing that we do know can produce an appropriate amount of cooling power: the sulphate aerosol in the troposphere, as emitted from coal-fired power stations and from ship bunker fuel. This aerosol has offset CO2 warming by around 75% in the past century. There should be a temporary suspension of initiatives and regulations to suppress these emissions, while they are having a significant cooling effect in the Northern Hemisphere, unless human health is at risk.
ACTION PLAN
Interventions in the Earth System
2.) Try to maintain or even enhance the current cooling effect from currently emitted sulphate aerosols in the troposphere at mid to high northern latitudes. For example the regulation to ban bunker fuel for ships should be relaxed while encouraging continued use of bunker fuel where the resulting aerosol emissions might be beneficial. Reduction of sulphate aerosol ‘pollution’ will be unpopular with many environment groups, but the priority to cool the Arctic has to be established.
Some would say: “but Jim, this isn’t geoengineering. This is simply encouraging ‘beneficial’ pollution.” Andrew Lockley, forum moderator for the Google Geoengineering Group and lead of the geoengineering project Stratospheric Aerosol Transport and Nucleation (SATAN) had this to say about encouraging the use of bunker fuels:
For clarity, it’s *preventing* the desulfurization of marine fuels that would be geoengineering. There’s a strong case for cleaning them up, as they’re very polluting and kill many people near ports.
”Accidental” Geoengineering – 2015
Thank you for the clarification, Andrew. What happened after the bunker fuel ban went into effect in 2020? Studies were published and they claimed that there was less pollution (less dead people) but the oceans heated up.
Gettelman, A., Christensen, M. W., Diamond, M. S., Gryspeerdt, E., Manshausen, P., Stier, P., et al. (2024). Has reducing ship emissions brought forward global warming? Geophysical Research Letters, 51, e2024GL109077. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL109077
Regulations put into effect in 2020 by the International Maritime Organization required a roughly 80% reduction in the sulfur content of shipping fuel used globally. That reduction meant fewer sulfur aerosols flowed into Earth’s atmosphere.
When ships burn fuel, sulfur dioxide flows into the atmosphere. Energized by sunlight, chemical intermingling in the atmosphere can spur the formation of sulfur aerosols. Sulfur emissions, a form of pollution, can cause acid rain. The change was made to improve air quality around ports.
In addition, water likes to condense on these tiny sulfate particles, ultimately forming linear clouds known as ship tracks, which tend to concentrate along maritime shipping routes. Sulfate can also contribute to forming other clouds after a ship has passed. Because of their brightness, these clouds are uniquely capable of cooling Earth’s surface by reflecting sunlight.
The authors used a machine learning approach to scan over a million satellite images and quantify the declining count of ship tracks, estimating a 25 to 50% reduction in visible tracks. Where the cloud count was down, the degree of warming was generally up.
Begging for Bunker Fuel: Bring Back Marine Geoengineering
Enter Ron P. Baiman, retired radical economist, turned “Global Green New Deal” geoengineering activist. In 2023, he wrote “Healthy Climate Action Coalition Petition to World Leaders: The Case for Urgent Direct Climate Cooling.”
A bunch of us (in forums and communications within the groups in the lists above) have been discussing a potential immediate practical step (that earlier has been raised by others) that may provide at least a modicum of cooling especially over the oceans: a relaxation of the “bunker fuel” sulfur content regulations that just came into effect in 2020 for inter-port “high seas” shipping. The idea is that cargo ships and tankers would be able to use the old dirty sulfur laden fuel in the open ocean but switch to the cleaner fuel when they are near ports or human habitation. Apparently many ships have multiple fuel tanks so that they may be able to switch fuels in transit.
To be clear, we would stress that we fully support getting off of fossil fuels, but if fossil fuels are going to be used anyway it makes no sense not to at least benefit from fossil fuel burning maritime sulfur aerosol generation that is known to have a significant cooling effect (how much is currently being re-estimated using the “termination shock” signal from the 2020 abrupt change in sulfur emissions due to the regulation). Looking forward this also points the way to including effective (and hopefully less harmful to human health) tropospheric aerosol generators in future non GHG emitting replacements for the bunker fuel (see the HPAC direct climate cooling petition for some possible options: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yHe2Fe6fU11odfcH-4GwdYDNTCk7uB-J/view?usp=sharing ).
In his paper (linked above) he states he prefers geoengineering now over caution:
[Climate] Intervention [aka Geoengineering] related moral-hazard arguments cannot be settled a priori [based on theoretical deduction rather than empirical observation] and do not properly compare the possible risks of some climate cooling methods against the known risks of not attempting to directly cool the climate.
Translation: Since we can not address moral-hazard related concerns, we must employ geoengineering, climate engineering, or climate intervention immediately because we KNOW that not attempting geoengineering would be worse.
I explained this reasoning to my eight year old daughter. She asked, “Daddy, is that man crazy?”
After falling on deaf ears, Baiman decided to give it another go:
An earlier draft (attached) of our letter: “An Open Letter to the IMO Supporting Maritime Transport that Cools the Atmosphere While Preserving Air Quality Benefits” has been transmitted to the IMO Secretary General.
Source: Open Letter to IMO on Bunker Fuel Regulation has been Transmitted to the IMO
Here are Baiman’s proposals to the IMO:
1) Partially relax the IMO’s maritime bunker fuel sulfur emissions regulation for “high seas” maritime transport outside of Emissions Control Areas in ways that – as much as possible – would increase the global cooling benefits of sulfur or similar aerosols without causing harm to humans or natural systems, and
2) Require that benign tropospheric aerosol precursors such as sea water (referred to as the “marine cloud brightening method”) or other possible tropospheric aerosols (referred to as the “climate catalysts method”) that can be released from ships and that would replace the global cooling benefits of sulfur aerosols without – as much as possible – causing harm to humans or natural systems, be deployed in maritime transport (Baiman et al., 2023).
Translation:
1) Use bunker fuel out to sea (mid-ocean) and use low sulfur fuels near ports.
2) Require sea salt blowing machines on international ships for marine cloud brightening (MCB)
Bruh! Imagine the hubris of a retired economist trying to play God with the world’s weather and begging the IMO to empower geoengineering at any cost.
Regional deployment of marine cloud brightening off the U.S. West Coast would be far less effective in the warmer world of 2050, and if implemented, could unleash higher temperatures in Europe and other regions, warns recent research.
The June 2024 modeling study of the controversial geoengineering technique shows “that a regional intervention will have large scale implications. So even though you’re applying [MCB] in a smaller space, the impacts [end up being] global,” says Jessica Wan, first author on the paper and a climate sciences Ph.D. candidate at California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Source: Cloud brightening over oceans may stave off climate change, but with risk
Summation
Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) and Ship Tracks from bunker fuel are not adequate solutions for global warming. Both MCB and Ship Tracks are examples of pollution working as cloud seeding. At best, they may temporarily cool, at worst, they could destabilize weather worldwide and even lead to global conflict:
“Anytime we interfere with natural precipitation patterns, we set off a chain of events that we have little control over,” he said, adding, “If we’re not careful, unrestrained use of this technology could end up causing diplomatic instabilities with neighboring countries engaging in tit-for-tat ‘weather wars’.”
Source: Expert Raises Alarm Over Cloud Seeding: Could ‘Weather Wars’ Erupt?
Learn more about MCB in my previous article:
San Francisco Bay Geoengineering Project
Marine Cloud Brightening, the Silver Lining Project, and the Great Barrier Reef Restoration Project.
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