From Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, and announcement that comes at a very inconvenient time for IPCC and Pachauri while their “Glaciergate” issue rages. Aerosols and black carbon are tagged as the major drivers. And no mention of disappearance by 2035.
Black Carbon a Significant Factor in Melting of Himalayan Glaciers
The fact that glaciers in the Himalayan mountains are thinning is not disputed. However, few researchers have attempted to rigorously examine and quantify the causes. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist Surabi Menon set out to isolate the impacts of the most commonly blamed culprit—greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide—from other particles in the air that may be causing the melting. Menon and her collaborators found that airborne black carbon aerosols, or soot, from India is a major contributor to the decline in snow and ice cover on the glaciers.
“Our simulations showed greenhouse gases alone are not nearly enough to be responsible for the snow melt,” says Menon, a physicist and staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division. “Most of the change in snow and ice cover—about 90 percent—is from aerosols. Black carbon alone contributes at least 30 percent of this sum.”
Menon and her collaborators used two sets of aerosol inventories by Indian researchers to run their simulations; their results were published online in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
The actual contribution of black carbon, emitted largely as a result of burning fossil fuels and biomass, may be even higher than 30 percent because the inventories report less black carbon than what has been measured by observations at several stations in India. (However, these observations are too incomplete to be used in climate models.) “We may be underestimating the amount of black carbon by as much as a factor of four,” she says.
The findings are significant because they point to a simple way to make a swift impact on the snow melt. “Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for 100 years, but black carbon doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for more than a few weeks, so the effects of controlling black carbon are much faster,” Menon says. “If you control black carbon now, you’re going to see an immediate effect.”
The Himalayan glaciers are often referred to as the third polar ice cap because of the large amount of ice mass they hold. The glacial melt feeds rivers in China and throughout the Indian subcontinent and provide fresh water to more than one billion people.
Atmospheric aerosols are tiny particles containing nitrates, sulfates, carbon and other matter, and can influence the climate. Unlike other aerosols, black carbon absorbs sunlight, similar to greenhouse gases. But unlike greenhouse gases, black carbon does not heat up the surface; it warms only the atmosphere.
This warming is one of two ways in which black carbon melts snow and ice. The second effect results from the deposition of the black carbon on a white surface, which produces an albedo effect that accelerates melting. Put another way, dirty snow absorbs far more sunlight—and gets warmer faster—than pure white snow.
Previous studies have shown that black carbon can have a powerful effect on local atmospheric temperature. “Black carbon can be very strong,” Menon says. “A small amount of black carbon tends to be more potent than the same mass of sulfate or other aerosols.”
Black carbon, which is caused by incomplete combustion, is especially prevalent in India and China; satellite images clearly show that its levels there have climbed dramatically in the last few decades. The main reason for the increase is the accelerated economic activity in India and China over the last 20 years; top sources of black carbon include shipping, vehicle emissions, coal burning and inefficient stoves. According to Menon’s data, black carbon emitted in India increased by 46 percent from 1990 to 2000 and by another 51 percent from 2000 to 2010.
This map of the change in annual linear snow cover from 1990 to 2001 shows a thick band (blue) across the Himalayas with decreases of at least 16 percent while a few smaller patches (red) saw increases. The data was collected by the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
However, black carbon’s effect on snow is not linear. Menon’s simulations show that snow and ice cover over the Himalayas declined an average of about one percent from 1990 to 2000 due to aerosols that originated from India. Her study did not include particles that may have originated from China, also known to be a large source of black carbon. (See “Black soot and the survival of the Tibetan glaciers,” by James Hansen, et al., published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.) Also the figure is an average for the entire region, which saw increases and decreases in snow cover. As seen in the figure, while a large swath of the Himalayas saw snow cover decrease by at least 16 percent over this period, as reported by the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a few smaller patches saw increases.
Menon’s study also found that black carbon affects precipitation and is a major factor in triggering extreme weather in eastern India and Bangladesh, where cyclones, hurricanes and flooding are common. It also contributes to the decrease in rainfall over central India. Because black carbon heats the atmosphere, it changes the local heating profile, which increases convection, one of the primary causes of precipitation. While this results in more intense rainfall in some regions, it leads to less in other regions. The pattern is very similar to a study Menon led in 2002, which found that black carbon led to droughts in northern China and extreme floods in southern China.
