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:
If you want to "fix" this situation within reason, you need to cut funding.
Doing that has disproportionately negative impacts for the educations of people from socioeconomically worse off backgrounds. Or in other words, it hurts upward educational mobility for the poor.
Or, you could provide this presidential administration with a gift:
Centralize the universities and have the government more directly control all the funding. Make them "free".
This is far more likely than alternatives like 'Just give universities infinite money', but still bad
Compared to twenty years ago, kids are eating some types of ultraprocessed foods more and some types less🧵
For example, one thing there's proportionally less of is sugar-sweetened beverage consumption. Meanwhile, there's relatively greater sweet snack consumption.
Overall, the ultraprocessed food (UPF) consumption share is up across young ages to similar degrees.
The increase is definitely there, but it isn't dramatic. For example, going from 61% to 67.5% is an 11% increase in twenty years.
The increase in consumption is not differentiated by the sex of children.
In other words, boys and girls are both eating a bit more ultraprocessed food.
People tend to understand it as an indication that earlier generations were a lot less intelligent than we moderns.
Or if they're read up on the literature, they now think things are reversing.
Both are wrong! Take a look at this chart of Norwegian data:
If you don't understand what those tests are like, here are some example questions:
What we see over time with the Flynn Effect (the increase in IQ scores) and the Reverse Flynn Effect (the more recent decrease in IQ scores) is that both are due to something really boring: people interpreting tests differently than they used to.