In addition to causing smoggy skies and chronic coughs, soot – or black carbon – turns out to be the number two contributor to global warming. It’s second only to carbon dioxide, according to a four-year assessment by an international panel.
The new study concludes that black carbon, the soot particles in smoke and smog, contributes about twice as much to global warming as previously estimated, even by the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“We were surprised at its potential contribution to climate,” said Sarah Doherty, a University of Washington atmospheric scientist and one of four coordinating lead authors.
The silver lining may be that controlling these emissions can deliver more immediate climate benefits than trying to control carbon dioxide, she said.
The paper was made freely available online today (Jan. 15) in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres.
Some previous research had hinted that models were underestimating black-carbon emissions, Doherty said, from such things as open burning of forests, crops and grasslands, and from energy-related emissions in Southeast Asia and East Asia.
Black carbon’s role in climate is complex. Dark particles in the air work to shade the Earth’s surface while warming the atmosphere. Black carbon that settles on the surface of snow and ice darkens the surface to absorb more sunlight and increase melting. Finally, soot particles influence cloud formation in ways that can have either a cooling or warming impact.
The report surveyed past studies and included new research to quantify the sources of black carbon and better understand its overall effect on the climate.
Doherty was executive director of the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry Projectin 2009 when policy groups were seeking better information on the benefits of reducing black-carbon emissions. The research team undertook a comprehensive assessment, funded by IGAC and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Because of a lack of action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the policy community is asking what else we can do, particularly to help places like the Arctic that are melting much more quickly than we had anticipated,” Doherty said. “We hope reducing black-carbon emissions buys us some time. But it doesn’t replace cutting back on CO2 emissions.”
While carbon dioxide has a half-life of 100 years, black carbon stays in the atmosphere for only a few days.
The authors investigated various sources of black carbon to see which reductions might have the most short-term cooling impact. Regulating emissions from diesel engines followed by replacing some wood- and coal-burning household stoves, authors find, would have the greatest immediate cooling impact.
“If you’re just thinking about impact on climate, you would want to be strategic about which sources you cut back on,” Doherty said. “We looked at the overall impact because some of these sources also emit associated particles that can have counteracting effects.”
Black carbon contributes to climate change in the mid to high latitudes, including the northern United States, Canada, northern Europe and northern Asia, as well as affecting rainfall patterns of the Asian Monsoon.
The report incorporates data that Doherty and co-author Stephen Warren, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences, gathered between 2007 and 2009 to measure soot on Arctic snow. Calculating black carbon deposits in the Arctic is difficult, so data are essential for testing and correcting models.
First author Tami Bond, now at the University of Illinois, earned a doctoral degree at the UW in 2000 that combined engineering, chemistry and atmospheric science to measure emissions from burning that have atmospheric importance.
“Mitigating black carbon is good for curbing short-term climate change, but to really solve the long-term climate problem, carbon dioxide emissions must also be reduced,” Bond said in a press release.
In related research, Doherty, Warren and UW graduate student Cheng Dang will travel next month to Colorado, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and elsewhere to collect snow samples and investigate black carbon’s effects on North America’s Great Plains.
###
[UPDATE] I trust Anthony won’t mind if I highlight their interesting estimate of the total black carbon forcing from all sources since 1750:
<blockquote>When open burning emissions, which emit high levels of organic matter, are included in the total, the best estimate of net industrial-era climate forcing by all black-carbon- rich sources becomes slightly negative (-0.06 W m-2 with 90% uncertainty bounds of -1.45 to +1.29 W m-2).</blockquote>
In other words, black carbon forcing from all emissions is zero ± one W/m2 …
w.
Ms. Hickey is apparently ignorant to the existance of water vapor.
This exhibits all the signs of being yet another False Economic Growth scam on par to the now discredited Co2 scam, and when all the money has been wasted someone will prove that its self regulating like Co2. Its all part of a Corporate-Nazi ideology with the aim of increasing the financial apartheid between rich and poor by inflating the cost of basic living to a point where low income people in temperate climates have to chose whether to heat or eat in winter !
Reading between the lines they’re saying they don’t know what’s going on but more research could lead to a better understanding.
In short, send money.