“The black carbon from India is contributing to the melting of the glaciers, it’s contributing to extreme precipitation, and if black carbon can be controlled more easily than greenhouse gases like CO2, then it makes sense for India to regulate black carbon emissions,” says Menon.
Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research for DOE’s Office of Science and is managed by the University of California. Visit our Website at www.lbl.gov/
Additional information:
- Read the paper, “Black carbon aerosols and the third polar ice cap”
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Sam Lau (01:01:28) :
I agree with your comments about the evils of China, I see the evil as communism, just saying CO2 is the least of their problems, and actually is probably feeding millions in China.
It is somewhat remarkable to hear the actions of communist China, doing what communist governments have always done, described as “ruthless capitalism.”
Let’s not forget that this is the result of running “simulations” based on the carbon inventory. When ever i see that now I start to get twitchy.
Er, simulations – would they be compute models now?
Then they could probably feed in a shopping list and get a significant result, we would then be told it is all Tesco’s or WallMart’s fault.
Is all science reduced to sitting in a nice warm comfy office and grabbing data from here there and everywhere and then stuffing it into a computer?
Does no one actually get out on the ground and actually see if there is any real soot on the glaciers and do that year on year to see what happens?
Of course, its a bit of a bugger if it snows and covers up the soot (unless glaciers are formed by sublimation or something, I imagine it must snow occasionally at these altitudes, so I imagine they also have to feed in snow fall data and sun/cloud days data (just like the HadCru data).
Maybe they also have to actually get out there and measure the albedo or is that produced by yet another computer program from who knows who? (the WWF? Climbers Weekly?)
Plus if the stuff is particulate then they have to perform plume analysis to see just how much really is from India and not China……..
Now that’s just off the top of my head.
On the other hand the disappearing snows of Kilimanjaro were not due to any of the above, they say, but due to deforestation affecting humidity affecting “melt” so I guess they also need humidty data going back over the years, and so on.
Now glacier size etc must also be based on original ice plus added ice due to snow/rain/humidity minus ice that melts due to all of the above including temperature.
So I assume this “simulation” also accounts for all these factors and all the ones a true scientist can come up with based on years of experience and not just a few that joe public can think of in two minutes.
Some of these stories are just a tad to convenient and a bit too vague for a lay person to get to grips with but given everything else that is going on is someone feeding out just enough rope to see who will hang themselves?
And who peer reviews this stuff? does a peer reviewer actually check the computer models these days? the data? the factors included? is there some kind of gold standard for reveiwers? or do they just ask themselves if they trust the author/author’s institution?
As already pointed out, this “study” with yet another “model” may be right, or it may be wrong. All I know is that this carbon crap, the stuff that all life is based upon, that is terribly polluting & toxic apparently, is used by water companies in sewage treatment works as a filter bed to remove pollutants from the treated & filtered waste water, often recyced many times over.
Also, that water filter jug you may keep in the fridge has a filter containing……….carbon, or as they like to call it, charcoal, as most people won’t get the connection for ages. Also, those of you who have a water filter by your sink, have one that most likely (95% probability based on strict IPCC peer-reviewed data requirements), contains activated charcoal (carbon) to remove the bad tases & odours. Also, those of you who have an air filtration product(s) in your home, they contain activated charcoal (carbon) to remove the bad air to give you good air. Well, if that hasn’t scared the crap out of most nsa & Amway reps then I don’t know what will. If they want to object I will be only too happy to remove these comments for a small (not) fee!!!! BTW, do they still use carbon brushes on electric motors? Oh & in those carbon writing implements, you know, carbon surrounded by a material containing mostly sugars & carbon, oh what are they called now my memory gets bad these days, oh that’s right, pencils, will we be banned from using them to kick around ideas about nano-carbon technology, nano-tubes, buckie-balls, etc., on a piece of carbon based writing material, called paper? What on earth will we wipe our ar……..?
I remember 15 years ago, when working on civil engineering projects, talking with some environmental engineers who were worried about not being able to clean up the leachate sufficiently from landfill sites, I recommended to them buying all the BBQ charcoal from B & Q (UK DIY store) & compacting it at the outflow end & see what happens! One commented, it’s “really amazing stuff you know what it can remove”, to the senior engineer!
Oh & finally, spreading the fireplace ash on the snow & ice – nice one!!! I do the same.
