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.
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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:
The idea is to put large, powerful animals like bulls or lions in the ring with several dogs, and the winner lives.
The sport has existed for thousands of years. One of our first records is of Indians showing it to Alexander the Great.
The first record in England comes from 1610 and features King James I requesting the Master of the Beargarden—a bear training facility—to provide him with three dogs to fight a lion.
Two of the dogs died and the last escaped because the lion did not wish to fight and retreated.
For one, there's no supportive pattern of sanctions. For two, you can develop in near-autarky, and before post-WW2, that was comparatively what the most developed countries were dealing with.
I'm not talking fatalities, but bites, because bites are still a bad outcome and any dog who bites should be put down.
If we take the annual risk a dog bites its owner, scale it for pit bulls and Golden Retrievers, and extrapolate 30 years...
How do you calculate this?
Simple.
First, we need estimates of the portion of the U.S. population bitten by dogs per year. Next, to adjust that, we need the portion of those bites that are to owners. So, for overall dogs, we get about 1.5% and roughly ~25% of that.
Then, to obtain lifetime risk figures, we need to pick a length for a 'lifetime'. I picked thirty years because that's what I picked. Sue me. It's about three dog lifetimes.
P(>=1 bite) = 1-(1-p)^t
It's pure probability math. To rescale for the breed, we need estimates of the relative risk of different dog being the perpetrators of bites. We'll use the NYC DOHMH's 2015-22 figures to get the risk for a Golden Retriever (breed = "Retriever" in the dataset) relative to all other dogs, and Lee et al. 2021's figures to get the risk for a pit bull. The results don't change much just using the NYC figures, they just became significantly higher risk for the pit bulls.
To rescale 'p' for b reed, it's just p_{breed} = p_{baseline} \times RR_{breed}.
Then you plug it back into the probability of a bite within thirty years. If you think, say, pit bulls are undercounted for the denominator for their RR, OK! Then let's take that to the limit and say that every 'Black' neighborhood in New York has one, halve the risk noticed for them, and bam, you still get 1-in-5 to 1-in-2.5 owners getting bit in the time they own pit bulls (30 years).
And mind you, bites are not nips. As Ira Glass had to be informed when he was talking about his notorious pit bull, it did not just "nip" two children, it drew blood, and that makes it a bite.
Final method note: the lower-bound for Golden Retriever risk was calculated out as 0.00131%, but that rounded down to 0. Over a typical pet dog lifespan of 10-13 years, an individual Golden Retriever will almost-certainly not bite its owner even once, whereas a given pit that lives 11.5 years will have an 18-33% chance of biting, and if we use the DOHMH RRs, it's much higher. If we use the DOHMH RR and double their population, that still holds.
The very high risk of a bite associated with a pit bull is highly robust and defies the notion that '99.XXXX% won't ever hurt anyone.' The idea that almost no pit bulls are bad is based on total fatality risk and it is a farcical argument on par with claiming that Great White Sharks shouldn't be avoided because they kill so few people.
Frankly, if we throw in non-owner risk, the typical pit bull *will* hurt some human or some animal over a typical pet dog's lifespan. And because pit bulls live a little bit shorter, you can adjust that down, but the result will still directionally hold because they are just that god-awful of a breed.
Final note:
Any dog that attacks a human or another dog that wasn't actively attacking them first should be put down. That is a big part of why this matters. These attacks indicate that the dogs in question must die.