According to Geophysical Research Letters, the Earth warmed half a degree last year due to reduced soot and sulfate particles. This was due to the pandemix quarantines. [Study Here](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2020GL091805)
So I’m genuinely asking: could increasing clean energy also cause global warming? Are we in a lose/lose situation?
In: Earth Science
According to [this graph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/Radiative_forcing_1750-2011.svg/1218px-Radiative_forcing_1750-2011.svg.png), soot makes the earth cooler but the effect is an order of magnitude lower than how much carbon dioxide is heating it up by.
So while, yes, putting less soot into the atmosphere *will* warm the planet up further, it would also prevent it from getting much worse than that – and the majority of the change is from already-existing CO₂ in the atmosphere.
It’s certainly a lose/lose situation, but I’d say it’s a lose slightly / lose severely situation.
The paper is sound, so yes. Sort of. The temperature rise they saw was due to getting rid of the products of burning fossil fuels. So as we increase our use of clean energy, we will slowly lose that minor cooling effect. The good news is that gets rid of an even greater heating effect by reducing our output of CO2. If we went 100% clean, there would be a small bump as soot and sulfates went away, but we’d be putting out zero CO2 to produce energy which is worth the tradeoff.
Worrying about additional warming from soot and sulfates dropping as a reason to oppose clean energy (not accusing you of doing this) is like not wanting to get stitches for a nasty cut because the stitches will hurt on top of your pain from the cut.
Yes, in the extreme.
Let’s say we get hydrogen fusion to work. That’s super efficient, and it’s how the Sun makes power so we know it scales.
Take 8B people and have them use energy at the rate of US people (50GJ per person per year). That’s a lot of joules. If they use all that power in super efficient LED light bulbs, not so bad, though this will be a damn bright planet. Realistically, lots of that energy is going to go into heat. The Sun is still going to be just as hot, but less CO2 in the atmosphere will trap less of the heat.
If we presume the atmosphere returns to 1900 chemistry, will the global temperature return to 1900 levels? No. All those zillions of joules that go into heat will keep the planet warmer that it was when the atmosphere was more benign.
Are we all dead? No. Even 1960s temperature levels were pretty good. Warmer than 1900, but nothing like the “burn the whole planet down” stuff we have today. That said, the current temperatures don’t seem to have killed many people. Sure, they have killed some, maybe thousands, but thousands out of billions is not even a dent in the bucket. It appears that humans are pretty hard to kill, and even 2200’s coal burning Earth won’t have killed even most of them.
The lack of aircraft flying in the sky which also happened after 9/11 meant that there was less clouds being generated by aircraft contrails. This revealed how hotter the planet had already got, but was masked by the cloud cover which lowered the temperature, so the situation is already worse than we thought it was.
I mean, the climate is complicated, so I think it’s true that there are both warming and cooling effects of a lot of things. But they’re not equal, and the suggestion here is that the lack of soot and sulfate did have a warming effect in the short term. But note that the 0.3K is a regional maximum, not the global change (which was about a tenth of that)
No, and you really don’t have to look much further prior to the industrial revolution as a data point.
During this study there were also major wildfires around the world.
The trivial answer is yes. Increasing clean energy WITHOUT reducing the use of dirty energy will almost certainly not reduce global warming.
The climate is complex and decades of the damage already done will not be undone quickly. Clean energy is certainly the largest component of the action needed but we may be at the point where there may need to be significant investment into “negative carbon footprint” technologies. Don’t forget that much of the world’s population and energy growth will be in the less developed countries in the coming decades.
Short term, yes
Soot, aerosols, clouds, and plane contrails reflect light high up and keep it from reaching the surface, this reduces the amount of energy that the Earth absorbs and therefore the amount of IR that it has to reemit and can have trapped by greenhouse gasses
Soot and aerosols clear out very quickly, on the order of months so a rapid drop in the amount of soot in the atmosphere will result in a brief uptick in temperature
But the soot generally comes along with CO2 production which sticks around. A reduction in CO2 production slows the rate at which Earth is getting warmer so while you see a slight uptick immediately the long term growth tilts downward.
If we shift heavily over to green energy it will result in a significant decrease in soot, but the resulting drop in CO2 production and hopefully decline in atmospheric CO2 will help stop the increase, but it will take many years to see the impact of a CO2 reduction
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