The Discovery Channel has “shark week”. With all the Arctic news items on WUWT, this is beginning to feel like “polar week”. Here’s an article about aerosols having an impact on the arctic from a surprising source.- Anthony
From Universe Today, Nancy Atkinson
Since the 1890s, surface temperatures on Earth have risen faster in the Arctic than in other regions of the world. Usually, discussions on global warming tend to focus on greenhouse gases as the culprit for the trend. But new NASA research suggests about half the atmospheric warming measured in the Arctic is due to airborne particles called aerosols.
Aerosols are emitted by both natural and human sources. They can influence climate by reflecting or absorbing sunlight. The particles also affect climate by changing cloud properties, such as reflectivity. There is one type of aerosol that, according to the study, [reduces] rather than increases in its emissions seem to have promoted warming.
The research team, led by climate scientist Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies used a computer model to investigate how sensitive different regional climates are to changes in levels of carbon dioxide, ozone, and aerosols.
They found that Earth’s middle and high latitudes are particularly responsive to changes in aerosol levels. The model suggests aerosols likely account for 45 % or more of the warming measured in the Arctic since 1976.
Though there are several types of aerosols, previous research indicates two in particular, sulfates and black carbon, play leading roles in climate. Both are products of human activity. Sulfates, which come mainly from the burning of coal and oil, scatter sunlight and cool the air. Over the past three decades, the United States and European countries have passed clean-air laws that have halved sulfate emissions.
The models showed that regions of Earth that showed the strongest responses to aerosols in the model are the same regions that have witnessed the greatest actual temperature increases since 1976, specifically the Arctic. However in the Antarctic, aerosols play less of a role.
Researchers with the NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported in the April 3 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters that Arctic summers may be ice-free in as few as 30 years.
The Arctic region has seen its surface air temperatures rise by 1.5 C (2.7 F) since the mid-1970s. In the Antarctic, surface air temperature has increased about 0.35 C (0.6 F). That makes sense, Shindell said, because the Arctic is near North America and Europe, highly industrialized regions that produce most of the world’s aerosols.
“In the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere and in the Arctic, the impact of aerosols is just as strong as that of the greenhouse gases,” said Shindell. “We will have very little leverage over climate in the next couple of decades if we’re just looking at carbon dioxide. If we want to try to stop the Arctic summer sea ice from melting completely over the next few decades, we’re much better off looking at aerosols and ozone.”
Aerosols tend to be short lived, staying in the atmosphere for just days or weeks, whereas greenhouses gases can persist for centuries. Atmospheric chemists thus think the climate may respond most quickly to changes in aerosol levels.
NASA’s upcoming Glory satellite is designed to enhance current aerosol measurement capabilities to help scientists reduce uncertainties about aerosols by measuring the distribution and properties of the particles.
“White House Science Advisor Holdren suggests “climate engineering with particulates”
“NASA GISS suggests [that the lack of] aerosols play a large role in Arctic warming”
I see a connection, but why would the elites pursue this line of reasoning? Are they saying that Greenpeace and other clean air advocates are to blame for Arctic warming?
How strange.
–Mike Ramsey
Maybe the Chinese said shut up about the Global Warming
thingy or we’ll call in our debt!
Sorry, “Climate Change”…..I panicked!
I am not certain which way arctic temperatures are pushed by aerosols. To help confuse maters more we might note the following. The 1960 brought us the beginnings of the serious US-Soviet cold war with massive amounts of soot spewing intercontinental bombers on patrol over the ice packs. Then in 1990 the former Soviet Union began the permitting process to allow commercial air traffic to cross their territory (and the polar regions). This led to a burgeoning traffic increase by 2000. Red herring or smoking afterburners, you decide!
This is also silly, there is NEITHER ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING NOR ANTHROPOGbornENIC GLOBAL COOLING PRODUCED BY AEROSOLS
Watch this picture:
http://www.igp.gob.pe/vulcanologia/Principal/Html/VolcanLadoSur-ImagSatelital-Grande.htm
Do you see any humans down there?…WE ARE TOO LITTLE AND TOO FEW TO CAUSE ANY DETECTABLE CHANGE
I will tell you: You see in the picture several VOLCANOES around a name AREQUIPA, well that is a CITY with a million and a half inhabitants.
Does anybody can think, if not crazy, that those tiny “MOLDS” which grow and die down there can really compete in producing MORE aerosols or whatsoever compared with those gigantic volcanoes?
Back to earth you fool NEW AGE scientists!
