Via Roger Pielke Senior’s new and improved Climate Science Blog:
Kiminori Itoh of Yokohama National University has prepared a guest weblog for us. It is titled:
“Soot And The Arctic Ice – A Win-Win Policy Based On Chinese Coal Fired Power Plants”.
As you saw in a recent weblog in Climate Science, China appears to be modifying the global climate through aerosol emission from a large number of coal fired power plants: August 12, 2009, New Paper “Increase In Background Stratospheric Aerosol Observed With Lidar” By Hofmann Et Al 2009. This paper gave me an idea that soot from China may be responsible for the recent reduction of the Arctic ice, which finally leads me to a Win-Win policy on coal fired power plants in China, as you see below.
The target of the paper of Hofmann et al was sulfate aerosol transported into stratosphere. Thus, its main effect on the global climate is cooling of the troposphere and warming of the stratosphere similar to volcanic eruptions. In fact, this paper was introduced in Science (24 July 2009, p. 373) with the title of “China’s Human Volcano.”
The Chinese aerosol, however, can have another effect on the climate. That is, a possible influence of soot on the Arctic ice. It seems to me that Hofmann et al.’s paper, together with other recent findings, gives evidence for this possibility as follows:
1) Hofmann et al’s paper shows that stratospheric haze became densest in 2007 and declined a little after that. According to their claim, this is associated with the changes in sulfate emissions from China. This fact reminds me that the ice extent in the Arctic sea was significantly reduced in the 2007 summer and recovered after that. Since the amount soot should be proportional to that of sulfate, also the amount soot transported to the Arctic may have a peak in 2007, and may explain the dramatic reduction of the sea ice extent; the soot deposited onto the ice surfaces absorbs sun light of Arctic summer, gives heat to the ice, and lets it melt. This process should be particularly effective during summer of the Arctic when the sun does not set.
2) About half of the recent temperature increase in the Arctic region is reportedly due to aerosols (combination effects of sulfate and soot) (D. Shindell and G. Faluvegi, Nature Geosci. 2, 294-300 (2009)); this result convinces one that the influence of soot on the Arctic environment does exist.
3) There are other recent papers on soot: e. g., “Atmospheric brown clouds: Hemispherical and regional variations in long-range transport, absorption, and radiative forcing,” V. Ramanathan et al., J. Geophys. Res. vol. 112, D22S21, doi:10.1029/2006JD008124, 2007.
From these results, I suspect that the soot from China is responsible for the recent reduction of sea ice in the Arctic summer. To verify this, detailed chemical analyses, such as carbon allotropes, should be made if the soot can be sampled from the ice (this may be an interesting project).
Thus, I can claim that the influence of the soot is likely large. Then, according to the spirit of the precautionary principle, the soot from China should be reduced even if the scientific basis is not sufficient. The precautionary principle should be applied not just to CO2, but to other primary factors of climate changes. If this is not possible just because there is no statement on soot in the FCCC (Framework of Convention of Climate Change), we need another convention (or protocol) which enables us to treat soot properly. Otherwise, countermeasures on climate change will be useless.
Now, I want to point out that the reduction of the Chinese soot can become a Win-Win policy for China as well as for other countries. About 80% of the Chinese electricity comes from coal fired power plants. The CO2 emission from China in 2004 was about 2.27 billion metric tons, which was 8.6% of the world emissions (26.3 billion metric tons). But, their efficiency of energy production is still low (34.6% as an average), and emissions other than CO2 and aerosol (i. e., mainly SOx, NOx and mercury) bring heavy health problems as well. In fact, resultant atmospheric pollution causes 300 thousands to 400 thousands of deaths a year.
If countries like Japan, which has advanced technologies of coal fired power plants (e. g., energy production efficiency being 41.1% in Japan), can cooperate with China to increase the efficiency of energy production and to decrease all kinds of emissions, this will become a true Win-Win policy. China can save a lot of human lives and working hours, can reduce the influence of the aerosol on the global climate, and in addition, can reduce CO2 emission. The other countries also benefit from this policy, including economical ones and a reduction of transboundary pollution.
This Win-Win policy actually will reduce the emission of CO2. Just from this aspect, it is much better than the cap-and-trade policy which in fact will increase the CO2 emissions. Moreover, and importantly, when considering a large capacity of coal reserves, this is a reasonable tactics in near future.
With this kind of Win-Win policies, developing countries like China can agree with developed countries on their energy policies. There will be no progress in the negotiation between them if the developing countries can participate in the climate policies only through the reduction of CO2. We need flexible approaches for complicated issues like the climate changes.
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Here is an experiment that shows how soot is likely affecting the Arctic ice:
http://global-warming.accuweather.com/2008/04/a_simple_experiment_1.html
See, this makes sense. Soot is actually harmful whether it causes warming or not-and it can be substantially reduced with technology and not energy rationing. Win-win? Absolutely.
Secretary Clinton should immediately start negotiations with China but it is doubtful that the Obama administration would approve as they believe CO2 is the path to control. Of course we should also be investing in this technology but the U.S. is stymied by the Obama idea to drive coal from our energy future.
