From the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – RIVERSIDE and the Department of Modeled Inconsistent Results comes this unlikely claim: that there will be more of an aerosol load with global warming. Right – negative feedback anyone?
A warmer world will be a hazier one
Using a suite of computer models, UC Riverside-led study finds most aerosol species will increase under climate change associated with greenhouse-gas-induced warming
RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Aerosols, tiny solid and liquid particles suspended in the atmosphere, impact the environment by affecting air quality and alter the Earth’s radiative balance by either scattering or absorbing sunlight to varying degrees. What impact does climate change, induced by greenhouse gases (GHGs), have on the aerosol “burden”–the total mass of aerosols in a vertical column of air?
Past research done on climate models has found inconsistent results: Depending on the model, climate change was associated with an increase or decrease in aerosol burden. But a new study using the newest and state-of-the-art computer models, published today in Nature Climate Change, shows that under climate change associated with GHG-induced warming most aerosol species will register a robust increase, with implications for future air quality.
“Our work on the models shows that nearly all aerosol species will increase under GHG-induced climate change,” said climatologist Robert J. Allen, an assistant professor in theDepartment of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Riverside and the lead author of the research paper. “This includes natural aerosols, like dust and sea salt, and also anthropogenic aerosols, like sulfate, black carbon and primary organic matter. Stricter reductions in aerosol emissions will be necessary for attaining a desired level of air quality through the 21st century.”
Allen explained that an increase in GHGs will not only warm the planet, but also affect climate in many different ways. For example, GHGs will lead to changes in the hydrological cycle and large-scale atmospheric circulation. These changes, in turn, will affect air quality and the distribution of aerosols–irrespective of changes in aerosol emissions.
“Changes in the hydrological cycle and atmospheric circulation are complex, however, and could lead to opposing changes in the distribution of aerosols,” he said. “The models show that GHG warming will lead to more global-mean precipitation, which should reduce aerosol burden because the aerosols are rained out; however, GHG warming will also lead to a decrease in precipitation in certain regions, as well as a global mean decrease in the frequency of precipitation. These latter two changes, which would be expected to increase the burden of atmospheric aerosols, outweigh the former change. The result is more aerosols in the atmosphere.”
Allen and his team found their results using a multi-model data set: the Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Model Intercomparison Project (ACCMIP), which is supplemented with the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project version 5 (CMIP5). The researchers analyzed the ACCMIP and CMIP5 data bases, using model experiments with fixed aerosol emissions (based on the year 2000), but different climates–one based on 2000, the other based on 2100, with the difference of the two experiments indicating the aerosol response to GHG induced warming.
The researchers also conducted similarly designed experiments using the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) versions 4 and 5. Results from these models showed that even when emissions are held fixed, GHG-induced warming by 2100 drives an increase in aerosol burden and elevated concentrations of aerosol species on the Earth’s surface.
“The surprising finding is the consistency of the increase in aerosols over all the different models,” Allen said. “We associate this increase in aerosols to a decrease in aerosol wet removal, the primary removal mechanism, which is driven by a decrease in large-scale precipitation over land–particularly during the Northern Hemisphere summer months of June-July-August.”
Future research avenues for his research team include a deeper understanding of the mechanism by which climate change drives an increase in aerosol burden. Specifically, the team is interested in investigating why models project a decrease in large-scale precipitation in the Northern Hemisphere during June-July-August.
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Allen was joined in the research by William Landuyt at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering, NJ; and Steven T. Rumbold at the University of Reading, the United Kingdom.
The research was supported by grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation.
When did the in-depth study of models and models alone become a science in itself.
With the rise of the current generation of grads, who learned the usefulness of models in college. It seems no one taught them that only models that have been extensively verified with real empirical data are useful. Dang kidz these days.
Even models that have been verified with real data still have to be used carefully because you can always push models outside those areas in which they are known to be valid.
It wouldn’t matter so much if the MSM weren’t waiting outside like slavering dogs reprinting every crazy result like it’s the end of the world.
This ‘study’ is yet another fine example of GIGO: garbage in/garbage out.