AtB
vibenna (23:51:35) :
“…and could lead to serious peasant unrest.”
Is that worse than when “the natives get restless”, always a sure sign of danger in Hollywood movies? I’m spoofing it because it’s so vague.
Not that you’ll need to tell me/us, but why not try to think up some good things that “could” happen? Or maybe some good things even stemming from “serious peasant unrest”, whatever that means. Because many “climate change” people seem to have fallen prey to some kind of extreme and automatic fear of change neurosis, “and we’re all gonna die” from almost anything that might possibly happen. And by now it’s gotten pretty old, given the failure of AGWers to come up with much of anything valid from GW in the way of “disasters”.
This is superb!
IPCC: International Pack of Climate Crooks
Hmm. Major burner of coal in India: steel industry. Major steel industry player: TATA Steel….TERI….Pachauri….IPCC….CO2.
Means, motive, opportunity.
No glaciers here in Oz, only questions. Q1. Would not the soot affect the albedo only until covered by the next snow fall or drift of driven snow? It needs only to be covered by a mm or so. Is this dynamic included in the math modelling? Q2. What happens to the soot after a short time? Does it not oxidise to CO2 and go into the air, statics versus dynamics again? Q3. Why not face the unpalatable and look at Indian cremation as a soot source? Q4. Is not the downstream water supply governed by precipitation in river basins, with glacial meting being a tiny (and mostly renewed annually) source of water? Q5. If one is worried about water loss, one builds a dam or several, no? Q6. Having several times been around the China India Tibet region where the Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong and Yangtse rivers pass within 100 miles of each other, I can attest to seeing very little smog and a very small populace to produce it by human activity. (Smog is not the same entity as soot?) This area shows as a big blob of red increase on the map above. I can understand it being neutral, but cannot explain why glacial ice is increasing here. Look up Lijiang Yunnan on Google Earth and go slowly west for 150 miles to see some very rugged country, even more rugged a bit further north.
Re Sam Lau (01:01:28) :
The Chinese Government is perhaps the smartest of the large Governments these days. Here’s an extract from World Nuclear News, 21 August 2009-
“New reactor construction start in China. First concrete has been poured for Yangjiang unit 2 in Guangdong province in China. This is a 1080 MWe largely indigenous design, the second of four being built as phase 1 on the site. This brings to 16 the number of reactors under construction in China, with 35 more planned to start building in the next three years.”
Should make a dent in the soot and CO2, eh?
Earth to Heaven: We are going to STOP CLIMATE CHANGE from now on.
Heaven: That’s my department.
Heaven to Sun: That monkey on planet 3 is getting above himself again. He wants to control the weather now.
Sun: Ha ha! Shall I turn off for a while? I’m due for a rest.
Heaven: No, just slow down a while and show them who’s boss.
Sun: Will do; one minimum coming up. With added ice…
“You are funded by Big Oil” the racist card of the CAGW crowd.
OT, but you may be interested in this interview with Michael Oppenheimer on ABC TV (Australia). Click on the link below, then on the box titled “IPCC scientists on the defensive as sceptics step up assault”.
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/
Who said the snow had stopped?
@ur momisugly wayne (00:38:37) : I’ve been wondering when some honest physicist would raise this simple, logical reality to the public.
Well, funny that you would mention that …
Black soot and the survival of Tibetan glaciers
Xu, et. al, 2009
Contributed by James Hansen, October 15, 2009
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/52/22114.full
See also …
Melting of major Glaciers in the western Himalayas: evidence of climatic changes from long term MSU derived tropospheric temperature trend (1979–2008)
Prasad, et.al, 2009
The unequal distribution of the warming trend over the year is discussed in this study and is partially attributed to a number of controlling factors such as sunlight duration, CO2 trends over the region (2003–2008), water vapor and aerosol distribution
http://www.ann-geophys.net/27/4505/2009/angeo-27-4505-2009.pdf
And …
Cryospheric change in China
Li, et. al, 2006
Total glacier area has receded by about 5.5%. Snow mass has increased slightly. Permafrost is clearly degrading, as indicated by shrinking areas of permafrost, increasing depth of the active layer, rising of lower limit of permafrost, and thinning of the seasonal frost depth. Some models predict that glacier area shrinkage could be as high as 26.7% in 2050, with glacier runoff increasing until its maximum in about 2030.
http://tinyurl.com/ylnxs2u
I mis-cited “Cryospheric change in China”
It was published in 2008.