TerryBixler (16:32:47) : SO2 scrubbers already take care of most of our soot. It isn’t our issue, it’s an issue for places like Eastern Europe (brown coal anyone?) China, India, and Africa.
A most worthwhile post. I couldn’t emphasise enough the need to better understand the effects of soot on climate, and especially these effects at the higher latitudes.
Best regards, suricat.
This article brings several thoughts to mind:
1. I read in the news recently that China is building so many coal-fired plants partly to replace old, inefficient, more-polluting power plants with modern ones.
2. Westerners who block the construction of new domestic coal power plants are probably (unintentionally) extending the working life of older less efficient coal-burning installations.
3. I remember reading some time ago on RealClimate that the tropical troposphere “hot spot” could be the signature of either “greenhouse gas” (GHG) warming or solar warming, but a cooling stratosphere signified GHG warming–and the stratosphere is cooling. Kiminori Itoh seems to be saying that the stratosphere is warming?
Note: I take everything on RealClimate with a pinch of salt.
Were it a large issue, the increasing Chinese soot should be continuing to give lower and lower minimum ice extents. Instead, we see the short term trend of Arctic Ice recovering. Is the soot effect analogous in this way to the CO2 effect: CO2 is too weak a greenhouse gas to keep the earth warm when it decides to cool, and soot is too weak a melting agent to continue melting ice when the Arctic decides to freeze up.
Both of these decisions made by the oceanic oscillations and other natural cycles, perhaps ultimately decided by the sun.
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What a brilliant proposal by Professor Kiminori Itoh-san. This is what “caring for Earth’s environment and its people” used to be like; this proposal represents the values that all environmental organizations that my family contributed to over the years believed and advertised — until they were taken over by religious zealots and marxists.
Thanks for posting this, Anthony, and thanks to Mike Smith for a clear experiment with soot and albedo. Let the religious zealots go back to church and leave Earth alone, and let the marxists go back to Russia and China. Oh, woops! R and C no longer practice marxism because it failed to make them productive and creative. It is now left to the suckers who are too ignorant to understand its crushing effect on the human mind, spirit, and inventiveness. (And this does not mean that I am against government activity and intervention — in its proper place.)
This is a very worthwhile approach, but don’t just stop at coal-fired power. Also look at diesel.
When China has power shortages (as in 2004) its factories turn to their backup diesel generators. These are inefficient, expensive to run, and very polluting, but they do have the advantage that they are on-site, so the factory’s operation can’t be affected by electricity rationing, as it would be if it was depending on the local grid.
I have seen the effect of this in Hong Kong, which is just across the border from Guangdong, one of China’s manufacturing bases. There are lots of other things going on – e.g. Hong Kong’s own efforts to control vehicle pollution, Guangdong’s move up the value chain to less polluting manufacturing – and this is purely anecdotal – my personal experience of looking out of the window in 2004/2005 and thinking that the air was terrible and this was no place to raise children.
However, what I can say – again purely anecdotally – is that the air improved shortly thereafter, and those improvements seemed to coincide with China sorting out its power shortages. Those power shortages ended by China getting more big coal-fired power stations online, so that factories could moth-ball their diesel generators.
There is no question that soot has local/regional dangerous affects. I am not so sure about its affect on Arctic ice. Do the Greenland ice cores demonstrate contamination with soot? The other consideration is that there is no long term ice in the Arctic. Soot or not, it all melts eventually and gets recycled. Show me layers of soot in the multi-year ice. Than we should talk. To me, the people of China are the ones that should be demonstrating against the Chinese government for all the city pollution they inhale into their lungs.
Re: timetochooseagain. Most US coal electric plants don’t have scrubbers, they just use low sulfur coal. Soot is controlled by using Particulate Collectors.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat5p2.html
Durn. Just when it seemed that common sense had departed the earth forever. Gotta stop forecasting.
How about the Chinese selling US treasury bonds to pay for their carbon print?
Would you like it?
Joel Upchurch (17:12:40) :
Most US coal electric plants don’t have scrubbers
I´m sure you know how SO2 or CO2 is scrubbed, it is REALLY FUNNY:
To do it you wash gases with Milk of Lima, and that means calcining lime (Calcium Carbonate-chalk-) using fossil fuels to decompos it in CaO and CO2…just nuts!
Better suggest all those green crazy folks to stop fooling around, they are about to achieve the destruction of the biggest and most (up to now) admired country in the world. They, believe me, will be more effective than all Jihadist taken together.
I tell you once and again this, because I grew up believing in all what america represented for the world, since the days of WWII. Don´t throw all that to the sewage!
Joel Upchurch (17:12:40) : That’s what I, uh, meant to say.
Well, I know that we used some kind of thing like that. The point is, we have solved our soot issues-technologically-if China could afford to, they could to.
Soot might have been a factor, but it does not obviate the wind patterns that summer blowing much sea ice to lower latitudes, a bolus of warm water pumped into the Arctic basin by the NAO, and even some submarine volcanic activity and hot water plumes. It is handy to look at soot, but, as the solar intensity at the peak of summer is only 3%, and less or zero the rests of the year, this may be a small factor. Warm water floating under the ice would be a very efficient melting effect and ice leaving the area is very effective.
