Efforts to reduce pollution are warming earth faster, study claims

Monitoring Desk

NEW YORK: Leading climate scientists have warned that global warming is accelerating at a faster rate due to a previous attempt to curb climate change.

A study led by renowned climate scientist James Hansen suggests that reducing emissions from ships is having the opposite effect on temperatures.

As commercial ships move across the ocean, they emit exhaust that includes sulfur, which is known to be harmful to human health and the environment.

In 2020, an international rule went into effect that sharply reduced the amount of sulfur allowed in ship fuel.

One way to do this was by fitting ships with a ‘scrubber’, an exhaust gas cleaning system which treats the pollution that normally would go into the air and then dumps it in the sea.

But dumping the waste in the water has caused more heat has been absorbed into the seas, hastening an energy imbalance in which more heat is stored than released.

Hansen – of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, who was among the first scientists to alert the world in the 1980s to the climate-warming impact of greenhouse gases – claims this imbalance is accelerating the rate of global warming compared to the traditional release of pollution into the air.

The world already has warmed by nearly 2.2F (1.2C) above preindustrial temperatures, according to experts.

Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who was not involved in the study, said: ‘I tend to trust Hansen.’

The landmark Clean Air Act in 1970 triggered the movement to regulate pollution from cars and other forms of transportation, including ships.

In 2020, global standard-restricted shipping rules reduced fuel sulfur from 3.5 percent to 0.5 percent, which experts said is dramatically attributing to global warming.

The sulfur-containing exhaust helps create clouds over the ocean that push heat back into space as aerosols, but the seas capture the warmth and increase temperatures faster.