2024 is the hottest year on record, and it's been hotter than 2023 in part because of a global ban on shipping fuels containing sulfur dioxide.
Problem: SO2 causes acid rain, but it cools the globe. How can we just stay cool?
A new company might have found the solution.
🧵
Acid rain has been on the decline for many years, but in order to finally put the problem to rest, it'll be crucial to knock out sulfur dioxide emissions from shipping.
Globally, those emissions have been concentrated in these boxed-in regions where ships go to-and-fro.
When the International Maritime Organization 2020 regulation went into effect, roughly 80% of sulfur dioxide emissions from international shipping went away overnight.
If those sulfur emissions weren't stopped, sulfate aerosols would have acted to change the Earth's energy balance, cooling it down.
Think of this like sunscreen for the planet.
Because shipping-related emissions were spread out over so wide an area, their cooling effect was pretty sizable despite being only a fraction of global sulfur emissions.
The resulting rise in global temperatures when these went away inspired @ASong408 to think:
How can we keep the cooling while doing without the acid rain?
Watch this video.
What you just witnessed was a balloon containing sulfur dioxide.
You just witnessed a stratospheric aerosol injection, AKA, a controlled sulfur release in the stratosphere.
This part is critical: the stratosphere.
The reason the stratosphere is so critical is that, if you release sulfur dioxide up there, it distributes widely and makes minimal acid rain.
There's no weather that far up, so there's nothing to bring it back down right away!
Because there's nothing to bring the sulfur dioxide (+/as byproducts) back down from so far up, you can also consider this "sunscreen" extra long-lasting.
In other words, stratospherically-injected sulfur dioxide has a long "residence time."
The residence time isn't forever, it's a few years.
So in order to ensure the world doesn't face an acid rain problem, the release has to be done in controlled amounts.
Luckily, modest amounts meet our goals: they cool Earth, stabilize her climate, and produce minimal acid rain
The reason this works so well is that, when the sulfur is distributed so high up, it does better at cooling.
Accordingly, we can continue to fight sulfur dioxide emissions on the ground while moving smaller amounts into the stratosphere to keep our planet cool.
That's what @ASong408's company does, and, man does it work.
To hammer in just how well it works, check out these calculations:
If you want to learn more, you can go check out Andrew's guest post on my blog. There's a lot more info there, so I thoroughly recommend you give it a read.
And if you're already sold and you want to start launching sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to make the planet cooler, here's a link so you can do that too:
At every age, the incidence of dementia is down. As a society, people are no longer suffering dementia nearly as often!
The world over, child mortality is way down. It's unusual for parents to experience the death of a child these days, where even a century ago, it was the global norm.
Each year, novel gene therapies are approved.
The number of gene therapies in the pipeline is also rapidly increasing. There is tons of progress to be made here, and the main issue is regulatory.
We have lots of low-hanging fruit in curing disease!
There's a common type of misunderstanding that sounds like this:
"If taller people tend to be more educated, and women tend to be shorter than men, how do you explain women tending to be more educated?"
The issue has to do with intercepts. Consider this plot:
You can see that, among Whites, women tend to be shorter than men, and they tend to have lower earnings.
But at the same time, to similar degrees in both sexes, taller people tend to have higher earnings.
Perplexed? You shouldn't be.
The fact is that there's more to this that differentiates men and women than height, so the intercept for women is shifted down, even though the slopes of the height * income relationship are fairly comparable.
Debate about the value of essays in college admissions missed a key point:
Essays are biased, so should not be used.
Here's an example: High-income people know 'what to write' to look good to raters, so they outperform on essays relative to their other qualifications.
This shows up by race, too, and that's why admissions departments use essays to infer race for the express purpose of discriminating.
Write that you're Black; that you grew up as a poor immigrant; that you're gay or a cripple.
The reason essays do not have a role to play in the admissions process is because they're biased. It's plain, it's simple, it doesn't need to be discussed any further.
And here's some good policy: Use tools that are not biased or lose public funding.
Happy Autism Awareness Day! I think too many people are 'aware' of autism.
Have you ever met someone who claims to be autistic, but they've never been diagnosed?
Self-reported autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is practically uncorrelated with real, clinician-diagnosed autism🧵
Sort self-reporters into those with high and low ASD scores, and you get the bars on the left. The "high-trait" self-reporters look like people with diagnosed autism (ASD column).
But they're more socially anxious (middle) and avoidant (right).
So far, the means of distinguishing diagnosed from self-reported autistics have been crude.
To get a more nuanced understanding of their differences, we have to look at behavior.
For that, we'll start with the social control task.