WORD OF THE DAY

We Have Banjaxed the Climate So Badly That a Lack of Air Pollution Is Now a Threat

Charles P. Pierce

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Mon, October 16, 2023 

A Lack of Air Pollution Is Now a ThreatAthanasios Gioumpasis - Getty Images

The Washington Post has an interesting — and a little terrifying — account of a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about how September got so warm so suddenly that nobody can figure out why.

A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration analysis released Friday further cemented what several other data sets had already affirmed: September was not just the globe’s warmest on record, but its most atypically warm month in nearly two centuries of observations. It was 0.83 degrees above the old record for the month, a staggering departure from what was already extreme. No single factor — not human-caused global warming, not a burgeoning El Niño weather pattern — can immediately assume credit for such a drastic diversion from anything humans have ever seen before, scientists said. It is so far outside the realm of what has occurred, it creates a new conundrum that will take time for research to unpack.

There are a number of reasons proposed for this spike in the planet's peril, everything from an El Niño event to the massive eruption of an undersea volcano so powerful that it blasted water vapor into the upper atmosphere. (Evidently, and somewhat counterintuitively, water vapor exacerbates the warming process.) And then there's the threat posed by cleaner air.

At the same time, the absence of another substance in the atmosphere could be increasing global heat, he added: Air pollution. Like particles of volcanic ash, pollutants such as sulfur dioxide act to block sunlight and, in effect, cool the planet. But those particles have been declining in recent decades, and in recent years, have especially diminished over the oceans. That is thought to be because of new limits on sulfur emissions from shipping liners imposed in 2020. While those trends are seen as a win for global public health, they are expected to add to global warming over time.

Yes, we have banjaxed the climate so badly that the threat is now freakishly exacerbated by a lack of, say, sulfur dioxide in the air that we breathe.

All of those factors add to the biggest one observed over decades: Ever-rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the result of fossil fuel combustion. That has allowed global temperatures to rise by about 0.4 degrees each decade, or more than 2 degrees in all since the Industrial Revolution. That has raised the floor, and the ceiling, for what effect natural fluctuations can have on planetary warmth. “On top of this slow trend, there is tremendous interannual variability which could cause wide swings in global mean surface temperatures from one year to the other,” Bala said.

The threat posed by cleaner air?

We are a helluva species, we are.