14 comments

  • fuzzfactor 4 days ago ago

    I would imagine that a column of soot-containing air is more conductive if it contains oxides of sulfur than if it does not.

    The same electrical potential may still be present in the clouds, but instead of being neutralized dramatically it could now be dissipating slowly rather than gone in a flash :)

    More study would be good to have.

  • sMarsIntruder 3 hours ago ago

    Not just lightning apparently. SO2 masked for decades the global warming, and here we are.

    • ccgreg 2 hours ago ago

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

      Sadly misunderstood by a bunch of people.

    • ACCount37 an hour ago ago

      In the meanwhile, environmentalists and "chemtrails" loons converged on being opposed to stratospheric aerosol injection. While we have even more evidence now that it would work if implemented at scale.

      The amount of self-sabotage environmental movements do is mind-boggling.

      • Fricken 29 minutes ago ago

        The whole developed world is self-sabotaging. Environmentalists are just the messengers.

      • titzer an hour ago ago

        Right. Like one thing that cancer needs is oxygen. So if we stop breathing (instead of laboriously stopping smoking--that's hard), then we can slow down cancer.

      • sMarsIntruder an hour ago ago

        These guys are doing well https://makesunsets.com/

  • potato3732842 4 days ago ago

    Very interesting, but this article is kind of a mess and all over the place.

    I would expect a shipping lane to have more or less than baseline amounts of lightening regardless of soot on the basis of it being generally more churned up and therefore having slightly different potential than the rest of the ground (which just happens to be liquid water in this case).

    It's not clear to me if the study is isolating the variable they're measuring properly.

    Surely there's a "control" shipping lane somewhere that was cleaner to begin with or never cleaned up.

    Additionally, it's well known that having a bunch of crap (including water) suspended in the air to bridge the gaps makes it easier for electricity to arc so it's not clear if and/or to what extent this the change a result of sulfer emissions or particulate generally.

    It's also well known that particulate facilitates condensation (the article talks about this).

    • ccgreg 2 hours ago ago

      Hopefully you read all of the links in the article -- the purpose of thecoversation is to present information to the general public, with references to research that the author has been involved with.

    • atoav 10 minutes ago ago

      [delayed]

    • lesuorac 4 days ago ago

      > Surely there's a "control" shipping lane somewhere that was cleaner to begin with or never cleaned up.

      Isn't the shipping lane the "treatment" group and everywhere else in the world the "control" group?

      Like we administered x mg of sulfer to the patient and they saw y outcome while patients not receiving sufler saw z outcome. When we stopped administering sulfer all patients saw z outcome seems to be isolating sulfer as causing y.

      • jjk166 4 days ago ago

        > Like we administered x mg of sulfer to the patient and they saw y outcome while patients not receiving sufler saw z outcome. When we stopped administering sulfer all patients saw z outcome seems to be isolating sulfer as causing y.

        There is a reason we use placebos for control groups.