A new modeling study from NASA confirms that when tiny air pollution particles we commonly call soot – also known as black carbon – travel along wind currents from densely populated south Asian cities and accumulate over a climate hotspot called the Tibetan Plateau, the result may be anything but inconsequential.
In fact, the new research, by NASA’s William Lau and collaborators, reinforces with detailed numerical analysis what earlier studies suggest: that soot and dust contribute as much (or more) to atmospheric warming in the Himalayas as greenhouse gases. This warming fuels the melting of glaciers and could threaten fresh water resources in a region that is home to more than a billion people.
Lau explored the causes of rapid melting, which occurs primarily in the western Tibetan Plateau, beginning each year in April and extending through early fall. The brisk melting coincides with the time when concentrations of aerosols like soot and dust transported from places like India and Nepal are most dense in the atmosphere.
“Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally,” said William Lau, head of atmospheric sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Based on the differences it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in this region. There’s a localized phenomenon at play.”
He has produced new evidence suggesting that an “elevated heat pump” process is fueling the loss of ice, driven by airborne dust and soot particles absorbing the sun’s heat and warming the local atmosphere and land surface. A related modeling study by Lau and colleagues has been submitted to Environmental Research Letters for publication.
A unique landscape plays supporting actor in the melting drama. The Himalayas, which dominate the plateau region, are the source of meltwater for many of Asia’s most important rivers—the Ganges and Indus in India, the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh, the Salween through China, Thailand and Burma, the Mekong across Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, and the Yellow and Yangtze rivers in China. When fossil fuels are burned without enough oxygen to complete combustion, one of the byproducts is black carbon, an aerosol that absorbs solar radiation (Most classes of aerosols typically reflect incoming sunlight, causing a cooling effect). Rising populations in Asia, industrial and agricultural burning, and vehicle exhaust have thickened concentrations of black carbon in the air.
Sooty black carbon travels east along wind currents latched to dust – its agent of transport – and become trapped in the air against Himalayan foothills. The particles’ dark color absorbs solar radiation, creating a layer of warm air from the surface that rises to higher altitudes above the mountain ranges to become a major catalyst of glacier and snow melt.
- CLICK TO VIEW ANIMATION – Tiny, dark-colored aerosols — specifically black carbon — travel along wind currents from Asian cities and accumulate over the Tibetan Plateau and Himalayan foothills. Seen here as a light brown mass, these brown clouds of soot absorb sunlight, creating a layer of warm air (seen in orange) that rises to higher altitudes, amplifying the melting of glaciers and snow. Credit: NASA/Sally Bensusen Nicknamed the “Third Pole”, the region in fact holds the third largest amount of stored water on the planet beyond the North and South Poles. But since the early 1960s, the acreage covered by Himalayan glaciers has declined by over 20 percent. Some Himalayan glaciers are melting so rapidly, some scientists postulate, that they may vanish by mid-century if trends persist. Climatologists have generally blamed the build-up of greenhouse gases for the retreat, but Lau’s work suggests that may not be the complete story.
Building on work by Veerabhardran Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego, Calif., Lau and colleagues conducted modeling experiments that simulated the movement of air masses in the region from 2000 to 2007. They also made detailed numerical analyses of how soot particles and other aerosols absorb heat from the sun.
“Field campaigns with ground observations are already underway with more planned to test Lau’s modeling results,” said Hal Maring who manages the Radiation Sciences program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “But even at this stage we should be compelled to take notice.”
“Airborne particles have a much shorter atmospheric lifespan than greenhouse gases,” continued Maring. “So reducing particle emissions can have much more rapid impact on warming.”
“The science suggests that we’ve got to better monitor the flue on our ‘rooftop to the world,” said Lau. “We need to add another topic to the climate dialogue.”
h/t to Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.
Related Links:
> The Dark Side of Carbon: Will Black Carbon Siphon Asia’s Drinking Water Away?
