GRIST - Michael Diamond thought he’d have to wait until this year, at least, to have enough data to understand how a shipping regulation aimed at curbing pollution affected the clouds that deck the ocean. “They’re so variable. They’re so wispy. They’re so ever, ever changing,” he said. “So you really often need a lot of observations to get at what they’re doing.”
Nonetheless, just three years after the international maritime community slashed sulfur emissions in 2020, the cloud physicist with Florida State University published an award-winning paper studying clouds along a shipping lane in the southeast Atlantic. By analyzing satellite data from before and after the regulation took effect, Diamond demonstrated that the clouds had dimmed. In other words, even as it cleaned its emissions, the global shipping sector made marine clouds a little less bright.
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“I think there’s going to be a lot of papers on the shipping emission reductions,” said Robert Allen, a climate scientist from University of California Riverside with expertise in aerosols. “I don’t think they’re all necessarily going to be arguing the same thing.”