As for the ‘dust’ and other things, during Ice Ages, there is lots and lots of dust and droughts due to water being locked up in ice glaciers and a colder planet and colder oceans leads to less humidity. This is painfully obvious and totally ignored by these computer game playing ‘scientists’.
“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
~ Prof. Chris Folland ~ (Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research)
We can rest easy now. Global warming is its own cure.
It’s impressive that you can couple failed models and extract a meaningful conclusion.
2 wrongs make a right.
2wrongs in NOAA Climate science makes the next intramural grant application
Let us see. Warmer means higher absolute humidity. What happens to all the increased moisture? Willis notes that thermal changes act quickly to regulate both temperature and humidity, and ignore the vagaries of CO2 variation.
This modeling exercise reminds me of studies in economics, where we looked at changing a variable with the proviso that “everything else remains unchanged.” It’s no wonder that our economic analyses were worth nothing. “He who controls the assumptions controls the outcomes.”
I live in a region of Canada where the swing between a summer high of 35C and a winter low of -35C is common.
On summer days you can see the moisture in the air compared to winter days.
Why is this a surprise to UC Riverside?
They don’t get out much !!
I like to say the humidity is so thick you can cut it with a knife. You don’t know hot until you get a 100 degree day (38C) with a dew point of 60 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. With that much water in the air, the haze is thick and it is sometimes harder to breathe. I’ve had to work outside on a roof in that heat. I didn’t mind it.
Contaminants in the air cause haze, humidity by itself does not.
Here in Florida, and in much of the tropics, the air is as clear as can be…white clouds down to the horizon most days…you can sometimes see the tops of storms that are nearly two hundred miles away.
Seeing clearly through 100 miles of air is common here…a near daily occurrence.
And the dew point is way up into the mid to upper seventies every single day from May until October.
“On summer days you can see the moisture in the air compared to winter days.
Why is this a surprise to UC Riverside?”
It never rains in California. Girl, di’n’t they warn you?
These guys live in the Lost Angeles basin where it is always warm and dry and they live there because it is warm and dry and everyone just wants a little bit of rain and only at night, none of this ‘snow/ice’ every winter like we get in the northern states.
“Aerosols will increase, unless they don’t, in which case you can’t blame us because we hedged the language so much it means practically nothing. Thanks for the grant money.”
“Allen was joined in the research by William Landuyt at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering, NJ; and Steven T. Rumbold at the University of Reading, the United Kingdom.”
This must be a different Exxon than the one the dirt-worshipping lefties are trying to RICO. Otherwise, that would rather embarrassing.
GIGO ……. Garbage in , garbage out !
Marcus! I have told you before.
Format your output into a database and build some B+ tree indexes. Then pipe it through a graphics enhancer, and finally put on some nice lipstick as a finishing touch.
This way, your output is nicely formatted, sorted, has pretty, enhanced graphics, and is cute.
Your Welcome.
Always be careful not to wear out your welcome, or succumb to a fugitive apostrophe.
Wouldn’t more aerosols mean more clouds from cosmic ray interaction , thus, lowering global temperature ????
Marcus: technically, no. The CCN are formed by GCR’s. In this case the CCN are in the form of particulates so the two mechanisms run in parallel. So there would be additional cooling but in the way you suggest. Water vapour would condense on the additional particles which would have (and already do have) two causes.
So warming increases aerosols, which aren’t removed because the warming inhibits rain. Since the aerosols aren’t reduced by rain, they cause a reduced absorption and retention of heat, leading to overall cooling, which allows water vapor to condense and become rain, which removes the aerosols … sounds like a system seeking equilibrium to this amateur …
What happened to evaporation ????
what happened to the enhanced heavy precipitation that washes out the air?
You’re not supposed to be logical and screw up the theories that the nice climate modelers have predicted.
Their more precipitation / less precipitation reminds me of this study ranking US cities –
http://stories.weather.com/disruptionindex – Climate Disruption Index.
Both Mann and Hayhoe have speaking parts.
Part of the listing.
