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
Douglass DC
IIRC – a paper in Science on 10/30/09 showed that CO2 only contributes about 40-45% of GW. (Ironically, Gore pointed this out in a Newsweek interview about a month ago). The rest is methane (23%), halocarbons, soot (7%), volatile organics, etc. But Ramanathan and Long are saying that soot is a much bigger driver than this because the IPCC underestimated the amount of forcing from soot. So about 20% of the GW is from soot (black carbon).
In total soot generated by nation, China alone far exceeds the U.S. contribution with India a major player, and their contribution is climbing fast. The reason is that we put pollution controls on our coal- and oil-fired power plants to scrub out those pollutants and so we basically have not generated any increased soot volumes in a decade. Asian coal plants don’t have those scrubbers. And we don’t cook our food over soot-generating dung and wood in cramped huts.
What’s interesting here is that the onus to control emissions is starting to fall on China, India and Brazil. Blame for Himalayan glacier and Arctic ice melting is also shifting to Asia as the soot-generating culprit. They’ve been fouling their own nests. And all this is new information that wasn’t accurately accounted for in the IPCC 2007 report.
So we now have the following possible causes for what might be an increase of 1 Deg. F globally over the last century:
– Soot
– CO2
– Methane
– NO2
– SO2
– Ozone
– Halocarbons
– Volatile organics
– Water vapor/clouds
– Regional land use changes near thermometers
– Solar variations/sunspots
– UHI
– AMO
– PDO
– El Nino
– Recovery from the LIA
– Milankovitch Cycles
– Solar System planetary orbital variations
– Cosmic rays
– Volcanic activity
– Permafrost/peat
– Clathrates
– Leaking natural gas transmission lines
– Deforestation
– Poor temperature records
– Data fudging, manipulation or fabrication
– Lousy temperature data management
– Poor AGW theory
– Faulty computer models
– Global warming hysteria
– Political malfeasance
– Al Gore’s lifestyle
I’m sure I missed some possible contributors, but I think this list is a start.
“soot – black carbon”
any other colour on carbon out there?
Oops! Forgot to add:
– Natural variations about which we have no flippin’ knowledge
And good luck trying to divvy up that 1 Deg. F. between all these contributors with any level of scientific confidence or credibility.
CNN Sets Another BAD Ratings Milestone
CNN 4th For Week In Total Viewers For First Time Ever
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/15/cnn-4th-for-week-in-total_n_392942.html
I wonder why? Hmmm.
Isn’t there also a study or two out that attributes most of the ‘arctic meltdown’ to accumulation of soot (Black Carbon) as well?
And that ‘soot’ in South Asia comes not from cars and CO2 belching cement plants, but primarily from people burning wood (and horse/Cow dung) in their homes for heat and cooking.
The role of soot has been obvious for a long time, as has been the bent of the warmists to avoid it.
There was a scene on one of the older Nat Geo shows that showed how much the absorption of the under/over lying shades affected melt at the poles, but then, “surprisingly”, that subject got dropped.
I guess they figured out that this little bit of data pointed to someone other than evil western civilization.
As Emily Littela said, “Violins? Oh that’s different. Nevermind.”
George @ur momisugly 11:00:17
Controlling wildfires has huge downsides. Just look at British Columbia. The Pine beetle has destroyed Hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. A big part of the problem was the fire suppression in the last century. The pines got too old and were not able to fight off this attack. Yes we had warmer winters for a while, but fire is just as valuable of a control on bugs/diseases in trees as cold.
Jeremy,
Good point. Soot alone kills about 500,000 – 1,500,000 people per year.
(And add “carbon monoxide” to the list of contributors of the historic temperature rise.)
We will accept this new script for the armageddon movie if you remove CO2 totally from it.
Up to 40% of the airborne pollution on the U.S./Canadian West Coast comes straight from China. And it will only get worse: click
But China [and India] insist that air pollution must be measured on a per-capita basis. This is wrong. There are over 1.3 billion Chinese. Dividing their air pollution emissions by 1,300,000,000 allows them to keep emitting as much soot, etc. as they want, based on per-capita statistical nonsense.
There is only one atmosphere, and that is how the problem of air pollution must be approached. China already puts much more pollution into the atmosphere than the U.S., or any other country for that matter. [click] They are building 2 – 4 new coal-fired power plants every week. None of them use stack scrubbers, which remove 99.9% of particulates.
China is a developing country, but they are no longer dirt poor. They have close to a trillion dollars saved up from selling trinkets and clothing to America, and they have plenty of money from other countries, too. They can afford to start to control their particulate emissions.
The West must insist that the developing countries stop the per-capita talk. There is only one atmosphere, and we all share it. The U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England and Europe have done their part. The U.S. is actually a net “carbon” sink [CO2 absorber]. Singapore and Japan are among the cleanest countries on Earth. So cleaning up pollution can be done, and the technology, developed by the West, is available free to China and other gross particulate emitters.
China, India and other air polluting countries have the means to dramatically reduce their huge air pollution emissions. But they lack the will — and they will continue to lack the will to clean up after themselves as long as they think we might pay for it.
The sooner it is made clear to those countries that they must clean up their own mess without free money from the West, the sooner they will get serious about it.
Add “agricultural tillage practices” and “forest fires” to the list. Sheesh!
Andrew Parker
I referred to Ramanathan who did a neat experiment recently with a fleet of little unmanned aerial vehicles (drones). He flew them through the brown clouds downwind of Asia and at different elevations. He found that the brown clouds were heating up the atmosphere rather than reflecting heat back into space. That’s sort of counterintuitive and so surprised a lot of people, I think.
