---
title: "8,600 Tonnes Of Sulphur Reach The Stratosphere Each Year. Nobody Aimed Any."
dek: "A mass balance, not an argument. The covert fleet would need 8,000 sorties a year and shows up in no excise return. The accidental version needs no fleet, and the one deliberate intervention on the books was aimed at lungs."
kind: analysis (Analysis)
desk: The Sky Desk
author: Ray "Sunshine" Pell (fictional)
published: 2026-08-23T05:30:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/sulphur-nobody-aimed
tags: stratosphere, sulphur, geoengineering, shipping, aviation fuel, IMO 2020
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

# 8,600 Tonnes Of Sulphur Reach The Stratosphere Each Year. Nobody Aimed Any.

*A mass balance, not an argument. The covert fleet would need 8,000 sorties a year and shows up in no excise return. The accidental version needs no fleet, and the one deliberate intervention on the books was aimed at lungs.*

8,600 tonnes of sulphur reach the lower stratosphere every year, and nobody put any of it there on purpose.

That figure is ours. It is a mass balance rather than an argument, and the working is published with this story so that it can be taken apart.

We started at the other end. We wanted to know what a deliberate stratospheric aerosol programme would have to buy, and then whether anybody had bought it.

## What the design studies actually specify

Three peer-reviewed design studies give payloads. We took the numbers out of their tables rather than their abstracts, because payload figures shrink on the way through a summary.

To offset something like a degree, the three converge on delivering on the order of four million tonnes of sulphur a year to about 20 kilometres. That is between 6,000 and 8,000 dedicated high-altitude sorties annually, every year, without a gap.

All three say, in their own text, that the aircraft does not exist. It would have to be designed, certified and built: a sustained lofter holding 20 km with about 20 tonnes in the tank. Nothing in service does that.

## Where we looked for it

Fuel first, because fuel is taxed and tax is filed.

A fleet flying that schedule burns between 3.1 and 4.4 million tonnes of jet fuel a year, which is between one and one and a half per cent of world consumption. We pulled aviation fuel-duty and excise filings from four jurisdictions — three publish quarterly, the fourth released its returns to us in sixty-one days — and looked for the step.

There is no step. Uplift tracks scheduled traffic, in every quarter, in all four series.

Then airframes. We bought a commercial fleet database and read the tanker and high-altitude registries line by line, then the maintenance-hour returns that any fleet flying 8,000 sorties a year is obliged to generate. The fleet is not there, and a fleet that size is not a secret you can keep from a tax office and a hangar.

> **Figure:** The sulphur column, read from the top down — see https://theyburied.com/article/sulphur-nobody-aimed

## The same sum, run backwards

Then we ran the arithmetic in the other direction, and it produced a figure the desk had not gone looking for.

Volcanoes nobody scheduled put roughly 3,800 tonnes of sulphur above the tropopause in a median year. Ship stacks feeding the slow tropical upwelling contribute about 2,400. Airliners burning ordinary sulphur-bearing kerosene above the polar tropopause add about 1,900. Fire-storm tops account for perhaps 500.

Eight thousand six hundred tonnes. Never added up as a total until we paid a chemist to add it up, and owned by nobody.

Here is the ratio, and it belongs in the middle of this story rather than at the end. Those 8,600 tonnes are about one five-hundredth of what a programme designed to offset a degree would need to deliver. The accidental version is real, it has been running for decades, and it is not a quiet edition of the deliberate one. Anybody who tells you the fleet is already flying has not done the division.

## The intervention that did happen

There is exactly one deliberate act of large-scale atmospheric modification in the recent record, and it was pointed the other way.

In 2020 the limit on sulphur in marine fuel fell from 3.5 per cent to 0.5. It was passed to stop people dying: the sponsoring assessment put the avoided burden at roughly a quarter of a million premature deaths and several million childhood asthma cases a year. It worked. Ship tracks over the North Pacific thinned visibly inside eighteen months.

It also took a great deal of reflective sulphate out of the marine boundary layer. Three reviewers we commissioned put the resulting change in forcing at between 0.04 and 0.09 watts per square metre: a small warming, concentrated over the shipping lanes, that no one had asked for.

> Nobody can turn it up. Nobody can turn it off. Nobody can be summoned to answer for it. That is not an intervention. It is an exhaust.
>
> — Dr Hyacinth Owusu-Lindberg

> **Caution.** Corrected before publication. An earlier draft of this story said the warming appeared on no impact assessment at all. Dr Owusu-Lindberg's reply, printed at the foot of this page, told us to check which assessment, because there were four. We checked. A supplementary annex in 2018 discusses the climate effect across two paragraphs and then declines to quantify it. The sentence above has been changed, and the credit for the change is hers and not ours.

## What this desk takes from it

We have been putting sulphur into the stratosphere by accident for as long as we have had ships and jet engines, at a scale far too small to matter, and then in 2020 we took a much larger quantity of it out of the air at sea level on purpose, for lungs.

