NASA Scientists: Green Agenda Policies May Be Causing ‘Global Warming’
A group of NASA scientists is raising the alarm after a study found that globalist green agenda policies to supposedly fight “climate change” may actually be causing “global warming.”
The NASA scientists believe that efforts to supposedly cool the Earth, such as Bill Gates’s atmospheric aerosols experiments, are having the reverse effect and are dangerously warming the planet.
For decades, globalists have been promoting conflicting narratives in an effort to use the environment to push the public into accepting a collectivist agenda.
The 1970s saw scientists warning of a coming Ice Age in which “arctic cold and perpetual snow could turn most of the inhabitable portions of our planet into a polar desert.”
At the end of the twentieth century, it was the alleged threat of the exact opposite – “global warming.”
“Global warming” fear mongering then accompanied government campaigns urging the adoption of new regulations.
Then, at the start of the twenty-first century, when people were not fully embracing the fear of “global warming,” so-called experts ambiguously warned of “climate change.”
“Climate change” would conveniently cover all eventualities, including temperatures that sometimes went down.
This was especially convenient as science has long proven that Earth’s climate has been constantly changing over the last few billion years.
Now, NASA scientists claim to have discovered the primary cause of (alleged) global warming in the past few years: Green agenda “environmental ” policies.
Interestingly, they do not address the controversial question of whether or not global warming is actually occurring.
Specifically, curbs placed on sulfur dioxide emissions in 2020 by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) forced the sulfur content in shipping fuel to drop from 3.5 percent to no more than 0.5 percent.
Sulfur dioxide is one of the gases targeted by green activists as it is considered a pollutant contributing to acid rain as well as various respiratory problems.
Environmentalists appear, however, to have been taken off-guard by one consequence of the drop in atmospheric sulfur dioxide: a potential global increase in temperatures.
In their research paper, the NASA scientists note:
While IMO2020 [the new regulation] is intended to benefit public health by decreasing aerosol loading, this decrease in aerosols can temporarily accelerate global warming by dimming clouds across the global oceans. IMO2020 took effect in a short period of time and likely has global impact.
The process involved sulfate particles, formed from sulfur dioxide, which can mix with clouds and make them brighter.
These bright clouds then reflect some of the sun’s rays back out to space, so that less heat reaches Earth.
The scientists estimate that the drop in sulfur dioxide emissions means fewer bright clouds with the result, they claim, of a doubling (or more) of the warming rate:
Here we estimate the regulation leads to a radiative forcing of +0.2±0.11Wm−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.
They claim that we saw this rise in temperatures last year.
They attribute 80 percent of recent global warming to the drop in sulfur dioxide emissions:
The warming effect is consistent with the recent observed strong warming in 2023 and expected to make the 2020s anomalously warm.
The forcing is equivalent in magnitude to 80% of the measured increase in planetary heat uptake since 2020.
The study also mentions the implications for general weather patterns across the globe.
The scientists argue that the issue is making the weather more unstable, particularly this decade:
The radiative forcing also has strong hemispheric contrast, which has important implications for precipitation pattern changes … [and] can create significant perturbations in precipitation patterns.
Had they not been scientists from NASA, the media would probably have ignored the findings.
After all, a single corporate news outlet did not pick up a recent study revealing how carbon dioxide’s current and future impact on global warming is likely zero.
This time around, the study was published in Nature and picked up by no less than 120 news sites.
However, what the mainstream media outlets focused on was a tangential issue raised by the research findings.
The NASA scientists had mentioned in their work a process called marine cloud brightening which Bill Gates is championing.
This involves spraying sea salt into the clouds to create a similar bright-cloud effect to that created by sulfates, possibly cooling the planet.
In response, The Washington Post headlined its article, “Could spraying sea salt into the clouds cool the planet?”
In fact, it dates back to 1990 and has been investigated for almost two decades.
The Post did not make a single reference to the discovery that “carbon emissions” are not, after all, causing temperature increases.
No more did the New York Times, which hid the (partial) results of the study in an obscure paragraph tucked away in an article headlined, “Hanging by a Thread: U.N. Chief Warns of Missing a Key Climate Target.”
In fact, NYT omitted to mention that the study was conducted by NASA scientists, only mentioning that:
Other contributors [to global warming] might stick around for longer. In a study published last week, a team of scientists led by Tianle Yuan, a geophysicist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, estimated that the planet could be experiencing additional warming right now for a counterintuitive reason: recent regulations that slashed air pollution from ships.
NYT then dashed back to the accepted narrative of normal, everyday human activity being the main driver of alleged “global warming,” stressing that:
To scientists, the foremost driver of warming remains clear: Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, the three most important human-caused heat-trapping gases, have continued their steady upward climb.
At current rates of emissions, it might only be five or so more years before humans have altered the atmosphere’s chemistry so significantly that it becomes extremely difficult to stop warming from surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius, scientists have estimated
Evidently, NYT esteems the views of scientists from Imperial College London and other institutes more than the views of researchers from NASA.
Forbes, too, in an article titled, “Shipping Pollution Curbs Made Climate Change Worse, Controversial NASA Study Claims,” quotes random climate scientists who cast doubt on the study’s findings.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the research findings is that they shouldn’t have been news at all.
The effects of sulfates in the atmosphere have been known for decades.
An article dating back to 1999 states:
… the effects of the sulfur dioxide from industry might be countering the greenhouse effect created by carbon dioxide …
When fossil fuels are burned, both carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide are released.
As demonstrated in the ship tracks study, sulfate particles produced from sulfur dioxide create brighter clouds, which may cool the atmosphere.
Any light that is reflected cannot reach the ground and heat the surface of the Earth.
This means there is less heat for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to trap in the atmosphere.
This article was written by NASA scientists.
Today’s NASA scientists suggest in their study that the important question to address now is the “trade-off” between improving air quality and “global warming.”
They also imply that, in the future, scientists should exercise more caution in their efforts to control the climate, given the complex and often contradictory issues involved:
Study published in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01442-3