Category: sulfur dioxide

Molten Sulphur on an Airplane

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Snakes Molten Sulphur on an Airplane

They are planning for a massive geoengineering project to inject sulphur into the atmosphere to combat global warming.

I think they are insane.

A program to reduce Earth’s heat capture by injecting aerosols into the atmosphere from high-altitude aircraft is possible, inexpensive, and would be unlikely to remain secret.

“We developed the specifications for SAIL with direct input from several aerospace and engine companies. It’s equivalent in weight to a large narrow body passenger aircraft. But to sustain level flight at 20 kms, it needs roughly double the wing area of an equivalently sized airliner, and double the thrust, with four engines instead of two.

“At the same time, its fuselage would be stubby and narrow, sized to accommodate a heavy but dense mass of molten sulphur rather than the large volume of space and air required for passengers.”

The team estimated the total development costs at less than $2 billion for the airframe, and a further $350 million for modifying existing low-bypass engines.

The new planes would comprise a fleet of eight in the first year, rising to a fleet of just under 100 within 15 years. The fleet would fly just over 4,000 missions a year in year one, rising to just over 60,000 per year by year 15.

 

Probably bigger than the plane below.

Image result for crop dusting large

We’re about to kill a massive, accidental experiment in reducing global warming

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I’ve always thought that clean air laws decreased SO2 , increased sunshine and therefore warming.

Well … there is a new law that may change climate.

Studies have found that ships have a net cooling effect on the planet, despite belching out nearly a billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. That’s almost entirely because they also emit sulfur, which can scatter sunlight in the atmosphere and form or thicken clouds that reflect it away.

In effect, the shipping industry has been carrying out an unintentional experiment in climate engineering for more than a century. Global mean temperatures could be as much as 0.25 ˚C lower than they would otherwise have been, based on the mean “forcing effect” calculated by a 2009 study that pulled together other findings (see “The Growing Case for Geoengineering”). For a world struggling to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, that’s a big helping hand.

And we’re about to take it away.

In 2016, the UN’s International Maritime Organization announced that by 2020, international shipping vessels will have to significantly cut sulfur pollution. Specifically, ship owners must switch to fuels with no more than 0.5 percent sulfur content, down from the current 3.5 percent, or install exhaust cleaning systems that achieve the same reduction, Shell noted in a brochure for customers.

There are very good reasons to cut sulfur: it contributes to both ozone depletion and acid rain, and it can cause or exacerbate respiratory problems.

But as a 2009 paper in Environmental Science & Technology noted, limiting sulfur emissions is a double-edged sword. “Given these reductions, shipping will, relative to present-day impacts, impart a ‘double warming’ effect: one from [carbon dioxide], and one from the reduction of [sulfur dioxide],” wrote the authors. “Therefore, after some decades the net climate effect of shipping will shift from cooling to warming.”

Sulfur pollution from coal burning has a similar effect. Some studies suggest that China’s surge in coal consumption over the last decade partly offset the recent global warming trend (though coal does have a strong net warming effect).

It’s difficult to estimate how much the new rule could affect temperatures. We don’t know enough about cloud physics and the behavior of atmospheric particles, nor how diligently the shipping industry will comply with the new rule, says Robert Wood, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.

Another wrinkle is that ships emit other particles that can sometimes also stimulate cloud droplets to form, including black carbon, a major component of soot. Removing the sulfur from the fuel could alter the size and quantity of these particles, which could affect clouds as well, says Lynn Russell, a professor of atmospheric science at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

“So we can’t really say exactly what the change will be,” says Russell, though she adds that the rule change is “likely” to produce a warming effect on balance.

… read the rest: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610007/were-about-to-kill-a-massive-accidental-experiment-in-halting-global-warming/

 

PS There is a problem with the expensive scrubbers that are an alternative to low sulphur fuel.  The ships dump the waste into the ocean. The waste will be sulphuric acid (and more)

One Volcano = Up to Four Times As Much SO2 As All Of Europe

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There is an AGW site called RealClimate (I’m not going to link to them). They have a post up mocking  the use of volcano’s as a source of CO2/SO2 etc compared to human sources.

I did a post a while back looking at the amount of SO2 produced by one volcano.

Here is another news snippet from the same period.

“The sulfur dioxide (SO2) emitted from the Holuhraun eruption has reached up to 60,000 tons per day and averaged close to 20,000 tons since it began. For comparison, all the SO2 pollution in Europe, from industries, energy production, traffic and house heating, etc., amounts to 14,000 tons per day.”

Admittedly this is unusual. But there are 3,000,000 undersea volcanoes.

And they could have pumped out a lot of CO2 in the past.

The climate-driven rise and fall of sea level during the past million years matches up with valleys and ridges on the seafloor, suggesting ice ages influence underwater volcanic eruptions, two new studies reveal. And because volcanic chains suture some 37,000 miles (59,500 kilometers) of ocean floor, the eruptions could pump out enough carbon dioxide gas to shift planetary temperatures, the study authors suggest.

“Surprisingly, the deep seafloor matters in the long-term climate cycle,” said Maya Tolstoy, lead author of one of the studies and a marine geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.”