Except reducing soot is not win-win. It is win-lose. The earth is cooling, not warming, and the danger is cooling, not warming. If soot has been keeping the planet warmer than it would otherwise be then the evidence for natural cooling and the magnitude of natural cooling are even greater.
That makes soot on the northern hemisphere snow cover advantageous for its mitigating effect on cooling, even as it is bad for breathing. The best solution may be plants that can go from clean burning in the summer to sooty burning in the winter, as I discuss in this on my Error Theory blog (scroll down to “another freebie”).
The big problem in China isnt so much the coal plants, as the unscrubbed soot and sulfates coming from underground coal fires that have been raging for years. If the nations of the world made a concentrated effort to put out these coal seam fires, CO2 emissions, soot emissions, and sulfate emissions would be seriously decreased and we could reach kyoto goals without impacting the economy negatively
The arctic ice looks pretty white. I think any soot effect is greatly modified by snowfall in winter when there aren’t much in the way of southerly breezes and the jet stream is in the temperate zone. I, too, would like to see some of this sooty banding or analyses of ice cores.
It is correct that black carbon aerosols heat up the atmosphere when airborne, and cause warming and hence melting of ice when it falls on ice.
The main sources of black carbon are partial burning of most hydrocarbon material, such as crop residue burning; forest fires; residential burning of coal, wood, dung, what have you; diesel emissions, especially older diesels, on and off road; and industrial (hence relatively uncontrolled) burning of coal.
It was a real shock to me to find that power plants, even in India and China, emit virtually no black carbon (but create lots of sulfate through their emissions of sulfur dioxide).
Bond et al (2004), Table 15, shows that about 1 part per 8000 of black carbon emissions, worldwide, is from coal power plants, including China. Yes, this produces cognitive dissonance, but that’s what the research says.
We need to look at trends in other sources of black carbon from east Asia, to see how those trends fit with Arctic sea ice levels. It seems to me that there is a connection during the last 2 decades, but probably more to generally increased industrialization (more coal for steel making in China during this period) and traffic (lots more diesels) in China.
Here’s the Bond et al (2004) reference:
Bond, T.C. et al. “A technology-based global inventory of black and organic carbon emissions from combustion”, J. Geophys. Res. 2004, 109, D14203, doi:10.1029/2003JD003697.
You can google it and download the study free of charge; then just go to Table 15.
“To verify this, detailed chemical analyses, such as carbon allotropes, should be made if the soot can be sampled from the ice (this may be an interesting project).”
Sign me up! I can be packed and on my way in 20 minutes! I’ll even loan the use of my power post hole auger! One proviso; I get paid to fish, four hours a day. Dibs on the heated socks!
Years ago the US was out front on the technology of cleaning power plant emissions. If we had stayed on top of that technology instead of putting all our R&D funding into useless plans to bury CO2, which only succeeded in burying large amounts of dollars, we’d be positioned to recoup some of our massive trade deficit with China by selling them our tech and in the process doing more good for the environment than any CO2 sequestration scheme could hope to accomplish, even if any of them actually worked.
Did the Catlin expedition report any soot in the Arctic?
Alec Rawls (19:43:11) : “Except reducing soot is not win-win. It is win-lose. The earth is cooling, not warming, and the danger is cooling, not warming. If soot has been keeping the planet warmer than it would otherwise be then the evidence for natural cooling and the magnitude of natural cooling are even greater. ”
I may be wrong, but I don’t think soot is healthy anywhere, anytime. Better to have to deal with cooling than soot pollution. Ask the Chinese. So far a warmer ocean, especially in the higher latitudes, and winds affecting Arctic ice seem the strongest candidates for ice melt — perhaps also underwater volcanoes. Keep the studies coming; continue to lessen/control real pollution. I agree with Dave Wendt, “if we had stayed on top of that technology [cleaning power plant emissions] instead of putting all our R&D funding into useless plans to bury CO2….” Oh, my, what a bunch of idiots.
The soot factor is pretty significant in the Arctic and Subarctic. We’re looking at a most (90%) of the ice thinning of the past 150 years resulting from soot. Combined with ground-level ozone (also anthropogenic) the combined *OBSERVED* effect outweighs the modeled effect from CO2.
As for China, they are not the only culprit in the Arctic thaw, but because of trade winds and their dirty phase of industrialization, are the largest current contributor to Arctic and glacial ice loss.
As it travels, decreasing remnants of the Asian brown cloud ultimately causes many phenomena: Regional droughts, warming over the vast Indian and Pacific oceans, the US West Coast, glacier loss in the Rockies, marine storm seeding during winter (which in turn lofts the soot into the boreal and polar latitudes) and ultimately both atmospheric (brown cloud) and ice loss (darkened ice) toward the pole and even Greenland.
The good news is that soot is readily abated and has an atmospheric half life of 2 weeks. Total diesel emissions of soot are to be curtailed under legislation promoted by the Bush Administration. Ozone is less readily abated b/c it is associated with electric generation, but I suspect there may be a way to mitigate point source. Whether the advent of widespread electric car use poses a significant impact remains to be seen.