Massively under-reported science story because there's so much going on right now but...it turns out that we might have figured out what's causing this very scary spike.
Quick thread, on how WE'VE BEEN ACCIDENTALLY GEOENGINEERING FOR DECADES...but then we stopped:
So, geoengineering (or climate engineering) is when you intentionally do stuff to change the climate of the Earth. When you accidentally do stuff to change the climate of the Earth, that's just called "The last 100 years."
We've been doing a lot of accidental geoengineering.
The big bit is all of the CO2 in the atmosphere, which heats things up a lot. But we also do other stuff, like for example releasing tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, which we do by burning dirty fuels like coal and fuel oil.
SO2 actually (very temporarily) cools things down by seeding clouds and creating sulfuric acid aerosols. That's not, like, /good/, but by making more clouds (and also decreasing the size of droplets in clouds, and thus increasing their number) more sunlight is reflected to space.
One big source of SO2 is international shipping. Big ships use dirty fuels, dumping a ton of SO2 into the atmosphere, thus seeding clouds. You can actually see them from space...they're called "Ship Tracks."
Now, sulfur pollution is bad...it acidifies the rain which acidifies the ocean (which is already dealing with acidification). It can cause lung problems in humans and animals. So the UN's International Maritime Organization created a new rule to limit sulfur in ship fuels.
They started enforcing this in 2020...and we "lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year" according to FSU atmospheric scientist Michael Diamond.
Models show that the extra warming we've been seeing in the North Atlantic (which is a very busy area for shipping) can pretty much be /entirely attributed/ to the extra sunlight hitting the ocean (which has, this year, also been worsened by less dust blowing from the Sahara.)
Now, in one way, this is very bad news. Global warming is actually worse than we thought it was, we've just been shielding ourselves from it with /other pollution/. Similar effects have been seen when we turn off coal fired power plants.
In another way, it's good news. The new IMO rules are providing a free natural experiment that would otherwise be both extremely expensive and perhaps politically impossible to pull off. Geoengineering is a fraught topic that many people outright oppose.
But the reality is, we've been geoengineering this planet in a terribly reckless and haphazard way for over a hundred years. Getting a look at the exact effect of releasing SO2 for decades and then the effect of /stopping/ might truly be priceless.
Because it doesn't have to be SO2 we launch into the air to seed clouds, we could do it with salt from the water by simply spraying the ocean into the sky. And we could use the existing fleet of shipping vessels to do it. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs…
And the biggest perspective shift for me here is...we shouldn't be asking whether we should be doing geoengineering...we already are, we have been for a century. We should be asking...should take a huge step and do it intentionally and thoughtfully...because WE CAN SEE IT WORKS.
I also made my vlogbrothers video about this this week where I go into more detail. You can see it here:
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I want to tell you a story that has made me kinda hopeless about Twitter's ability to affect positive things happening, and it starts with this tweet from Hillary Clinton.
It was (and I understand why) widely mocked. The graph is confusing and bad, especially the part where it flattens out in 2030 (which is when most of the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate change bill in the history of Earth, expires.)
Some of the people making fun of the tweet were like "How do I vote for Target" which is a good joke. But the majority of the popular tweets about it were like "This is the problem with Democrats, they will only ever be just a little better than Republicans."
FYI Charlotte the stingray is not pregnant with shark rays (unfortunately impossible) but she is also not pregnant with clones of herself (also impossible) it's much weirder than that.
Charlotte the stingray procreates sexually, which means she isn't set up to create clones. Her egg cells have half of her genome with a random mix of genes from her father and mother.
Usually that would get fertilized with sperm with half of another stingray's genome.
Charlotte can't just not use an egg cell to make babies. She has to. So an evolutionary hack developed where some animals can fertlize their own eggs. In the case of sharks and rays, this is done with a by product of meiosis called a "polar body" that is usually discarded.
Here's the story of how I kinda bought 10% of an amazing new word game...for charity.
A few months ago, I saw a TikTok about a word game called "Gubbins" that was being produced by a small indie game studio in Australia (@folly_studio) and I messaged the people creating it.
I got early access to the game and absolutely loved it. It's fun, simple, fast, clever, and most of all ABSOLUTELY DELIGHTFUL. It's just a little piece of art that is part of my daily life now.
We got on the phone and they talked about how FREAKING HARD it is to do anything interesting in the mobile game space and how they were having a difficult financial time making it to the finish line.
It's really a shame that the IceCube neutrino observatory galaxy map was released on the same day as the gravitational wave data because they're both entirely new ways to observe our universe and I feel like it didn't get the press it deserved!
Like, it's one thing to use pulsars in the Milky Way as a galaxy-sized gravitational wave detector. But it's another thing to actually build a neutrino telescope by lowering thousands of detectors into a square kilometer of perfectly clear, ancient Antarctic ice.
100 trillion neutrinos pass through you every second never hitting anything...but very rarely they do hit an atom, creating a tiny spark of light! But what does it matter when there isn't a huge volume of transparent material in perfect darkness OH WAIT THERE IS!!!
Hey, it's me, the guy who has been early to every social media app somehow. Threads is going to be big. Bigger than Twitter. I'm sorry.
I don't like it either.
Here's why:
1. People are having a ton of fun. The giddiness of cultural creation is real. This was enabled by:
2. The simplest sign-up process any app has ever had ever. It turns out that this REALLY matters. People will spend 5 hours scrolling but they won't spend 5 seconds signing up.