Translation: The UN/World Bank said “the peasants finally figured out we were going to tax and regulate them back into serfdom so how about coming up with something we can use to tax and regulate them that they won’t object to as strongly”
Was it not as recent as recently as 2012 (and at least as far back as 2005) that some were advocating the deliberate placement of aerosols and particulates into the atmosphere in order to block sunlight and “reverse global warming”?
Ya gotta give ’em credit. The keep finding ways to redefine the problem so that they can continue to get funding to find a solution (and keep the politicians and public agitated).
“It’s second only to carbon dioxide, according to a four-year assessment by an international panel.”
Stop right there. Second? What about water vapor? Isn’t that nice how they just ignore the elephant in the living room? Sigh. Wake me when the scientific method makes a come back!
“Mitigating black carbon is good for curbing short-term climate change, but to really solve the long-term climate problem, carbon dioxide emissions must also be reduced,”
===============
Burning fossil fuel doesn’t just release CO2, it also releases H2O, which is a much stronger and more dangerous GHG.
The EPA is apparently seeking to have H2O declared a pollutant (true), which would be right in line with reducing H2O in the environment and its negative effects on temperature and health.
Just think of the flood damage that could be avoided, along with the loss of life, if we could reduce the amount of H2O released into the atmosphere. If we could completely eliminate H2O emissions from the atmosphere it would eliminate many of the problems around the world in a very short period of time.
So what effect does this have on the empirical measurement of the climate sensitivity to CO2? It must bring it down somewhat. How will the models be adjusted to take account of this. Maybe they will retrofit them to the temperature record again upto about 1996 then they will miraculously find they will predict no warming for 16 years or even longer. But don’t be fooled the world will still be predicted to become an inferno.
Read we need more money.
How can they do this when the earth is cooling. How come no body up there uses there freaking minds? Some how it goes past every form of science white out Any reality check.
Here a video from NASA claiming to have put to getter the temperature rise over history. They Cale it 14 degrees Celsius while MET office came whit 12 degrees and we know that even thats to hight.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012-temps.html
Last week i read some thing about calling skeptics trolls.
But better to be a troll know what hes talking about then to be a scientist who those not have an clue
Oddly enough, even moth change.
What warming?
Carbon is carbon, ain’t it?
/sarc off
replacing some wood- and coal-burning household stoves
A 10 step plan to reduce black carbon and man’s impact on the climate-
Step 1: “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” -Barack Obama, http://youtu.be/HlTxGHn4sH4.
Step 2: The U.N, with funds from U.S. taxpayers, uses proceeds from carbon dioxide taxes to confiscate wood and coal burning stoves and replace them with new electric stoves.
Step 3: Realize that in many parts of the world, people who use wood and coal to heat their food/shelter cannot afford electricity rates that have necessarily skyrocketed.
Step 4: Increase tax rate on carbon dioxide.
Step 5: Realize many former users of wood and coal buring stoves do not have electricity.
Step 6: Increase tax rate on carbon dioxide.
Step 7: Realize the recipients of the electric stoves are necessarily starving/freezing.
Step 8: Build wind farms and install power lines to power any electric stove whose owner is still living.
Step 9: Observe that global temperatures are persistently falling.
Step 10: Increase tax rate on carbon dioxide.
Brilliant!
Sorry, it looks like I forgot a “” after the word “skyrocket” in Step 1. Hopefully mod can fix it, or delete the post.
Really? This was the place where I stopped to read their press release further. Most of the papers which where published on the topic estimate the average atmospheric residence time between 8 to 15 years.
See: http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/GW_5GH_IPCC_GHG_files/image022.jpg
“It’s second only to carbon dioxide, according to a four-year assessment by an international panel”
Stop right there – why should we believe anything written by people who can advocate, write or even report such nonsense? The sad thing is, that opinion-makers and politicians will not see the two glaring flaws in this statement and will take it at face value, as would eg most of the people on my FB page. We still have a mountain to climb in terms of persuading the MSM and law-makers that the AGW scam and all that follows from it, is rubbish.
Meanwhile they will use this to ban open fires and to tax fuel for central heating etc and esp for cars, even further. And the price of food for those in the cities will go through the roof when the cost of transporting it soars. Maybe that will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of ignorance
We know that soot is a problem. We know that wind currents carry soot from China to the Arctic. Alarmists should be pushing to bring manufacturing back to the United States. Stricter pollution controls here and it would completely cut out the pollution from cargo ships. Sure things would cost more. Maybe then we would only buy what we need. We could go back to making quality goods that last. That would save resources, reduce energy needs and cut pollution even further. Makes a lot more sense than taxing plant food.
