Sulfur Community

The International Maritime Organization, which oversees the shipping industry, will begin enforcing rules this July that mandate cleaner fuel to cut air pollution and acid rain.

Regulations call for reducing the sulfur in shipping fuel from 4.5 to 0.5 percent by 2020. Scientists project that this switch will cut sulfur-pollution-related premature deaths from 87,000 worldwide per year to 46,000. But the sulfate aerosols spewing from supertanker smokestacks also produce planet-cooling clouds called ship tracks which some say cools the planet by reflecting back solar heat.  The ship tracks form when water droplets coalesce around sulfate particles. These clouds, which are big enough to be seen from orbit, reflect sunlight back into space, preventing the equivalent of up to 40 percent of the warming caused by human-produced carbon dioxide. “The IMO has done a good job addressing air-quality issues,” says Daniel Lack, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA. “But there’s a climate impact that wasn’t necessarily considered.”

The full story is at Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-01/smoke-water

Here’s an interesting commentary

 http://jer-skepticscorner.blogspot.com/2010/01/everyone-thinks-they-are-saving-planet.html

So is this eco-motivated change to clean fuels one of our strongest, if accidental, defenses against climate change?  Or did the oil lobbyists come up with a clever idea to throw doubt into the conscience of the general public.  I’ll let you form your own opinion.

-Paul Orlowski
Co-founder and Community Builder
SulfurUnit.com