Government regulation abruptly and drastically reduced sulfur content in shipping fuel associated with increased maritime atmospheric warming

The so called unintended consequences at work! Cleaner air, warmer earth! Poetic justice! 😊

Since climate models are junk, can we trust this modeling study? The study also uses the very controversial term "anthropogenic green house gases" indicating  politicization!

These scientists even suggest more government intervention into nature by calling for more geoengineering! It can be a curse to be a PhD leading to a pretense of knowledge!

"An 80% reduction in sulfur dioxide shipping emissions observed in early 2020 could be associated with substantial atmospheric warming over some ocean regions, according to a modeling study published in Communications Earth & Environment. The sudden decline in emissions was a result of the introduction of the International Maritime Organization's 2020 regulation (IMO 2020), which reduced the maximum sulfur content allowed in shipping fuel from 3.5% to 0.5% to help reduce air pollution. ..."

From the abstract:

"Human activities affect the Earth’s climate through modifying the composition of the atmosphere, which then creates radiative forcing that drives climate change. The warming effect of anthropogenic greenhouse gases has been partially balanced by the cooling effect of anthropogenic aerosols. In 2020, fuel regulations abruptly reduced the emission of sulfur dioxide from international shipping by about 80% and created an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock with global impact. Here we estimate the regulation leads to a radiative forcing of 

Wm−2 averaged over the global ocean. The amount of radiative forcing could lead to a doubling (or more) of the warming rate in the 2020 s compared with the rate since 1980 with strong spatiotemporal heterogeneity. The warming effect is consistent with the recent observed strong warming in 2023 and expected to make the 2020 s anomalously warm. The forcing is equivalent in magnitude to 80% of the measured increase in planetary heat uptake since 2020. The radiative forcing also has strong hemispheric contrast, which has important implications for precipitation pattern changes. Our result suggests marine cloud brightening may be a viable geoengineering method in temporarily cooling the climate that has its unique challenges due to inherent spatiotemporal heterogeneity."

Reduced sulfur content in shipping fuel associated with increased maritime atmospheric warming

Abrupt reduction in shipping emission as an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock produces substantial radiative warming (open access)

What a pseudoscience or demagoguery chart looks like (there is absolutely no evidence that the linear trend would continue):

Fig. 3: Time series of global temperature anomaly since 1980 (Lensen et al., 2019).