‘While carbon dioxide has a half-life of 100 years…’
It’s radioactive and fissions? Things really are worse than we thought.
So soot will open the northern trading routes?
Who benefits? Canada, USA, Russia,China and Asia.
The law of unintended consequences, again.
As a Canadian, its burn baby burn,
Smudge pots to prosperity?
Unfortunately I doubt these claims, its awful convenient to have a “causive” agent that does it all.
It cools, it warms, it melts ice, will it change the oil in my truck while its at it?
Gail Combs
January 16, 2013 at 7:06 am
“Because of a lack of action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the policy community is asking what else we can do, particularly to help places like the Arctic that are melting much more quickly than we had anticipated,” Doherty said. “We hope reducing black-carbon emissions buys us some time. But it doesn’t replace cutting back on CO2 emissions.”
Translation: The UN/World Bank said “the peasants finally figured out we were going to tax and regulate them back into serfdom so how about coming up with something we can use to tax and regulate them that they won’t object to as strongly”
###
Nice translation, though I would have expanded the meaning of “policy community” a bit. You read Marxist Jargonese very well!
BTW, since when is a survey of literature, much of which is just surveys of literature, a study? This is very much like the old propaganda technique of using news reports on the “Mood of the People” where the story really is about news reports on the MOP, which are stories about all news reports on the MOP…
From the post:
In addition to causing smoggy skies and chronic coughs, soot – or black carbon – turns out to be the *number two contributor to global warming*. It’s second only to carbon dioxide, according to a four-year assessment by an international panel.
The new study concludes that black carbon, the soot particles in smoke and smog, contributes about *twice as much to global warming* as previously estimated, even by the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
============================
What global warming, pray tell?
BC is no doubt pollution, but here we see another ingredient added to account for the mythical global warming. Now we have two sources to account for the warming that does not happen. This sort of absurdity is offered as science, and is swallowed by some.
I repeat myself, but it would seem that any theory that didn’t take into account the
forcing due to soot would in all likelihood attribute observed warming to CO2 alone,
thereby falsely exaggerating its effect. I assume that soot will have its major effect
on land temps. Does this provide an opportunity to judge relative effect by comparing land and nearby water temps? I have no idea.
“While carbon dioxide has a half-life of 100 years, black carbon stays in the atmosphere for only a few days.”
However, it sits on arctic ice for a lot longer than that, and reduces albedo.
To the virtual inhabitants of the computer model in question, this might be an interesting finding. To people in the real world it means nothing.
Replace them with a “rocket stove”!
Here’s a website for an organization that wants to build and distribute rocket stoves for cooking in the third world:
http://www.rocketstove.org/
Here’s a great how-to thread on making one for home heating, with lots of good comments:
http://www.iwilltry.org/b/build-a-rocket-stove-for-home-heating/
Here are a couple of sites that focus on using rocket stoves’ exhaust pipes to heat a large mass of “cob”-based masonry to provide long-term heating:
http://www.permies.com/forums/posts/list/40/2558
http://www.richsoil.com/rocket-stove-mass-heater.jsp
As a sidebar to this, Cliff Mass, also of UW, has an item on his weather blog about “ship tracks” caused by particulate matter in ship’s exhaust, with some nice sat photos.
http://cliffmass.blogspot.ca/2013/01/strange-lines-over-northeast-pacific.html
(I put “ship tracks” in quotes — he didn’t — because at the speed ships travel I think these are more like the “tracks” from forest fires.)
Before casting too many negative comments, at least peruse the paper. IMO the paper is a detailed investigation of what they define as black carbon (BC). The paper has many authors because it covers a number of specialty areas, including particle morphology, emissions inventories, and of course, climate models.
Whether their conclusions are justified from their collection of information is a matter of detailed study of the paper, which I doubt anyone has sufficient time to accomplish at this time. Some things that do raise flags are: the wide variation in complex refractive index from various studies, and the factor of 10 difference between the low estimate of BC emissions to the high estimate of BC emissions.
All-in-all the subject of the behavior of particles in the atmosphere is extremely complicated. But this is not a new subject, it has be the subject of studies for at least the past 50 years. It’s just that the climate modeling community is now looking for another man-made substance (other than CO2) to blame “climate change” on.
