We’re about to kill a massive, accidental experiment in reducing global warming

Studies have found that ships have a net cooling effect on the planet, despite belching out nearly a billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. That’s almost entirely because they also emit sulfur, which can scatter sunlight in the atmosphere and form or thicken clouds that reflect it away.

In effect, the shipping industry has been carrying out an unintentional experiment in climate engineering for more than a century. Global mean temperatures could be as much as 0.25 ˚C lower than they would otherwise have been, based on the mean “forcing effect” calculated by a 2009 study that pulled together other findings (see “The Growing Case for Geoengineering”). For a world struggling to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, that’s a big helping hand.

And we’re about to take it away.

Read the MIT Technology Review story by James Temple - “We’re about to kill a massive, accidental experiment in reducing global warming.”

A Guide to What the Times’s Bold, Flawed Climate Story Left Out

In the August 5 issue of the New York Times Magazine, reporter Nathaniel Rich spells out, in just shy of 30,000 words, how in the decade spanning 1979 to 1989, we came very close to halting climate change in its tracks, only we didn’t. Rich’s in-depth reporting links together the earliest understandings of and reports on climate change—as early as 1978, we knew that a hike in global temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius would wreck havoc on the planet — with the political atmosphere at the time. The consensus, in those years, was that climate change was a collective failure, and one for which every country and every leader should assume collective responsibility.

In the piece, called “Losing Earth,” Rich tracks the work of the lobbyist Rafe Pomerance and climate scientist James Hansen as they worked to convince both politicians and the American public of the consequences of unfettered fossil fuel burning. They were certainly effective in raising awareness; as early as 1979, Exxon was launching its own research into carbon emissions to better understand how much blame it would shoulder, because the company recognized that, at that time, it was still conceivable that it might end up in hot water if government regulations were authorized. “There was a formal consensus around the nature of the crisis,” Rich writes. That consensus led to meetings among global leaders in Geneva, Tokyo, and the Netherlands, while Pomerance and Hansen continued their work on the ground in the U.S.

Read the Fast Company story by Eillie Anzilotti - “A Guide to What the Times’s Bold, Flawed Climate Story Left Out.”

Can bribes save the rainforest?

Rainforests are some of the only pieces of lush wilderness left on the planet. Just about every bit of land that isn’t frozen or desert has been turned into farmland. Unfortunately, deforestation is a big problem. A popular solution has been to offer locals payments for NOT cutting down trees. But does this system actually work? A group of scientists set out to find the answer.

Can bribes save the rainforests?

The scientists knew that these bribes could go wrong. According to classical economic theory, people are selfish; they do whatever helps them the most. That means that the villagers could easily just take payments and keep harvesting trees.

Lots of research suggests that adding money to a situation can backfire. The villagers, who may have previously valued the forest for itself, might now start to look at it just as a source of income. After the bribes, they might cut down even more trees as a result.

Read the Ilana Strauss story from Treehugger - “Can bribes save the rainforest?”