> Soot is Key Player in Himalayan Warming, Looming Water Woes in Asia
> Asian Summer Monsoon Stirred by Dust in the Wind
> A Unique Geography — and Soot and Dust — Conspire Against Himalayan Glaciers
Gretchen Cook-Anderson
NASA Earth Science News Team
The one for China is behind a Med journal paywall.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/news-bbc-article-himalayan-glaciers-melting-deadline-a-mistake/
So there is a warming but the glaciers does not melt?
Hmm…
@ur momisugly George
“Various policies appear plausible : one is to furnish families in developing countries with better cooking appliances. Another is strengthening controls on diesel emissions, and a third would be to reduce wild fires by better management of the countryside.”
Sticking to India just for now,far too many folks there have been passed over by the new prosperity in that country and cook using nothing more sophisticated than dried dung so anything has to be an improvement.
Control on diesel emissions sounds reasonable until you actually see what is been driven, the owners make parts for some of the ancient wrecks that would be a criminal offense to have on the road in the “developed world ” Bill mentioned a figure of $250 dollars for cleaning up the exhaust, that is beyond the yearly income of most Indians.But it would be a much cheaper and positive way of cleaning up that locality than giving billions to African despots as is be proposed by the UN .Send them all our old trucks and get the place cleaned up,meanwhile stimulating the motor industry in the USA and Great Britain
rbateman (11:00:23) :
Put the smoke through a water bath trap. How hard it that?
Is that called “a bong”????
One solution is catylac converters on cars and scrubbers on all the coal plants and factories.
Here in the developed world both have been done so the factories here are just pumping out the plant food that is CO2 instead of that nasty soot.
One of the largest sources of both CO2 and soot is the bulldozing and burning of the Indonesian rainforest in order to create palm oil plantations. Palm oil is then sent to Europe for use as a “green” fuel. Indonesia is the 4th leading emitter of CO2 though not a heavily industrialized country.
Kyoto and now Cap and Trade encourage this type of shifting of CO2 emissions. It will take a hundred years or more of palm oil use to recoup the CO2 that is currently being released through deforestation.
A byproduct of this deforestation is the extinction in the wild of the orangutan and the Sumatran tiger. These magnificiant animals will be the first victims of “global warming” not the polar bear.
Aren’t those animations based on fluid dynamic computer models?
I agree with Pamela Gray (10:59:17) that there are much more dust in the air than soot. Wind storms and volcanoes bring much more dusts up in the atmosphere than all the diesel and coal emissions.
I would be critical of such finger-pointing as anthropogenic soot being the culprit when looking at the source of the research… I can see Hansen’s fingerprints all over this. The good news is… we don’t breath out soot.
Hmmmm…does this mean China should pay for the damages done to Tibet? ….. No … wait …they have occupied Tibet…
The “threatens fresh water resources in a region that is home to more than a billion people” claim is entirely false and reflects the ignorance of those who compiled the IPCC report where the claim originated and has been endlessly repeated from.
All Himalayan rivers are in flood from mid to late summer due to the Indian monsoon. Any reduction in flows from dissapeared glaciers would be a welcome relief to those annually suffer these often devastating floods.
In fact, melting and dissapeared glaciers would increase winter and especially spring runoff when Himalayan river levels are at their lowest, and any water shortages from low river levels would occur.
Now we’re talking real pollution.
The problem isn’t a global one, but a national/regional one. It is something that both India and China will find themselves forced to deal with as their economies grow and their people, no longer having to worry about just surviving, will demand the air be cleaned and pollution reined in – a quality of life issue.
So it is smog and soot from a quarter of the world’s human population living in India and Nepal – not CO2. Kiss cap-and-trade goodbye since it will do nothing about this.
Bob Moss (11:36:29) :
Exactly so!
The AGW ‘remedies’ remind me of medieaval medicine, where the cure usually killed the patient …
Just wanted to say sorry to the rest of the world for our idiot Prince Charles at Copenhagen today! And coming up, another idiot in the form of Hilary Benn (his father was an equal idiot). Mr Benn will sprout on and on about oceans becoming corrosive due to too much CO2. Again sorry.
Now THIS is a cause-and-effect relationship with climate worth considering. (Could this be what’s been happening in the arctic?)
