SO2: “Primary Cause of Global Warming Discovered, According to Dr. Peter L. Ward of Teton Tectonics”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29086842/

Hmmmm… as Rosanne Rosannadanna use to say ” if it’s not one thing, it’s another.”

Excuse me, what planet are you from, again?

According to the most recent USGS survey of rivers and streams in the US, the situation has not improved much over the last several decades. Not only are groundwater levels dropping nationwide as subsurface supply is withdrawn, it’s more polluted than ever before, at depth.

Our cities are NOT much less than polluted/polluting, because incremental decreases in source pollutant loading are met and exceeded by mass increase in the number of sources. For example, the average vehicle on the road is larger and emits more pollutants than a decade ago, and the number of vehicles and miles driven continues to climb each year. Our older power plants were to meet new EPA guidelines for retrofitting – until the present Administration got those regulations thrown out, along with attempts to control carbon emissions by instituting greenhouse gas controls.

But even if we weren’t continually adding to our air and water contaminant signature of global pollutants, we recipient to a massive long distance loading from SE Asia.

And, we’ve been sending our pollution hello’s to NW Europe for decades – it’s been tracked through wet deposition monitoring, particulate traps and air chemistry sampling and in ice cores.

Tell the Europeans the US is a ‘clean, nonpolluting country’, and they’ll laugh in your face.

Prepare for Pandora’s Box to open.

The ocean heat content data are from Levitus e.a., “Warming of the world ocean, 1955–2003″:
ftp://ftp.nodc.noaa.gov/pub/data.nodc/woa/PUBLICATIONS/grlheat05.pdf
The SI contains the main increase of the heat content of the different oceans for the two hemispheres and combined.

Detailed heat content data are available as yearly and pentad files at:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/indprod.html or directly at:
ftp://ftp.nodc.noaa.gov/pub/data.nodc/woa/DATA_ANALYSIS/DATA/temp/heat/

I can’t remember where I found the area’s for the different hemispheric oceans, but here is the ratio for the total of all oceans: 43/57 NH/SH
I have plotted the difference in ocean heat content per hemisphere (as surrogate for volume) here:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/oceans_heat.html

There are a few remarkable points: The largest increase in ocean heat content is at the subtropics. This coincidences with the decrease in cloudiness in the (sub)tropics found by Chen e.a. for the period 1980-2003 ( http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2002/2002_Chen_etal_2.pdf ) and differs from the GHG “fingerprint”, which should be more evenly spread over the latitudes. See Fig. 2 and S4 in Levitus e.a.

Moreover, as GHGs are near equal in the NH and SH, while 90% of the anthro SO2 emissions are in the NH, the NH oceans should warm less fast than the SH oceans…

I always enjoy your reasonable and well thought out comments.

Regarding this:

I know there was a river back east somewhere that actually caught fire and was listed as a fire hazard by the insurance companies. That was cleaned up.

That was the Cuyahoga river in Cleveland, Ohio. And you’re right, People fish there all the time now. The EPA says the fish are fine to eat.

The U.S. is now one of the very cleanest countries on Earth — if not the cleanest. The Ganges river in India is terribly filthy and hazardous. China had to shut down their entire industry in and around Beijing during the Olympics to pretend they aren’t gross, filthy polluters with zero regard for the environment or the atmosphere. Ever been across the border to Mexico?

Almost exclusively, America, now the cleanest country on the planet, gets attacked incessantly by the green lobby 24/7/365. Now we’re supposed to feel guilty about extremely minor issues like plastic grocery bags, of all things. [The real reason for that is because they occasionally cause jamming in the automated trash separating machinery, so the recyclers have to hire more expensive human pickers. Bad for the bottom line. Solution: a few bucks in the right pockets, and the drumbeat starts... Grocery bags, ba-aa-ad. Carry your own burlap sacks around, goo-oo-ood]

See how it works?

While I applaud your headlining ability to flush out those who don’t actually *critically* read the actual article, I was not referring to the debate over volcanoes’ *ability* to produce cooling effect, nor even to a debate over whether we should try… I was referring to:

(from you): “No, but it does mean that most any cooling we see in the next couple of years, no matter what the true cause of it, will be labeled automatically as “volcanic induced”. – Anthony”

(from McGrats): “Bingo! That’s exactly what will happen and NASA’a already begun the drum-beats!” [didn't see a cite, I would be interested if there is one]

(from Frank L:) “But still, we appear to be in for a very cold period, and never mind what, if the alarmists uses this event as explanation, they contradict earlier statements that CO2 effect is much much larger than the sun and volcanos, dont they?” [to Frank's credit, he does say "if"]

(from dreamin): “I agree that a big enough volcano will be used as an excuse (if necessary) by alarmists.”

