I give 20 claps when people make me LOL.
Although we are going to get desperate enough to try it. You should read the paper that this is the addendum for.
Because I don't think you understand the whole picture.
The planetary albedo is declining because warming oceans suppress low cloud formation. There are literally fewer clouds reflecting light.
"Marine Cloud Brightening" doesn't make clouds. It makes haze. At the level sufficient to cool the planet you are talking about "Under a White Sky" effects.
The title of Kolbert’s book comes from one possible side-effect of “solar geoengineering” (or “solar radiation management,” in what’s supposed to be the less scary parlance). Spraying light-reflective particles into the atmosphere will make blue skies look white. -- NYT Book review
Do you really think people are going to be happy living with that?
For the rest of the century?
MCB is one of those ideas like "iron seeding" that works on paper but has massive unknown risks. It sounds like it could work.
It's been tested using sulfate particulates in diesel fuels for over a century. We know we can use this technique to cool the planet because we have been.
However, the estimated 3-4 million deaths per year globally was enough to prompt the IMO to reduce the sulfur content of marine diesel fuels from 3.5% to 0.5% effective 2020.
The provided their analysis in this study “Beyond SOx reductions from shipping: assessing the impact of NOx and carbonaceous-particle controls on human health and climate”. In this study, sponsored by the EU Commission, the authors concluded that.
Historically, cargo ships have been powered by low-grade fossil fuels, which emit particles and particle-precursor vapors that impact human health and climate. We used a global chemical-transport model with online aerosol microphysics (GEOS-Chem-TOMAS) to estimate the aerosol health and climate impacts of four emission-control policies: (1) 85% reduction in sulfur oxide (SOx) emissions (Sulf); (2) 85% reduction in SOx and black carbon (BC) emissions (Sulf-BC); (3) 85% reduction in SOx, BC, and organic aerosol (OA) emissions (Sulf-BC-OA); and (4) 85% reduction in SOx, BC, OA, and nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions (Sulf-BC-OA-NOx).
The SOx reductions reflect the 0.5% fuel-sulfur cap implemented by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) on 1 January 2020. The other reductions represent realistic estimates of future emission-control policies. We estimate that these policies could reduce fine particulate matter (PM2.5)-attributable mortalities by 13 300 (Sulf) to 38 600 (Sulf-BC-OA-NOx) mortalities per year. These changes represent 0.3% and 0.8%, respectively, of annual PM2.5-attributable mortalities from anthropogenic sources. Comparing simulations, we estimate that adding the NOx cap has the greatest health benefit.
In contrast to the health benefits, all scenarios lead to a simulated climate warming tendency. The combined aerosol direct radiative effect and cloud-albedo indirect effects (AIE) are between 27 mW m−2 (Sulf) and 41 mW m−2 (Sulf-BC-OA-NOx). These changes are about 2.1% (Sulf) to 3.2% (Sulf-BC-OA-NOx) of the total anthropogenic aerosol radiative forcing. The emission control policies examined here yield larger relative changes in the aerosol radiative forcing (2.1%–3.2%) than in health effects (0.3%–0.8%), because most shipping emissions are distant from populated regions.
Valuation of the impacts suggests that these emissions reductions could produce much larger marginal health benefits ($129–$374 billion annually) than the marginal climate costs ($12–$17 billion annually).
Which shows you that governmental agencies are already weighing “lives saved” versus “climate costs”. In this case estimating that the health benefits of not killing 3–4 million people a year was worth more than the extra warming caused by reducing the amount of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere.
How many do you think MCB will kill?