Question is, will the Alarmists come out of their CO2 bunkers long enough to listen?
The problem is, that the REAL Scientists are saying something else.
According to Raina;
Himalayan glaciers: A state-of-art review of glacial studies, glacial retreat and climate change
You can download it here;
http://www.mtnforum.org/rs/ol/browse.cfm?tp=vd&docid=5408
Ive read the whole report.
Basically what he is saying, is that the glaciers are more or less showing that we are on our way out of the last ice age, and its very difficult to conclude anything. A totally different story than the IPCC numbers.
So, where did these IPCC-types get their stuff from again?
A plot on a Personal Computer? Do I smell something rotten again?
We can blame India and China for the melting glaciers and get them to pay us (The USA) for damages. Those creeps are causing our drought in California and destroying my skiing ! Pay up ! Refrigeration coils under all those ski slopes is going to be pricey. That solves the debt crisis. China and India and whomever else should be ashamed, but giving all their dollars back to us will save the planet and make everything hunky dory… I have charts to prove it. Trust me. Huh?
Most of the particulate pollution in India is from domestic cooking fires. A problem solvable by providing affordable electricity or bottled gas for cooking. A solution that would substantially improve the lives of many millions. However, the policies of the global warming advocates would actively prevent this solution.
India is absolutely right to resist any attempts to prevent their development, especially the provision of electricity and gas services to rural areas.
BTW, Bob Moss is right. The SE Asian Tiger will be the first major extinction from global warming due to the environmentally disasterous GW policies.
Incidentally, I have only ever seen one tiger in my life. It was dead beside a track running through one of the vast palm oil plantations in Malaysia. It was emaciated and had clearly starved to death.
The next media bogeyman has appeared.
Is this like the same kind of soot that from 1940 to 1975 caused a net cooling?
Just askin’.
Well, if 50 to 100 cities burning to the ground during WWII didn’t do that, I doubt anything we did after did. I figure that net cooling was mostly a negative PDO.
In any case, unlike CO2, soot is an easy fix.
How hold on a minute. A few years ago I thought the “Climate Modelers” said the had to increase the amount of aerosols to offset the lack of warming in their models to match observe data leaving one to believe that all aerosols have a cooling effect on temperatures. Who would have “thunk” that a solid particles would absorb both short and long wave radiation? I bet tax payers paid a bundle for that tidbit of information.
Bill Jamison (10:56:03) :
“This is an example of man-made climate change I can believe in! Fortunately it’s relatively cheap and easy to reverse. Too bad there isn’t more focus on fixing these types of problems instead of almost solely focusing on CO2 emissions.
A few years ago a UCI report said that up to 40% of the warming in the Arctic is due to black carbon, apparently most of it from China. If we can convince China to control pollution from diesel trucks we can greatly reduce the black carbon darkening the ice in the Arctic at a cost of about $250 per truck.”
But that is too easy -we must hand the Chinese more reasons to pollute-like most of the West’s remaining industry….
“Industrial and agricultural burning, and vehicle exhaust have thickened concentrations of black carbon in the air. ”
Hmm, thickened. So what’s that in ppm please?
I think that this particular problem is and Indian/Pakistani one and nothing to do with China in that the soot is coming from the south? I doubt if this is a political issue and purely ,as many have observed here, a regional issue caused by poverty and one that could be tackled without enslaving us as the Alarmistas seem to want/
Anyone else detect a shift in NASA’s focus here?
Ooops, co2 is busted. On to the next scare.
It’s a gish gallop.
” Jerry (11:20:50) :
By “black carbon” I assume they really mean “carbon black” correct?
I don’t know why things are so dumbed-down these days. ”
No, no. It’s to distinguish it from the other form of carbon. Usually called diamond.
(OK, there’s graphite as well, but that’s blackish.)
And, of course, calling it ‘soot’ doesn’t have the evil connotation associated with the word ‘carbon’.
Same scam as ‘the oceans are becoming more acid’. They’re not. At most slightly less alkaline, and still with a pH above 7. But ‘acid’ is eeeeevil.