Particulate matter (of which BC is a subset) has been the subject of emission controls in North America and Europe for at least the past 40 years, for health reasons. So if there are any effects on climate from BC, the maximum of those effects is in the past for North America and Europe. For the rest of the world, the control technology already exists to effectively control BC, and it doesn’t require de-industrialization to do it. In fact in may require more industrialization to control BC.
ferd berple says:
January 16, 2013 at 7:16 am
….The EPA is apparently seeking to have H2O declared a pollutant (true),…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Our favorite State Attorney General Ken Cuccinell seems to have skewered the EPA on that one.
Question–What is meant by 100 yr half-life of CO2?
Are they referring to how long it takes to get into various sinks? It obviously would not follow a typical half life curve in a changing environment.
ferd berple says:
anuary 16, 2013 at 7:16 am
Burning fossil fuel doesn’t just release CO2, it also releases H2O, which is a much stronger and more dangerous GHG.
The amount of water released from burning fossil fuels + all extra water vapour from cooling towers at power plants (including nuclear) is less than 0.1% of the natural water cycle of evaporation and precipitation (just a rough estimate, based on burning rates and energy yield). The extra 0.1% has an average lifetime in the atmosphere of about 4 days. Not a real influence at all. Water vapour is mainly a matter of temperature over the oceans and partly over vegetation and water rich land and lakes…
Adam Soereg says:
January 16, 2013 at 8:12 am
‘While carbon dioxide has a half-life of 100 years…’
Indeed the 5-15 years found in many papers is the residence time, the average lifetime of a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere, before exchanged with a CO2 molecule from one of the other reservoirs. That is based on the about 150/800 GtC exchange back and forth between the atmosphere and the oceans/vegetation, partly continuous (equator to poles) and partly seasonal. The 100 years is based on the future (Bern model) sink rate of some extra CO2 above the equilibrium point at the current temperature (which is about 300 ppmv, currently we are near 400 ppmv). The real sink rate is some 4 GtC/year at the 100 ppmv (210 GtC) above equilibrium. That gives an e-fold time of 210/4 = 52.5 years or a half life time of ~40 years. The Bern model may be justified if we burn all available oil and lots of coal (3000-5000 GtC, currently we have burned ~370 GtC), but there is no sign that in the near or even far future the deep oceans and/or vegetation will be saturated as sinks…
Sounds like a problem for Beijing to solve.
@Myron Mesecke
>We know that soot is a problem. We know that wind currents carry soot from China to the Arctic. Alarmists should be pushing to bring manufacturing back to the United States. Stricter pollution controls here and it would completely cut out the pollution from cargo ships. Sure things would cost more.
+++++++
Why assume that cleaner combustion costs more? We have to get rid of the idea that to burn something cleanly means ‘cleaning up’ combustion products after the burning takes place – a ‘catalytic converter mentality’. If you build a modern combustor, there is basically no BC to clean up. Look at the tailpipes of a 1983 Hyundai and a 2012 VW Golf Diesel. Chalk and cheese.
@mpainter
>BC is no doubt pollution, but here we see another ingredient added to account for the mythical global warming.
Please read carefully. It talks about ‘forcing’ of BC not ‘warming’ of the globe. Whether or not any warming takes place, the GHG equivalent if BC is there, and it is large relative to other things. The global temperature rises and falls for all sorts of (natural) reasons but we can still calculate the forcing value of components of the system (like, and especially, water vapour). Please consider that eliminating BC from our immediate environment is helpful while taxing CO2 is not.
” “We were surprised at its potential contribution to climate,” said Sarah Doherty, a University of Washington atmospheric scientist and one of four coordinating lead authors.”
Why would a group of scientists be surpised by anything they discovered?
I always thought science was about finding new stuff.
@old engineer
Thanks for your wise contribution. It is a reasoned approach.
“All-in-all the subject of the behavior of particles in the atmosphere is extremely complicated. But this is not a new subject, it has be the subject of studies for at least the past 50 years. It’s just that the climate modeling community is now looking for another man-made substance (other than CO2) to blame “climate change” on.”
