. But the sulfur particles help offset some of the warming caused by powering the ships, so the rules may also increase the likelihood that rising sea levels caused by global warming leave those same populations without a home.
Julian Lee is an oil strategist for Bloomberg First Word. Previously he worked as a senior analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies. Centre for Global Energy Studies . Founded in 1990 by His Excellency Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani the Centre for Global Energy Studies (CGES) is a non-profit think tank, specialising in oil market analysis and forecasting, and the economics and politics of energy .
Certainly an unbiased person.
its not Julians opinion its this guy
Mikhail Sofiev, one of the authors of the Nature Communications paper, funded by
Nature Research is part of Springer Nature. The main shareholders of Springer Nature are Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and BC Partners and details about corporate governance and board memberships can be found here.
So the world would have overheated years ago but shipping saved us?
The article may be over the top but it’s based on a real phenomena
The tradeoff between cleaner ship fuels and global warming
Cleaner low-sulfur shipping fuels should reduce air pollution-related deaths around the world by around a third, and childhood asthma cases in children by more than half. But this carries a climate tradeoff: the higher-sulfur fuels help cool the planet temporarily.
I have a hard time believing the emissions from ships have any significant impact. Cars, definitely. Buildings, sure. Farm equipment, no way. Construction equipment, no way. Shipping emissions maybe low hanging regulatory fruit because there are very few ships compared to buildings or cars, it defies common sense
It is easy to focus on shipping. They are huge and very visible when in port or passing near the coast. And in places like the Dover Straits, one can easily see a yellow pall of haze coming from the stacks. And of course the IMO is a single organisation who can be buttonholed.
But ships are the absolute most energy efficient way of moving goods. The transport costs from port to door reflect the differences.
By comparison, the power systems in countries India are so unreliable that many companies and homes have standby generators. Or as described by a recent BBC article, it’s the other way round. Those thousands of small inefficient generators produce huge amounts of pollution. Then ther are the millions of cars stuck in traffic jams polluting the environment.
But tackling those is far more difficult… so people focus on easy targets.
its the volume of ( crap ) fuel they use and anyone that lives in a port city knows they are shocking polluters.
The fuel we burned a few years ago was 4.5 % sulfur. We burn 50 tons a day at sea. Ship traffic has increased three or four fold in the last twenty years. That’s a lot of sulfur.
While sulfur particles may help offset some affects global warming the down side of putting more sulfur particles in the atmosphere is worse. I am surprised how we seem to have forgotten when large swaths of North American and European forests were dying off from the acid rain. Regulations requiring the use of low sulfur coal or sulfur dioxide treatment in power plants along with the use of ULSD in vehicles helped mitigate that issue.
To believe acid rain falling in the oceans does not have any effect is foolish.