(from Alan Chapelle): “The biggest problem in the AGW debate is that the ‘Alarmists’ are as changeable as the weather.” [not sure what that means exactly, but it seems to be a kind of reply to the hypothetical scenario that alarmists will blame volcanoes for creating hypothetical cooling]

(from Matt): “Of course, down the road, they’ll rewrite the history to make the last 12 month’s cooling “volcanically induced”, just like the CO2-induced warming of the 20th century (for which at least half the warming occurred before the big rise in CO2).”

(from kim): “Leif, not a big enough effect to take the minimizing sun off the hook. But it will be blamed for the survival of the Baby Ice.”

I am a skeptic, of both sides. When I read the AGW *scientists*, I see hypotheses that we very well may be heading for real trouble… they are by no means certain enough to make any predictions – but they’ve seen that the probabilities of a trend are high enough, and the consequences harmful enough, that they feel the need to report on it now, even while they are working on learning more.

Yes, it’s true that many alarmists have overstated the reports of the scientists, and often mischaracterize (or at the very least misunderstand) the scientific position; I mostly ignore them, and just look at the data, and the scientists’ opinions, themselves.

However, on the extremist skeptic side, I see mostly attack by derision and negating of straw-man arguments, often by attributing claims and positions to the opponent, not based on anything actually said but what the attacker thinks they *will say*, or “obviously” think (i.e., mindreading). To me, that is a red flag, that the person is more interested in inventing an argument rather than debating a position actually held.

As a skeptic of both sides, I would join you in decrying the use of extremist or alarmist positions or arguments by either side; however from the quote above it seems that you, and several of your readers, have decided that ‘debate by mindreading’ is acceptable.

To me, it is not, and only adds to the noise, no matter which side does it.

some might be interested in veiwing this

http://33igc.org/coco/EntryPage.aspx?guid=1&PageID=5100&ContainerID=11823&ObjectID=12520

The Pinatubo eruption injected some 20 million tonnes of SO2 directly into the stratosphere, where it stayed for 2-3 years (to make it convenient, let’s say 800 days). The total effect (including water vapour feedback) was a cooling of maximum 0.6 ºC. Humans emit around 80 million tonnes SO2 per year, mainly in the troposphere where it lasts for average 4 days. The direct effect of both (sunlight scattering on wetted sulphate particles) is virtually the same, which means that the direct effect of human made aerosols is around 0.025 ºC (including a 4-day accumulation). Tropospheric aerosols also are supposed to have an indirect effect on clouds (more reflective, longer lasting). The IPCC gives a fourfold range increase for this forcing, compared to the direct effect. If we assume this is right, then the net effect of human made SO2 emissions would be 0.1 ºC.

But the cooling effect of aerosols incorporated in current models is much larger. The Hadcm3 model has made a retrofit of the influence of aerosol changes in the period 1990-1999 (thanks, William), where there should be an increase of 6 ºC at the place of largest aerosol influence in Europe. That is not visible at all in the surface station data.

The Indoex experiment in the Indian Ocean showed a large difference in radiation balance between the NH and the SH near the equator. The NH with a large load of aerosols has a top-of-atmosphere loss of 5 W/m2, and the surface has app. 20 W/m2 less insolation. Despite that, the temperature trends on the South tip of India are more positive than for the only SH climate station (Diego Garcia) in the neighbourhood. Not only land is warming faster in that region, the heat content if the NH Indian Ocean increased slightly more than the SH, if corrected for area (as surrogate for volume).

The overall temperature trend for land increased more for the NH than for the SH. Moreover, the heat content of the oceans increased more in the NH than in the SH (again, if corrected for area), while 90% of the aerosols are emitted and have their effect in the NH.

Thus it seems to me that either the influence of sulphate aerosols is overestimated, or the influence of soot aerosols underestimated (or both) in current models. Either way, that means that the influence of a CO2 doubling will be on the low side of the IPCC estimates and probably below.

Of course this is not an exact calculation and it doesn’t include a lot of other items which influence temperature trends. But it would be interesting to compare the modelled regional influence of large changes in aerosols with regional temperature trends and to compare the hemispheric differences in ocean heat content increase with hemispheric aerosol influences on energy balances.

Go green, go veg, and pray ….

Any educational system that places indoctrination above education, does not deserve any respect.

Research has shown that the reason many NE lakes are acidic is because rainwater flows through so much rotting vegetation before it reaches the lakes.
This is also the reason why acidification was increasing during the 60’s and 70’s. So much of that region was reforesting.

You can add CFC’s and ozone destruction to the list of things the alarmists have been wrong about.