I am not sure this is the ‘modelling community’ speaking in this paper. It is particle researchers who are pointing out (as they have been politely for years) that the workings of BC are not recognised by the modellers and they had better get with the programme, so to speak. It is a direct and substantial (to say the least) repudiation of the way BC and (indirectly) CO2 have been treated in the models. A factor of 3?? Good grief. The fact that they got it published in the face of Team (and Journal) opposition to anything that undermines the pre-eminence of CO2 is significant. Let’s not tar everyone with the same brush. The modellers have a lot to answer for, particularly fiddling the sulphate constants. This paper tightens the thumbscrews already impinging on their fat jiggery-pokery fingers.
One of the fudge factors used in GCM’s to fit the past century’s temperature record, including the 1945-1975 cooler period with increasing CO2 levels are the “white”, reflecting sulfate aerosols. Black carbon was clearly underestimated and the influence of reflecting aerosols largely overestimated, with large variations in the different models.
My estimates, based on the 2-3 years lifetime of the Pinatubo injection of sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere and the resulting temperature drop, was that the influence of human made sulfate aerosols (half life time in the lower troposphere some 4 days before raining out) was less that 0.1°C. With this study, even the sign of the influence of the combined (black and white) aerosols may be positive…
That all means that the influence of CO2 is largely overestimated and that the climate models “projections” are way too high…
See some background at:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/aerosols.html
and
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/india_temp.html
and
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/oxford.html
some discussion at RC in its early days:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/02/an-aerosol-tour-de-forcing/
with my comment at #6, not censored and even no (inline) reply at that time…
Myron Mesecke says:
January 16, 2013 at 8:24 am
“Maybe then we would only buy what we need.”
Amen.
…and I just bought a diesel because it produces less CO2.
“Because of a lack of action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the policy community is asking what else we can do, particularly to help [b] places like the Arctic that are melting much more quickly than we had anticipated [/b] ,” Doherty said. “We hope reducing black-carbon emissions buys us some time. But it doesn’t replace cutting back on CO2 emissions.”
Arctic melting is over. So what was the slower rate that they “anticipated”?
http://i49.tinypic.com/xudsy.png
For any “climate scientists” who are still having problems with rate of change: plus numbers means more sea ice , minus numbers mean melting ice. Hovering around zero means melting has stopped.
David Joss of Downunder says:
January 16, 2013 at 12:37 pm
Myron Mesecke says:
January 16, 2013 at 8:24 am
“Maybe then we would only buy what we need.”
and push many more people out of employment.
Amen.
It’s second behind CO2, as a cause of warming.
So… I have the entire human history of man fermenting wine and vodka and whiskey and venting off the carbon dioxide to wherever, with all these hundreds of thousands of individual stills, from the ones made by prisoners in the state pen, to the ones made by physics students at the world’s finest schools, and every single human being in between, and not ONE of those people, in the entire HISTORY of drunks who’ve run off their wife, and it ain’t huntin’ season, and they need something to talk about, have EVER UTTERED a SYLLABLE: d.r.u.n.k.s, mind you, and we like to talk about – err… they like to talk about anything and everything under the sun…
not ONE HUMAN in the HISTORY of MANKIND had two rooms, and leaked off CO2 into one and said – “Hey – it feels like the CO2 room is handling this heat differently than that other room… ”
and in the entire history of mankind adding CO2 to greenhouses: running the PPM consistently up to 12, 16, 2,000 ppm… not ONE time in the entire history of university and agricultural college and drop-outs from Berkley getting stoned and forgetting to turn on the fans/turn off the CO2 in THEIR greenhouse, not ONE housewife from England with a little greenhouse, and some CO2 her maintenance man husband hooked up – not ONE REPORT in the HISTORY of MANKIND of ‘Oh, I noticed when the CO2 rose to….” ….”that the thermostat was acting differently like the air in the room was in some way, changed by adding more CO2, so the heat in the room did (back-flips wearing bunny slippers, PICK AN EFFECT: THERE IS NONE)
Ok so I’ve checked out those two fields, kinda thinking if anything I’ve read or heard in the history of all mankind’s endeavors about ‘the CO2-added space, acted differently and the air handled heat differently.”
Not once from every human being who ever grew in a greenhouse with CO2 added. Not one university/agricultural college where the student forgot the CO2 on over the weekend in Greenhouse #3, not one professor checking up on his ability to amaze students and show them the REAL greenhouse effect…
not one single report of huge vats of sour mash or whatever it’s called, and the CO2 being leaked off because even after the initial warmth from the rotting mash was gone, the CO2 helped keep something in particular warm. A room, a space between two walls, a space around a vat, nothing. N.O.T.H.I.N.G. in the history of a man liking to sit down with a nice Pale Ale, and the East or Western worlds’ history of instrumentation.