 

 

 

One Volcano = Twice As Much SO2 As All Of Europe’s Smokestacks

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Wow.

“Sulphur dioxide has been spurting too — 35,000 tons of it a day, more than twice the amount spewing from all of Europe’s smokestacks. The gas has spread across the Icelandic countryside, causing people to wheeze and trapping some indoors.

The record-setting amount of pollution has surprised even volcanologists in the middle of a major project funded by the European Union to understand the island’s fiery activity. They had been preparing for a repeat of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption, which led to a billowing ash plume that grounded planes across Europe. “Everybody was expecting a big ash cloud, and now we have something totally different,” says Anja Schmidt, an atmospheric modeller at the University of Leeds, UK, who studies how volcanic gases spread.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gas-spewing-icelandic-volcano-stuns-scientists/

 

(h/t Instapundit)

 

NASA Misleads About “Warming Hole” in SouthEast

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NASA is telling lies about the southeast USA. They claim that sulphates were causing the Southeast to stay cooler and masking AGW. For some reason they use the term “warming hole”.

Read about it here.

How do they explain that it was warmer in the southeast in the 20s and 30s than now?

Here is the big lie that jumped out at me.

“As a response to the declining sulfate levels, Leibensperger’s modeling shows temperatures over the central and eastern United States have increased by 0.3°Celsius between 1980 and 2010.”

The trend from 1980 to 2010 (using NASA’s own data) is indeed .2C per decade.

But the trend from 1990 to 2010 is in fact negative.  It is -.2C per decade.

And the trend from 1895 to 2010 is FLAT!

All 3 graphs below:

southeast_1895-2010

southeast_1980-2010

southeast_1990-2010

Huge Increase in Sunshine Reaching Earth – 12.5 times the CO2 warming

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The Hockey Schtick points to a new paper that finds a large increase in sunshine over the last 26 years.

“According to the authors, “the average increase of [surface solar radiation] from 1982 to 2008 is estimated to be 0.87 W m−2 per decade,” which equates to 2.26 W m-2 over the 26 year period. By way of comparison, this forcing was 12.5 times greater than the surface forcing alleged by the IPCC from increased CO2 over the same period.

The abstract is here. The paper is here.

“since the late 1980’s Rs has brightened over Europe due to decreases in aerosols but dimmed over China due to their increases. We found that variation of cloud cover determines Rs at a monthly scale but that aerosols determine the variability of Rs at a decadal time scale, in particular, over Europe and China.”

The warming since 1980 was caused by clean air legislation in the the US, UK and Europe.

Not by CO2.

I have posted several articles on this theme here , here and here.

Are we cooling the planet with SO2?

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Today I am going to ask a provocative question. Are we cooling the planet with Sulfur Dioxide (SO2)?

Cooling you might say? I thought we were warming? It could be that we are keeping the planet 4C cooler than it would have been (and still appear to be warming).

Sulfur dioxide “is the chemical compound with the formula SO2. It is a toxic gas with a pungent, irritating smell, that is released by volcanoes and in various industrial processes. ”

USGS: “The most significant climate impacts from volcanic injections into the stratosphere come from the conversion of sulfur dioxide to sulfuric acid, which condenses rapidly in the stratosphere to form fine sulfate aerosols. The aerosols increase the reflection of radiation from the Sun back into space, cooling the Earth’s lower atmosphere or troposphere. Several eruptions during the past century have caused a decline in the average temperature at the Earth’s surface of up to half a degree (Fahrenheit scale) for periods of one to three years. The climactic eruption of Mount Pinatubo on June 15, 1991, was one of the largest eruptions of the twentieth century and injected a 20-million ton (metric scale) sulfur dioxide cloud into the stratosphere at an altitude of more than 20 miles. ”

From 1850 to 1980 SO2 emissions rose from almost 0 to 140,000 Gigagrams per year in 1980 and then dropped down to 110,000 Gigagrams around 2000 and then it started to rise again as China began to burn a lot more coal.

Illustration from Atmos. Chem. Phys., 11, 1101–1116, 2011 pg 1107 Anthropogenic sulfur dioxide emissions: 1850–2005 S. J. Smith1, J. van Aardenne2,*, Z. Klimont3, R. J. Andres4, A. Volke1, and S. Delgado Arias1

Pinatubo released 20 million metric tons of SO2 into the atmosphere.

20 million metric tons = 20,000 Gigagrams.

Therefore, around 1980, humans were releasing the equivalent of 7 Pinatubo’s worth of SO2 each year into the atmosphere.

Seven Pinatubo’s per year!

Depending on which reference, the cooling of one Pinatubo = .5F or .5C or even .6C.

That would mean human produced SO2 should be cooling the earth by about 3.5C.

Yet temperature went up over .5C from 1980 to 2000.

Oh wait, SO2 went down from 1980 to 2000 the equivalent of one Pinatubo.

Could it be that if there was no human SO2 in the atmosphere the temperature recovery from the Little Ice Age could have been as high as 4C instead of the .8C claimed?

Maybe all that coal China is burning is saving our planet!

(Yes I know low level SO2 is supposedly not as bad as SO2 at 30,000 feet, but high altitude SO2 also causes some stratospheric warming – look it up)