25. Newark, New Jersey
23. Madison, Wisconsin
22. Lincoln, Nebraska
18. Milwaukee, Wisconsin
13. Portland, Oregon
10. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
8. St. Paul, Minnesota
** 5. Kansas City, Missouri
2. Minneapolis, Minnesota
What do these cities have in common? They will all soon be affected by CO2 induced – extreme drought / precipitation
** Kansas City, Missouri gets both and extreme flooding too. Lucky them.
But not sure how global this is as you look at the rankings.
8. St. Paul, Minnesota Population: 294,873
St. Paul is the first city on our list to be significantly impacted by extreme future drought. “We expect dry places to get drier, wet places to get wetter,” Easterling said. Extreme precipitation will also likely increase, earning this city spot 8 on the list.
2. Minneapolis, Minnesota Population: 400,070
Minneapolis could get pummeled from a lot of different angles, making it number 2 on our list. The city itself will be a good deal hotter than rural places close by. It has seen precipitation increase by almost 40 percent since 1958, a trend expected to continue. Drought here will also continue to worsen.
Notice the different affect shown and ranked position. Written and Designed by: Michele Berger, she needs to get out a little more and realize they are called the Twin Cities because they are 8 miles downtown to downtown. I thought CO2 was a global gas.
“The surprising finding is the consistency of the increase in aerosols over all the different models,” Allen said. “We associate this increase in aerosols to a decrease in aerosol wet removal, the primary removal mechanism, which is driven by a decrease in large-scale precipitation over land–particularly during the Northern Hemisphere summer months of June-July-August.”
At some point in time in the distant future, we might be living in a climate as bad as the 1930’s.
Error is correlated across models. It’s not surprising at all that there’s consistency over all the different models. They all make the same mistakes.
The surprising finding is…….that all of this is possible without increasing the temperature
It be interesting to see a graph of smog in various cities correlated by that city’s average annual temperature.
Oh, wait, that’d be real life that would being studied to answer the question if warmer temps would cause a net increase in particulates.
Never mind.
It’d*
Smog is wind related. When the wind blows hard, all smog created by cities moves away. When the wind stops, the pollution stays. All these ‘studies’ are insanely stupid and determinedly childish.
Specifically, the team is interested in investigating why models project a decrease in large-scale precipitation in the Northern Hemisphere during June-July-August.
Good god, they’re computer programs, they do what they are programmed to do! Have we so lost touch with reality that we now understand computer models to be a reality unto themselves that may be studied without reference to the computer programs from which they are comprised? We don’t study the code to see how it works, we study the output on the assumption that it models reality? How did these models become reality? Magic?
Arthur C Clarke would bust a gut laughing. Science has become indistinguishable from magic.
+1
I think they know what the code lines do – software engineers usually know – but what the modelled climate does is a separate thing. It is convenient for them their science is based on the model output, so it remains true in its own reality.
The models are sentient now. They’re mostly underwater and only come up now and then for minority reports.
You are making the assumption that any software engineer has ever been anywhere near the model. I have the modelE1_pub source code on my machine. Roughly 130 000 lines of Fortran in roughly 130 files. It’s actually pretty amazing the number of parameters they have thought to include and the amount of work that must have gone into it. The code is a lot cleaner than the code in the ClimateGate dump (I have that code too), but it shows the scars of history, and I am still of the opinion that building a credible model requires *at least* physicists, numerical analysts (rather than references to ‘Numerical Recipes’), and skilled software engineers, not to mention a lot of testing. This kind of stuff is really challenging to write and harder to test, and if you think
!@param Z1I thickness of first layer ice (m)
REAL*8, PARAMETER :: Z1I = .1d0
(actual code from modelE1_pub) is a good way to name something, you’re certainly not making it any easier. This is two models I’ve seen that don’t *look* as if any software engineers were involved; surely there is enough grant money to pay for a few? I would really love to see some of these programs reviewed by professional software engineers. Better still, I’d like to see their test suites and procedures so reviewed.
I didn’t say they all are professional as you usually think professionalism. Many software engineers are not very professional.