Nothing.
So I go check my infrared astronomy guys they’re real big on understanding and quantifying the amount of earth-generated infrared light, so they can comb, combine, include/exclude/highlight/diminish their photographs for that big paper, that A that really matters…
NOTHING.
The optical astronomy guys, they’re the ones who helped Einstein cement relativity with the news about gravity – that yes, a beam of light was bent by gravity when it passed our sun, so Einstein was right – those guys –
the guys who love the night sky and have photos of planets or whatever all over the walls of their den where they photo’d the sky at a certain hour and date for 40, 50 years – none of these guys with huge expensive scopes, and no grandpas who just love, incidental sky watching through a scope –
not one of these professors or THESE students looking for that EASY A, that stunning paper that grips the scientific world with the final indicator there is more infrared in the air because there’s more
motion on atmospheric gas – the d.e.f.i.n.i.t.i.o.n. of heat –
Not one of these persons manning the giant scopes people get PhDs on, has ever noticed that – yeah – the number of days when astronomical seeing is too occluded to view, has grown – and guess what ?! it’s right in line with rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere!
After all CO2 overall has risen a third in the last 50 years.
Man’s CO2 has risen a third in the last 15 years.
But not one, single soul on earth, in monitoring sky conditions so people can reserve time on telescopes, has ever noted that it’s a lot harder to find a slot due to the HEAT in the atmosphere making it WAVER –
scintillation not rising even though the atmosphere’s warmer? No added wavering of the stars when they’re magnified several hundred times?
The definition of warmer gas is more motion: the definition of the twinkling of the stars is, that heat, on gas, is motion. But the stars are too depressed to waver more.
Over your carbon sin. The stars and Al Gore and the EPA think they discovered you, and everybody, have been using fire sinfully, so the atmosphere’s warmer, but the stars won’t twinkle more because they’re too depressed. Over your sin.
There are land based telescopes with computerized machine assemblies to flex the very glass mirrors to remove that effect, atmospheric scintillation: the wavering of the air overhead from earth generated infrared heat.
Not a word in thirty years by the people who invented, built, build, maintain, design, use these, that – oh yeah you can see clearly the added infrared heat is making the machines flex the mirrors, more and more.
NOT A WORD.
Because there is no more infrared in the sky, even though the CO2 has risen by a third in the past 50 years and the man made CO2’s risen by a third the past 15.
Not
One
Word
from the people who built a computerized telescopic mirror flexing machine, to offset the very effect we’re discussing: heat, on atmospheric gas. Infrared light derived from earth’s heat load, wafting upward in convection.
Not One
Not Ever.
NONE.
So, I’m saying “If this heats second behind CO2, what’s a little less than nothing? That can’t be right.”
Therefore the pictures and hand waving and beautiful pictures of soot in water that comprises about 5 molecules of 100, man made, are worth about what it cost to put it on a post card with “Wish you were here, our vacation in the arctic!”
It’s interesting.
Climate science
It aint.
No? That’s not right and everybody knows that CO2 warms this planet – how? Because I’ve got instruments in the sky now that are looking with an urgency expressed in their cost – millions – hundreds of millions of dollars: nobody’s talking about rising CO2 making any of those instruments’ readings vary.
And they’re designed to detect
just
that.
So I brought my analysis of how much CO2 is heating this planet and if soot on snow is second to that, I’ll move on to analyzing something real. Then, secondarily, something that matters.
Weather sin is a scam. Period. You don’t owe Al Gore a thing. Except maybe indict him for terror himself.
Al Qaeda tried to sway policy by saying if we didn’t install certain policies we would lose life and property.
Al Gore tried to sway policy by saying if we didn’t install certain policies we would lose life and property.
If at any time he COULD have found out there was actually no ‘end of the world’ coming he’s acting in a criminal way.
Yes he is, as are all those who pretend that sheer sociopathological determination to run your life and make you pay them for being alive,
is scientific proof you need to do it.
I can’t wait to go to some international party venue in a 5-star hotel to tell developing countries that use dung and wood for heating/cooking that they owe the developed nations reparations ($$$) for ruining our climate with their evil ‘black carbon’.