We are made of carbon and water. Carbon heals wounds. …
Let’s begin practicing SOOT DENIAL ☺
nominal (12:41:21) :
see if you can get a sample of that purple stuff that’s swallowing up the globe for analysis
So long as it is not Posleen I’ll give a try.
Climategate: the lawyers move in – those scientists are toast!
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100019956/climategate-the-lawyers-move-in-those-scientists-are-toast/
Here’s a better look at my statement about who owns the mainstream media.
Bilderberg Group Exposed on the History Channel
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC7E6vgf1RA ]
People are too enthusiastic on alternative causes besides CO2 over here. Be criticial on every report. First we have to make sure there is something like Himalayan gletsjer meltdown. An article in last months Science appears to show that meltdown is slowing down or there is no meltdown at all:
”
Climate Change:
No Sign Yet of Himalayan Meltdown, Indian Report Finds
Pallava Bagla
Are Himalayan glaciers beating a rapid retreat in the face of global warming? That would seem to be the case, according to a flurry of recent reports by BBC and other mass media. But the picture is more complex—and poses scientific puzzles, according to a review of satellite and ground measurements released by India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests earlier this week. The report, by senior glaciologist Vijay Kumar Raina, formerly of the Geological Survey of India, seeks to correct a widely held misimpression based on measurements of a handful of glaciers: that India’s 10,000 or so Himalayan glaciers are shrinking rapidly in response to climate change. That’s not so, Raina says.
“
I know this is OT for this thread but I’m seriously concerned about proposed population control for the sake of non existent global warming http://www.optimumpopulation.org/
Oh rest ye merry souls… permanently.
Modern humans use a lot of BTUs, with all the cars, homes, heat, manufactured stuff, and whatnot. That’s a lota carbon footprints for the planet. (as if that’s really a problem, but I’ll play along)
The World Bank and the UN need to pay carbon credits to individuals for a little HUMAN EUTHANASIA, to get carbon numbers restored back to “normal?”. (what the heck is normal ?)
Volunteer work is always welcomed on the planet. Now what to do with all those happy toxic carbon filled corpses? Into the antarctic permafrost, now there’s a carbon sink for ya.
I’d take my credits, up front though, I’d want to do a little round the world vacation once or twice first with the proceeds. I’d even walk (not), just show me the money ! Instead of cap and trade….it’s de-cap and grave… AGW problem solved.
What’s up with this? How come the CO2 from China ends up in California and the dust ends up in the opposite direction? At least that’s the argument that California’s Cap and Trade doesn’t work.
Damn.NASA have a problem for every solution.
Reading this I just realised I am experiencing a final collapse in my ability to take seriously, let alone come close to believing, any climate verbiage from any of these US or Western government research institutes. Such panic-stricken utterances reveal that they know the public is on to the fact that they are nothing but corrupt self-serving political clubs with nothing to offer scientifically. The political hoops and initiations that any “scientist” must go through to be part of any of these organisations amount to an effective scientific and intellectual castration – no matter how much money is thrown at them, they will never get anything right.
@ur momisugly Smokey (13:30:45)
“The sooner it is made clear to those countries that they must clean up their own mess without free money from the West, the sooner they will get serious about it.”
At the risk of diverting this blog into politics, I must vehemently disagree.
The idea is not that group A creates effect M which demands response X, as opposed to group B creating effect N which demands repsonse Y. The reality is that both causes and effects are far beyond our ability to control.
I no more agree with your prescription than I do with AlGore’s.
I think it’s true, that soot in very large quantities can accumulate solar power and raise the local temperature some.
But I don’t buy it that the soot is the culprit in the melting of glaciers drama.
Why does a glacier seem to melt faster the more it melts away?
That ought to be a rather simple question for anyone who’s been taking a nice stroll in the high mountains. It’s all about simple geography and basic physics.
Here’s a hint: imagine a funnel laying on the side, where the narrowest point is the base of the glacier.
That’s one thing.
Another thing is that the more a glacier retracts, or melts away, lots of soot is going down stream, and the surface area of the glacier gets smaller.
A third thing is that these melting glaciers they speak of have been retracting since the little ice age. So the soot back in the hay days of the early 19-century must have put out a lot of soot, to hasten hundred of yards thick ice to melt away.
A fourth thing is that the soot has to outperform, so to speak, the white of the surface area.
A fifth thing is that melting glaciers tend to melt from below. And I’m not seeing soot be able to outperform pressure and friction.
The sixth sense tells me that even if the soot is truly the evil character in this whole drama of some of the chinese glaciers hasty melt, would they really prefer the glaciers were growing instead of retracting? After all, looking at the yellow river the glaciers aren’t melting fast enough no more, or rather, even though the hasty melt the quantity of the melt water just doesn’t cut it, the yellow river needs more.
And an anecdote, just like most countries that has lots and lots of glaciers, even China hasn’t measured more than a fraction of the total amount, usually just the biggest most easy to come by.
Aren’t we back to the very basic question posed by the surfacestation project? What amount of glacial loss has occurred and how sure we are both to the absolute loss and the rate of change. And perhaps as importantly when did they form and at what rate. (Many of the glaciers that we are alarmed (cited) about are centuries old not millenia) Unless we have a high confidence in the basic field data these studies are nothing more than interesting what ifs. I feel we should be “compelled” to get good data first and only later figure out what it means.
SidViscous (13:39:40)
i had to look that one up, but no worries, the alien invasion scare is a few years away. maybe dick cheney will follow in al gores’ footsteps and make a documentary on it
Jason (13:49:59)
that is troubling, isn’t it? check this one out http://www.popoffsets.com/what_we_do.php
google Thomas Robert Malthus to see where that kind of stuff probably originates…