Wall Street Journal U.K. bureau chief David Luhnow has noticed an interesting explanation for the boiling seas issue that has gotten the global warming crowd so excited, culled from the pages of the prestigious journal Science.

Fascinating. Turns out ship pollution may have been helping keep the ocean cooler.

‘We’re changing the clouds.’ An unintended test of geoengineering is fueling record ocean warmth | Science | AAAS https://t.co/iTG1EVNh6n

— David Luhnow (@davidluhnow) August 8, 2023

Here is the passage, emphasis added:

The Atlantic Ocean is running a fever. Waters off Florida have become a hot tub, bleaching the third-largest barrier reef in the world. Off the coast of Ireland, extreme heat was implicated in the mass death of seabirds. For years, the north Atlantic was warming more slowly than other parts of the world. But now it has caught up, and then some. Last month, the sea surface there surged to a record 25°C — nearly 1°C warmer than the previous high, set in 2020 — and temperatures haven't even peaked yet. "This year it's been crazy," says Tianle Yuan, an atmospheric physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

The obvious and primary driver of this trend is society's emissions of greenhouse gases, which trap heat that the oceans steadily absorb. Another influence has been recent weather, especially stalled high-pressure systems that suppress cloud formation and allow the oceans to bake in the Sun.

But researchers are now waking up to another factor, one that could be filed under the category of unintended consequences: disappearing clouds known as ship tracks. Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations's International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships' sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule "is a big natural experiment," says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "We're changing the clouds."

So if it weren't for United Nations–imposed regulations on ship exhaust emissions, there'd actually be a cooler sea.

They no doubt put out doom-and-gloom predictions if the rules weren't changed, called global shipping a big bad polluter, and by 2020 got their way on their imposed regulations, claiming to be the experts here.

And as one researcher notes, it was effectively an experiment, since the U.N. didn't know what it was doing.  Turns out someone was just taking a flying guess at what might make things better to please the science cocktail crowd and grants-givers, and ended up boiling the seas instead of stopping global warming.  They effected climate change, just not the climate change they thought they would be getting.

Maybe someone should be held accountable for this meddlesome one-size-fits-all on global shipping, which has surely driven up the cost of it and, along with it, consumer prices.

But that's not how this crowd thinks.  These people would like more regulations to be borne by companies and consumers, with consumers left holding the bag of cost, all to save the earth (and make themselves more powerful in the process).

And when they make Larry Lightbulb "mistakes" like this, nobody gets fired for incompetence, or gets a bill from the shipping companies for the added costs.

Maybe someone should remember this next time they try to impose another do-gooder regulation to save the planet.

What's wrong with this picture?

Update: See also Leslie Eastman at Legal Insurrection's post on the matter here.

Image: European Space Agency via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 ISO.