Crispin in Waterloo says: January 16, 2013 at 12:25 pm
Please read carefully. It talks about ‘forcing’ of BC not ‘warming’ of the globe. Please consider that eliminating BC from our immediate environment is helpful while taxing CO2 is not.
===================
It is you who does not read carefully. Above my comment I quoted from the post two instances wherein it cited BC as a contributor to global warming. Please go read it again.
The first phrase of my remark characterizes BC as pollution. You ignored that. Why do you take issue with my comment?
Well, I read all the comments to see if anyone noticed what I did, but I saw nothing, so here goes. From the Abstract:
Am I misreading this wrong? Total black carbon forcing since 1750 of basically zero plus or minus one W/m2?
WUWT?? All of the media hype and that’s what we get?
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
January 16, 2013 at 4:30 pm
“Am I misreading this wrong? ”
Are you any relation to George Busch?
So the whole thing, press release, study, and all, is nothing but a fraud.
I think the EPA may have a research assistant if they will only reach out. There is a very informative website on the dangers of this chemical compound they wish to rule dangerous. They should go to http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html to get all the support they need for this vile threat.
sarc tag should be unnecessary, but just in case, –> /sarc
The paleo rises in me. Hit the back button. Ok, put a rock on it and go get a cup of coffee. We are going back to the Carboniferous period. No pretenses to decimal places, let’s just call it 325 million years ago. Enormous forests had been on land for about 25 million years and had sequestered most of the carbon on the planet. Oxygen was at the highest level ever. Carbon about at the preindustrial level. A reciprocating series of southern hemisphere glacations (the continents that record these things for us were down there then).
But this is about oxygen, and fires.Unless Thomas Gold was right much of the Carbon we enjoy comes from this period. Fires. Carbon cares not whether it has been burnt. Fires, like nothing we can imagine. Fires, like today the nutrients remain and the plants return. Soot so deep we find it in the strata today.
We really have no way to compare the black carbon then and today but my sense is that nothing we are doing today will be found in strata 350 million years hence. Was there discernable effect on climate?
Not really.
If one forgives a note I’ve made in another thread too, because this is so relevant:
While the (northern) arctic would be a separate topic, albeit commented on in a moment, one thing is particularly blatant: Soot is not the dominant cause of warming around Antarctica. If soot was, the land (ice) would warm more than oceans, since soot can darken ice/snow more so than oceans (where soot would soon get mixed into quadrillions of tons of deep water). Instead, for instance, during the 1982-2004 period, which was a time of warming for the oceans around Antarctica, the land (ice) very strikingly cooled, even when just a small number of miles from the oceans, as seen in an illustration towards the bottom right within http://s10.postimage.org/l9gokvp09/composite.jpg (click to enlarge).
What does more contribute to explaining such is cloud cover change (as in http://s13.postimage.org/ka0rmuwgn/gcrclouds.gif ), since the Antarctic ice is so white as to be whiter than clouds, unlike dark blue oceans, meaning that a reduction in clouds cools Antarctica while warming the surrounding ocean. The deviation in Antarctic temperature trends occurred long before CFCs and the late 20th century “ozone hole,” as seen in http://www.space.dtu.dk/upload/institutter/space/forskning/05_afdelinger/sun-climate/full_text_publications/svensmark_2007cosmoclimatology.pdf (though perhaps ozone change as well could have contributed more in earlier pre-CFC history if ozone change was more heavily driven by solar variation and far less quantitatively dominated by manmade CFCs than environmental activists tend to imply).
Also, while soot presumably can have some effect, the pattern of temperature history does not fit it being a dominant forcing at the northern end of the planet either: As illustrated by http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif , there was major arctic cooling during the 1940s-1960s,* and that was a time of growth in global soot-releasing combustion including in Asia. What does more fit such by far is seen in the bottom left of http://s10.postimage.org/l9gokvp09/composite.jpg
* Also note, as http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif shows, arctic temperatures were no warmer in the 1990s than in the late 1930s, which fits how the late 20th century was not very special for arctic ice extent in the history seen in http://nwpi.krc.karelia.ru/e/climas/Ice/Ice_no_sat/XX_Arctic.htm ,and, as an annual average without cherry-picking a single month alone, arctic extent in the years recent to now (2013) has been comparable to that in the mid-1990s ( http://www.webcitation.org/6AKKakUIo ).