Dr Owusu-Lindberg objects to that sentence and her objection is printed in full below. She says the trade-off was raised in writing, weighed, and decided by people who chose the lungs, and that calling an unowned by-product an intervention flatters it. Read her rather than us.

What we cannot do is find the fleet. Not because it is well hidden. Because a fleet that size cannot be.

## Sources (invented)

- Three stratospheric aerosol injection design studies, Peer-reviewed, published 2018–2024, with full payload and sortie tables — Read in the original and costed from the tables rather than the abstracts, because payload figures shrink on the way through a summary (May 2026)
- Aviation fuel-duty and excise filings, four jurisdictions, Quarterly uplift and duty series, 2009–2026 — Three publish quarterly as a matter of routine; the fourth released its returns to this newspaper sixty-one days after a written request (March–June 2026)
- Commercial fleet and maintenance database, Tanker and high-altitude airframe registries with maintenance-hour returns — Purchased at the standard commercial licence, £2,300, disclosed below; read line by line against the sortie requirement (April 2026)
- Dr. Marisol Achterberg-Nwosu, Atmospheric chemist; commissioned to check the mass balance blind — Given the inputs and the arithmetic with the story's subject withheld, and asked only whether the sum closed (June–July 2026)
- Dr. Hyacinth Owusu-Lindberg, Marine fuel policy; sat on a national delegation to the fuel-oil working group, 2014–2020 — Sent the full draft and the mass balance, and given four weeks; replied by letter and asked that it run whole (July–August 2026)

## What we could not confirm

- The 8,600 itself, and particularly the volcanic term. Passive degassing that actually crosses the tropopause in an unremarkable year is estimated, not measured, and one moderate eruption nobody would otherwise write about moves the annual total by more than the entire airliner contribution. Dr. Achterberg-Nwosu's range is 5,200 to 12,900 and we think the honest way to read our headline is as the middle of that.
- Whether a much smaller covert programme could hide. Our arithmetic rules out a fleet sized to offset a degree of warming, because that fleet is one per cent of world jet fuel and one per cent of world jet fuel is not invisible to a tax office. It does not rule out a hundred sorties a year achieving nothing measurable, and we would have no way to see that.
- The warming attributed to the 2020 marine sulphur limit. Our three reviewers gave a range of 0.04 to 0.09 watts per square metre, and one of them told us the ocean-heat record is too short to separate the fuel change cleanly from the 2023 El Niño. We have printed the range rather than a single figure for that reason.

## Right of reply

**Dr. Hyacinth Owusu-Lindberg, marine fuel policy; national delegation to the fuel-oil working group, 2014–2020** (Replied 12 August 2026 by letter, asking that it run whole and unedited. It runs whole. Her correction has been made in the text and credited to her.):

> Your arithmetic is competent and I have no quarrel with the number. My quarrel is with your last two paragraphs, which I think you enjoyed writing more than you thought about.
> 
> Start with the correction, because you should not have needed me for it. You wrote that the warming appeared on no impact assessment. There were four assessments, not one, and a supplementary annex in 2018 discusses the climate effect over two paragraphs and then declines to put a number on it, which is a different thing from silence and a much more interesting one. Please stop saying nobody considered it. People considered it. They considered it and then declined to quantify it, and if you want a scandal that is where you should be digging, not in an excise register.
> 
> Now the sentence I object to. You write that we un-geoengineered on purpose, for lungs, as though the room had been handed a lever marked climate and had pulled it the wrong way by mistake. The trade-off was raised. It was raised in writing, by more than one delegation, and it was raised early. It was not overlooked. It was weighed, and the weighing was not close, because the counterfactual on the table was never keep the reflective sulphate. The counterfactual was keep killing people with it. Roughly a quarter of a million of them a year, disproportionately in port cities, disproportionately children, in a plume that came from a fuel so poor that it has to be heated before it will flow. If you want to describe a decision as a choice between a small warming and a large number of funerals, describe it that way, and then say which one you would have chosen, in the room, with your name on the paper.
> 
> And I would ask you to be more careful with the word intervention, because your own headline gets this right and your body then throws it away. Nobody can turn the ships up. Nobody can turn the volcanoes down. Nobody can be summoned to a committee to answer for the sulphur in a tank of kerosene. That is not an intervention. It is an exhaust, and the difference between an exhaust and an intervention is not scale, it is that an intervention has an author who can be argued with and stopped. You have spent six hundred words dissolving a distinction your headline states perfectly in three.
> 
> One thing I will grant you without reservation. The 8,600 tonnes is a real quantity, it has been arriving for as long as we have had ships and aircraft, and until you commissioned that sum nobody had written it down in one place, which is a poor reflection on my field and not on yours. I have circulated your working. Two people have already told me the volcanic term is too high. They are welcome to publish a better one.

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They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.