The good news – Models show that increased CO2 and temperatures will make all backyards worldwide, suitable for growing a family money tree.
As I recall, a previous paper by Dr. Robert Allen showed cloud cover had a NEGATIVE 21 watts/M^2 on earth’s energy budget, which is more than an order of magnitude above CO2’s gross forcing of just 1.9 watts/M^2 (pre-industrial levels of 280ppm to present day 400ppm)…
An increase in airborne particulates would increase cloud seeds and cause cloud cover to increase, which would have a cooling feedback effect from increased albedo…
Any additional CO2 induced warming would also increase ocean evaporation, which would also increase cloud cover and act as another negative cloud feedback.
It seems counterintuitive that increased airborne particulates would lead to enhanced manmade global warming.
“The researchers analyzed the ACCMIP and CMIP5 data bases, using model experiments with fixed aerosol emissions (based on the year 2000), but different climates–one based on 2000, the other based on 2100…” Yes, use that data set we collected back in 2100. (why will none of these researchers admit to using modeled inputs?)
Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer
Those days of soda and pretzels and beer
Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer
Dust off the sun and moon and sing a song of cheer…
Songwriters: TOBIAS/BRADTKE/CARSTE)
“Using a suite of computer models,”…
Ho hum.
So much for the hope of solar power, which greatly prefers direct lighting. More indirect lighting, more times like when it’s the peak of summer yet solar panels yield practically nothing during weeks on end of persistent haze.
And how many steady breezes are available for wind turbines on hazy days to replace the lost electricity?
Maybe there will still be some un-hazy bone-dry desert areas where they can erect some more unqualified solar successes like Ivanpah…
I for one do not care for the lives or deaths of Allen and his team of Ejaculate Conceptions. Ha ha
I wonder if they used the Lewis/Curry or even the Otto et al. model? #B^)
“…most aerosol species…”
I always thought that the term ‘species’ was reserved for living organisms. So aerosols reproduce?
“Species” is the correct term. There are classic formations of aerosols and classic elemental compositions. When they are seen and recognised, they are categorised correctly.
The idea that they are all equally toxic is of course baseless and against common knowledge.
One of the most toxic airborne substances known is platinum. Platinum mines and processing rooms have extremely tight worker exposure conditions. One a person is dosed, they survived but are sensitised, not inoculated. They can never be exposed to platinum again of they die from the reaction.
Methinks someone has waaaaay too much time on their hands….
(At UC, that is.)
Solar Dimming made the world cooler during 1950-1980.
Solar Brightening made it warmer during 1980-2000
The sun covered in haze is no more a problem in the developed world, but in China.
(Wild 2012 has more on this)
Clean air act has a function.
No assumptions, please. The major air pollution zones are Indonesia and India,. China is usually much cleaner than both.
North-western Indonesia, through its peatland burning, emits more CO2 than the whole USA.
The alarmist rhetoric is reaching a fever tipping-point. Wouldn’t be anything to do with the Paris Panic-fest parfty, would it?
Talking about Paris, the futility of it all is well summed up on this post at Climate etc. Well worth a read, although one will be severely depressed that so little is achieved at so much expense. Why Politicians cannot see the madness of this escapes me (but then perhaps they are already mad).
http://judithcurry.com/2015/11/09/lomborg-impact-of-current-climate-proposals/#more-20393
Allen and his team found their results using a multi-model data set: the Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Model Intercomparison Project (ACCMIP), which is supplemented with the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project version 5 (CMIP5). The researchers analyzed the ACCMIP and CMIP5 data bases, using model experiments with fixed aerosol emissions (based on the year 2000), but different climates–one based on 2000, the other based on 2100, with the difference of the two experiments indicating the aerosol response to GHG induced warming.
The researchers also conducted similarly designed experiments using the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) versions 4 and 5. Results from these models showed that even when emissions are held fixed, GHG-induced warming by 2100 drives an increase in aerosol burden and elevated concentrations of aerosol species on the Earth’s surface.
Models all the way down. Computer games. Enough said.