Common wisdom tells us that when we make good decisions, good results come from that. Likewise, when we make bad decisions, bad things come from that.
But history? Doesn’t always support this theory.
For instance, in 1964, a (white, male) southern congressman added the concept of not discriminating due to sex into the American Civil Rights Act. His motivation was not to protect women’s rights. Instead, it was an attempt to mock the idea of civil rights, says NPR Political Correspondent Nina Totenberg.
“[It] was added .. as a “poison pill” amendment aimed at killing the whole bill entirely,” she says. “It was treated with considerable amusement by its sponsor in the House floor debate and continued to be treated as something of a joke at the time.”
The motivation was bad spirited. It was a joke, designed to undercut the entire civil rights movement.
Instead, the bill passed, and women were suddenly viewed as equal.
Bad intentions, good outcome.
It goes the other way, too. In fact, we are possibly living with the outcomes of one of those good decisions, bad outcomes right now.
The last three months have been amongst the warmest in recorded history. Check that. July and August of this year are the two warmest months recorded, ever. This is not, again, propaganda, this is just simply adding up all the temperatures for all the days, then dividing by 30. Or 31. Or, you know, whatever. I’m a writer, not a math…er. Math person. Mathematician. Whatever.
Anyway. Looking at the chart of the 30 warmest months in recorded history, you notice a trend: outside of one particularly warm July in 1998, they’re all from this decade.
You’ll also notice that most of them are Julys. 18 of them, in fact. The rest are almost all Augusts, except for a couple Junes that snuck in, in 2020 and 2022.
And then, you have this September, which was 0.93 degrees Celsius warmer than average.
That’s the biggest gap above average temperature, ever, and hot enough—at 16.38 degrees Celsius on average, globally, to tie it with August 2020 as the sixteenth hottest month, ever.
To quote climate scientist Zeke Hausfather: “This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist – absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”
It feels like this year was a particularly bad year. You can blame El Nino, at least in part, but scientists are looking at another cause, a good decision.
You see, on January 1 2020, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) reduced the amount of sulphur that could be in ship’s fuel had to be reduced from 3.5 percent to 0.5 percent.
According to the press release from the IMO, this was expected to reduce the amount of sulphur oxide by 77 percent.
This is no doubt a good thing. Sulphur oxide (which is an umbrella name for all manner of sulphur/oxygen compounds, most notably sulphur dioxide) is what gives us acid rain. There’s been a lot of work to reduce the amount of acid rain over the last 50 years, and this was supposed to help.
Good decision. According to the IMO: “As a result, reductions in stroke, asthma, lung cancer, cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases are expected. Cutting sulphur emissions from ships will also help prevent acid rain and ocean acidification, benefiting crops, forests and aquatic species.”
All of these are good outcomes from a good decision. But they weren’t expecting one thing.
You see, sulphur oxide also causes clouds to form.
If you look at photos of the Atlantic ocean from space from before the reduction in sulphur dioxide, you’ll note there’s all these clouds that look like, like jet contrails, except on a much more massive scale.
And the thing about clouds is they actually keep the earth cooler. It’s not a simple equation: clouds=cooler. They reflect the heat of the sun, but they also work as blankets, holding the heat already here in. But as a general rule, the white clouds reflect more heat than they hold in.
Suddenly, though, those clouds that are being formed by ships—known as ship tracks—are not being formed. More sunlight is hitting the oceans and the oceans are starting to get warmer faster.
That’s bad.
In an effort to pollute less, these ships are generating fewer ship tracks and suddenly we have removed a factor that was helping mask the impact of global warming.
This is called “accidental geo-engineering,” when something we are doing for one reason, turns out to have an unintended effect, like, I don’t know, building a giant border wall and cutting off animal migration routes.
We try to do good things and instead we get bad outcomes and the hottest September on record.
For some people, the very problem reveals its own solution. If ships are no longer creating these clouds, they say, what would happen if we had a fleet of ships whose job it was to create these clouds?
Not by spouting sulphur dioxide into the air. Instead, these ships would take in seawater and spray it into the air; the saltwater would seed the clouds and the mist created would also help.
This is something that is being tested right now in Australia, in the hopes of saving the Great Barrier Reef.
The question is: Is this a good decision? And will it have a good outcome? Or is it a bad decision, with bad outcomes? Or…? There’s lots of different viewpoints and lots of unforseen consequences that we might not even be aware of until the process is happening on a global scale. We have accidentally backed our way into this mess; will trying to deliberately engineer our way out solve the problem or create new ones? Time will tell.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