Talking about aerosols:
Tambora eruption, 194 years ago:
http://scienceblogs.com/eruptions/2009/04/194_years_since_the_great_tamb.php
Sulphates induce cooling by providing a nucleus for water to condense around and form clouds. The top layer of a tropospheric cloud is quite white and reflects inbound radiation in both the visible and infrared. It will not come as a surprise that when this happens, the area underneath the cloud gets cooler. Decrease sulphates, and you decrease the amount of reflected energy. Incoming ionizing radiation also helps to catalyze the formation of these sulphate particles since the sulphates form a rather ionic compound; either sulphurus acid or sulphuric acid when they react with water vapor in the air.
Farmer Steve
You are one of the few who understand what our framers tried to instill in this great country.
Anna V
The sayin is “the love of money is the root of all evil” and that saying is is untrue. The love of money is how wealth is created.
Add solar to the mix; less clouds over the Arctic allowing increased SW radiation contributed to the 2007 Arctic melt.
http://www.arm.gov/science/research/pdf/R00143.pdf
Reduced cloudiness and enhanced downwelling radiation are associated
with the unprecedented 2007 Arctic sea ice loss. Over the Western Arctic
Ocean, total summertime cloud cover estimated from spaceborne radar and
lidar data decreased by 16% from 2006 to 2007. The clearer skies led to
downwelling shortwave (longwave) radiative fluxes with increases of +32
Wm-2 (- 4 Wm-2) from 2006 to 2007. Over three months, simple calculations show that these radiation differences alone could enhance surface ice melt by 0.3 m, or warm the surface ocean by 2.4 K, which enhances basal ice
melt. Increased air temperatures and decreased relative humidity associated
with an anti-cyclonic atmospheric circulation pattern explain the reduced
cloudiness. Longer-term observations show that the 2007 cloudiness is
anomalous in the recent past, but is not unprecedented. Thus, in a warmer
world with thinner ice, natural summertime circulation and cloud variability is
an increasingly important control on sea ice extent minima.
Satellite and ground-based observations show that decreased cloudi
Adolfo Giurfa (08:20:38) :
Does anybody can think, if not crazy, that those tiny “MOLDS” which grow and die down there can really compete in producing MORE aerosols or whatsoever compared with those gigantic volcanoes?
Back to earth you fool NEW AGE scientists!
There has always been an inescapable scale problem
with this issue. Well done Adolfo!
Let them have thier aerosol theory. They can regulate aerosols and stuff some $$$ in their pockets, just like they did with FREON.
Just don’t let them perform Frankentstein/Mr. Hyde experiments on the atmosphere. And they can preserve Gore & Hansen in Acryllic and put them on display in their new church.
So the question is, who will be appointed Particle Czar?
Alan Chappell (01:49:50) :
Flanagan
I was under the impression that you resided in the Central African Republic, do you have a town called Brussels there? According to! # weather underground,# the average temp. for Brussels Europe over the last 7 days was 12.15c slightly BELLOW normal.
And here in the UK (even further north than the Brussels in Belgium) it has been pretty much the same.
Mind you, he has named himself after a 1970’s Charlton Athletic footballer so I think we should cut him some extra slack.
Soot from NH development is certainly in the game. But let us not forget also: “Dee planes, dee planes!”
Lots of planes flying through rather high latitudes on great circle routes in the NH. Almost none in the SH (other than the odd South Africa to New Zeeland flight).
One of the interesting things scanning thru this blog each day is reading various anecdotal comments about ‘the weather here in _____ is hot’ or ‘it’s been colder than average here in _______’. The temps/trends worldwide are so variable geographically, it just seems impossible that anyone could come up with an ‘average’ global temperature with any kind of accuracy whatsoever. It would require thousands upon thousands more strategically placed weather stations than we have. Instead the number is shrinking, and we’re relying on increasingly dubious software extrapolations.
It’s just insane.
It’s still true: garbage in/garbage out. The only change as we go along is that our “in” garbage quality is getting worse as we proceed, instead of better, and the quantity is being multiplied by software manipulations.
Jerry Haney (08:35:57) :
I was thinking of the song:
money is the root of all evil
money is the root of all evil
money is the root of all evil
take it away take it away take it away
It was in some musical I think
“”” Aerosols tend to be short lived, staying in the atmosphere for just days or weeks, whereas greenhouses gases can persist for centuries. Atmospheric chemists thus think the climate may respond most quickly to changes in aerosol levels. “””
Well a surface emitted Infra red photon takes a millisecond to go 300 km and clear the atmosphere into outer space.
So that is how long any sort of absorbing gHG, or scattering aerosol, also including water vapor and water droplets and ice crystals; need to be in the atmosphere for to get the job done of warming the atmosphere.
And note once again that this is a video game computer prediction.
Don’t these “scientists” have anything better to do with their time and budgets than to keep feeding these high school science class exercisesto us as if they are new Nobel Prize worthy discoveries.
