It would be nice if everything were “cut and dried,” that everything was the good vs. the bad. But, many things land in between.

In that regard, I found with interest a recent article in the Los Angeles Times detailing the results of an international regulation imposed in 2020 requiring all ocean vessels to use low-sulfur oil rather than higher-sulfur oil (lower in price) in firing their boilers. The purpose of the regulation was to improve air quality and public health by reducing carbon emissions.

The regulation succeeded in doing that, but it also resulted in reducing smoke emissions into the higher atmosphere which increased global warming. The leading researcher of a study at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center wrote: “Because of the dimmer clouds, we effectively gained more energy to the climate system because more sunlight is coming in.”

The study estimates that this regulation alone “could lead to an increase of .16 a degree Celsius within the next seven years.” Scientists are not in agreement of how much the change will be, but there seems to be general consensus that the regulation did add to global warming.

The thrust of the article points to how new, well-intended regulations can have unintended effects: “That the shipping regulation change simultaneously benefitted public health and worsened global warming is not lost on those studying the problem.”

This discussion made me think back to the time of my youth when the skies around here were filled with smoke from open-burning garbage dumps, coal-fired furnaces and the smoke stacks of local industry. We have benefitted by regulations in cleaning up that air, yet, if the article is to be believed, we may have also eliminated some of our protections against the sun.

It would interesting if we knew more about how the last ice age ended. Most geologists believe that the earth has experienced many periods of cooling followed by warming cycles, much of it (from a book that I recently read) is related to “the tilt and wobble of Earth’s axis, as well as the eccentricity of its orbit around the sun” which occur in about 100,000-year cycles.

Some estimates are that we are now about 20,000 years into the warming part of our current cycle. When and how will it end? There is evidence that global warming is accelerating, and that human activity is likely responsible for some of that. It is not just the CO 2 we are adding to the atmosphere. Now, we are told that cleaning up the air may have also contributed to it.

I am just guessing, but common sense would argue that before any human activity at all on the earth, mother nature had, on her own, on occasion, likely slowed down global warming because there was no one to fight forest fires. When things got hot and dry, fires would start, usually by lightning. They would burn until they hit a river, or lake or even the ocean itself. The smoke from all of that would have helped cool things down by helping shield the earth from sunlight.

If that happened at the same time a dozen volcanoes were going off and spewing smoke and ash into the air…there would undoubtedly have been less sunlight warming the earth.

Okay, I am getting into uncharted territory, which, as a non-scientist, I should probably steer away from.

Yet, I guess, what I am getting back to is the axiom that most things are not “cut and dried.” There are nuances to everything including how two important public policies–public health and global warming–can sometimes run into each other. The world is a complex place.

Rolland Kidder is a Stow resident.