Ricardo (23:17:34):
You Sir, like many others above don’t understand the real problem, the real problem is no easy fix like filters, diesel trucks, etc, the problem in India and China with Black carbon will take at least another hundred years to resolve.
I first visited India in 1959 and China in 1964 the rural areas of both these countries have changed little in the last 50 years, hundreds yes hundreds of millions still without electricity, drinking water, sanitation , and cooking with charcoal, wood, coal, animal dung, in India alone there are millions of people dependent on charcoal as an employment, until there is eduction and services to rural areas in these countries ( 60% of the population live without services ) the best intentions in the world will do nothing.
Example:
In 2007 I was driving in Northern India and the Jeep we were in had a flat tire in the middle of a village (population 3-4,000 people ) these people to watch TV walked 12 km to another village that had 2 TV sets, and had to pay to watch, (no money, a chicken, a bag of charcoal, etc,) I spoke to the village letter writer ( a man in the market with a typewriter without many of the letters of the alphabet, he explained he wrote these letters in ink ) he asked how much the small diesel generator we had cost, I told him about $500 this he informed me was more money than the entire village possessed.
“vibenna (22:54:32) :
REPLY: And let’s not lose sight of the fact that:
1) Something can be done about black soot and aersols from India, with positive benefits all around
2) CO2 is not the main driver
3) The threat of melt has been wildly and irresponsibly exaggerated by the IPCC for the purposes of getting grants
4) The projection for melt that is realistic is the year 2350…or beyond, Plenty of time to do something about #1”
Bravo!! That man deserves a VB (Or a Becks, it’s better. Now I need to hide from the locals).
Um.
Could anyone answer this thought-experiment?
Say a visiting Vogon spaceship scoops up all the glaciers in the Himalayas, and replaces them with special slippery mats so that any new snow falling on these areas automatically slides down instantly and is carried away by the rivers and streams.
Now, will people living further down the vallies notice any difference as a result of the Vogon action ?
Where does this 100 years come from? I’ve looked at the discussion paper and this claim isn’t made anywhere in the paper.
interesting piece in Guardian website today, dont know how relevant it ishttp://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/04/understanding-glacier-changes:
”
wayne (23:59:45) :
Finally.
Some reality from proper physics!
Thank you, Lawrence Berkeley physicists!
(And thank you for your integrity.)
”
They’re only ‘models’ based on buggrall data points.
Let’s see what 10yrs of snow does to the actual glaciers.
What is not said is to save the glacier never ever buy anything from Indi or China! the gore carbon credit scam is the very worst thing for the glaciers that could be thought up, keep the industry in the regulated west and it will get better, dont even patronise a company with an overseas call centre (not that they are any use either).
Dr. Syed Hasnain, the one who cooked up the 2035 deadline, gave a lecture at NASA in November discussing black carbon and aerosols.
And yet the 2035 claim was robustly defended by Dr. Pachauri himself until as late as 20th January.(IIRC)
Is it possible to distinguish between the effects of carbon particulates and bog standard dust? The kind that gets whipped up from arid areas and carried for miles, and gets worse when you chop down trees, graze goats and the like?
“Our simulations showed greenhouse gases alone are not nearly enough to be responsible for the snow melt,” says Menon, of Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division.
When Berkeley’s Environmental Energy Lab feels the heat, the CO2 propaganda iceberg is obviously melting!
It is great that the story also identifies the purpose of the federal funds pouring into that division of the Berkeley lab: Environmental Energy.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA PI for Apollo
Thesis-gate
It’s worse than we thought — again.
From IPCC’s AR4, all three working groups had included the following citations, some unpublished:
9 citations from Master’s theses;
31 citations from PhD theses.
Redefined peer review?
Detailed listing can be found here:
http://climatequotes.com/2010/02/03/ipcc-cited-multiple-masters-students-in-ar4-some-unpublished/
Two things here:
1.) It’s rather easy to control black carbon in an industrial setting. MSHA does it with it’s ‘permissible’ underground diesel regulation.
2.) Aerosols effect on precipitation is a zero-sum game, and this has been known for a very long time. Cloud seeding ‘enhancement’ is nothing more than borrowing, and does not increase precipitation. It does not add to the total, it moves when & where it occurs.