We already know dust promotes cooling; aerosol is a fancy word for dust; like anthropogenic is a fancy word for man made.
The polar regions are supposed to warm faster than the equatorial regions, because the cooling efficiency is much higher in the tropics, and almost non existent at the poles.
It’s standard black body radiation and lookalikes theory. Hot things radiate more and cool faster; cold things radiate very little so don’t do much cooling at all.
If cold things cooled efficiently it would not have taken nearly so long to get to liquid helium. Instead it took a Herculean effort by Heike Kammerling Onnes to get that nearly last bit of thermal energy out.
And my tax dollars are being used to dredge up this juvenile “research.”
I’m with anna v on this. As soon as I saw that this study was done with a GCM (which is what I assume “computer model” refers to), I tuned out.
REPLY: Yes, but in the interest of maintaining a broad scope of discussion at WUWT, I chose to publish this. Why not tell us why? – Anthony
Bill Illis (06:12:21) :
Do we have any confidence in the GISS arctic temp data. I haven’t had the time to research this yet, but just some pieces and bits make me wonder. The most recent thing I’ve seen would raise some questions in my mind. In doing some research, I ran across “The Top of the World” by John L. Daly:
http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm
In that site are temp histories for Spitzbergen, Jan Mayer Island and Franz Josef Island dating back to the late 1950’s or earlier. Visually, there is no trend in temps for any of these locations. I think we can agree they are in the arctic. Were they not part of the GISS data base? Were these locations subject to different conditions than the rest of the wildly warming arctic?
60N-90N is NOT Arctic! Almost no region with Arctic climate is as far south as 60N. The southernmost latitude should rather be chosen as 65N or 67N, if yoy really are interested in Arctic temperatures. I suspect that if you do this, the temperatures nowadays would be almost the same as around 1940. By calling everything north of 60N Arctic, you can claim a warming since 1940. Was this the main reason for chosing 60N as the Southern limit?
And in the other end of the world, this diagram mixes Antarctica and Southern mid-latitudes. Why? For Antarctica only, there are essentially no data before 1958, and probably no warming since then either.
On another thread (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/09/was-2007-arctic-ice-really-a-historic-minimum/0 Ron de Haan gave this link:
http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm
There are a couple of graphs showing temperates at arctic rim weather stations which both show no temperature rises over an extended period, so on what data are the current NASA graphs based
Interestingly the references to the “steady state” graphs are to NASA (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/data/update/gistemp/station_data/) and following that link reveals that they are no longer available. Another set of inconvenient data removed from public view?
Basil (09:42:10) :
I’m with anna v on this. As soon as I saw that this study was done with a GCM (which is what I assume “computer model” refers to), I tuned out.
REPLY: Yes, but in the interest of maintaining a broad scope of discussion at WUWT, I chose to publish this. Why not tell us why? – Anthony
I found it interesting to see what GISS, the home of Dr. James E. Hansen, is putting out.
–Mike Ramsey
Peter Plail (09:52:14) :
I saw the same thing and forgot to give a hat tip to Ron de Haan. I’m as curious as you as to how these stations could be so different than the GISS data (or model?)
For anyone looking for some good information and education about the dynamics of the artic, this is a great site:
http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm
So NASA’s officially jumped the shark tank and have lost their last milligram of credibility. Prepare for the switching of gears to ozone depletion needing billions of green dollars we don’t have, for a non existent problem, using REAL pollution and then claiming they saved the planet. Niiice.
So remember folks to invest in those ozone credits, where you don’t have to go to the messy trouble of heating your home with oil. No no, we’ll shoot the particulate right up into the atmosphere for you, with a small tax to cover the cost of course.
I’ve already lived through this same lie back in the 70’s. This maybe worse then AGW rhetoric, more fraudulent and disastrous to more then your income if any of these wing nut ideas are implemented.
Okay. Here’s my thing. If aerosols only stay in the atmosphere a few weeks before they are washed out, how does that affect climate? Because according to the Warmists, climate should and can be stretched over hundreds of years. Plus, as the story indicates, NA and Europe have halved our aerosol output via Clean Air laws since 1986. What 1976, however, does strike me as is the year before the PDO flipped to its Warm mode. So of course the Northern Hemi is warming! Maybe aerosols have increased Arctic temps along with oceanic currents and other things, but they are hardly the mega-player in ‘climate change’ that this article seems to make them out to be. Of course, this is just my opinion.
Surprsing as it may sound, living somewhere leads to better knowledge of local events than looking at internet.
So, as I said, 24C today, 21 tomorrow, and the average temps for this time of the year is 13C. We never went below 16 since beginning of April. My source is the national weather institute…
http://www.meteo.be/meteo/view/en/211797-Forecasts+in+detail.html?newlanguage=true