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”
A very interesting article. Does the soot also effect the global temperature though and account for the global warming by increasing the energy absorbed from the sun? It says:
“But unlike greenhouse gases, black carbon does not heat up the surface; it warms only the atmosphere.”
Surely warming the atmosphere is the problem that we are facing. And if there is more CO2 in the atmosphere this will only serve to act as a feed back loop.
Thankfully the problem of soot is one that can be easily resolved, I imagine getting India and China to do something about it will be the hard part!
OT, but Fox is running a story I hadn’t seen earlier. http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/04/climate-chief-defends-panels-global-warming-findings/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+foxnews%252Fscitech+%2528Text+-+SciTech%2529
And quotes from Yvo de Boer. They’re robustly defending the science again.
During the ice-age scare of the seventies, the geo-engineering solution most frequently cited involved sprinkling soot on the icecaps.
Now we can be sure it will work.
This is great news!
refs:
————
Another Ice Age?, Time Magazine, June 1974
In Search Of (The Coming Ice Age), narrated by Leonard Nimoy, 1978 (mention of soot as a possible solution, pt3)
Cooling World, Newsweek, April 1975 (mention of soot as possible solution)
————
“We may be underestimating the amount of black carbon by as much as a factor of four,” she says.
China burns 42% of the worlds coal. One only needs to look at various pictures from Beijing to realize that China has a soot problem.
If I read the report correcting, they only used data provided by India.
In the US soot has been regulated since the 1980’s.
It’s relatively cheap to clean up soot emissions from power plants, way way cheaper then trying to control CO2 emissions.
Hansen et al have been arguing ‘it’s the soot’ for at least 10 years.
No, no, and no. This looks like a weather pattern variation to me, not melting ice. Less snow to begin with. The balance tipped in favor of less snow, causing the annual melt to not be replaced. It is very likely that what appears to be increasing glacial melt is not because of acceleration of melt or warmer anything, it is because the steady state seasonal melting is not being recovered during snow and ice build-up season. That’s weather folks. Not black carbon.
Glaciers are either a finite resource for earthlings or no resource at all.
If they melt, they provide water until they’re gone.
If they don’t melt, they provide no water.
It appears that they are melting these days, although, clearly at some point they weren’t melting and that’s how they got to be there in the first place.
So, if 2350 seems an undesirable date for the last drop of glacier water, when would be a more satisfactory time?
As with oil and other finite resources, our descendants, either 5 generations or 500 generations from now, will be staring balefully into an empty bucket.
Another piece of fluff science writing that doesn’t look at the basics before spouting ‘doom’
First step would have been to get an accurate figure on the amount of soot and aerosols effecting the Himalayan mountains. Without an accurate number for this the whole premise is flawed.
In fact she admits that 30% of the loss is due to black carbon alone and estimates the real figure could be up to four times as high. If this were true, surely 120% of the ‘thining’ would be caused by soot, without considering the effects of aerosols?
This would also mean that CO2 must have little or no effect effect and that glaciers would be growing if industrial pollution could be stopped?
More rubbish from the computer modellers at Berkeley Lab – they’ve really lost the plot!
Meanwhile the glaciers continue to shrink and grow as they always have done over the millennia at the behest of the deterministic chaos which is inherent in our strongly coupled Earth/Sun climate system.
India has decided to throw the IPCC overboard and have its own committee: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/India-to-have-own-panel-on-climate-change-Jairam-Ramesh/articleshow/5535830.cms
THEY insist:
http://www.santiagotimes.cl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=18150:student-scientists-tackle-global-warming-in-chile&catid=44:environmental&Itemid=40
WE don’t NEED India and China to do anything. THEY NEED to do it for their own sake. Soot effects are so localized that it can’t be called global warming.
Feb 3, 2010 by Mark Steyn
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/02/03/credibility-is-what-is-really-melting/
Whenever I write about “climate change,” a week or two later there’s a flurry of letters whose general line is: la-la-la can’t hear you. Dan Gajewski of Ottawa provided a typical example in our Dec. 28 issue. I’d written about the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit’s efforts to “hide the decline,” and mentioned that Phil Jones, their head honcho, had now conceded what I’d been saying for years—that there has been no “global warming” since 1997. Tim Flannery, Australia’s numero uno warm-monger, subsequently confirmed this on Oz TV, although he never had before.
In response, Mr. Gajewski wrote to our Letters page: “Steyn’s column on climate change was one-sided, juvenile and inarticulate.”
Yes, yes, but what Steyn column isn’t? That’s just business as usual. A more pertinent question is: was any of it, you know, wrong?
Well, our reader didn’t want to get hung on footling details: “The disproportionate evidence supports the anthropogenic cause of global warming,” he concluded.
Yes, but how did the “evidence” get to be quite so “disproportionate”?
Take the Himalayan glaciers. They’re supposed to be entirely melted by 2035. The evidence is totally disproportionate, man. No wonder professor Orville Schell of Berkeley is so upset about it: “Lately, I’ve been studying the climate-change-induced melting of glaciers in the Greater Himalaya,” he wrote. “Understanding the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet’s most magnificent landforms has, to put it politely, left me dispirited.” I’ll say. Professor Schell continued: “If you focus on those Himalayan highlands, a deep sense of loss creeps over you—the kind that comes from contemplating the possible end of something once imagined as immovable, immutable, eternal . . .”
Poor chap. Still, you can’t blame him for being in the slough of despond. That magnificent landform is melting before his eyes like the illustration of the dripping ice cream cone that accompanied his eulogy for the fast vanishing glaciers. Everyone knows they’re gonna be gone in a generation. “The glaciers on the Himalayas are retreating,” said Lord Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank and author of the single most influential document on global warming. “We’re facing the risk of extreme runoff, with water running straight into the Bay of Bengal and taking a lot of topsoil with it. A few hundred square miles of the Himalayas are the source for all the major rivers of Asia—the Ganges, the Yellow River, the Yangtze—where three billion people live. That’s almost half the world’s population.” And NASA agrees, and so does the UN Environment Programme, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the World Wildlife Fund, and the respected magazine the New Scientist. The evidence is, like, way disproportionate.
But where did all these experts get the data from? Well, NASA’s assertion that Himalayan glaciers “may disappear altogether” by 2030 rests on one footnote, citing the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report from 2007.
In fact, the Fourth Assessment Report suggests 2035 as the likely arrival of Armageddon, but what’s half a decade between scaremongers? They rate the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing as “very high”—i.e., more than 90 per cent. And the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for that report, so it must be kosher, right? Well, yes, its Himalayan claims rest on a 2005 World Wildlife Fund report called “An Overview of Glaciers.”
WWF? Aren’t they something to do with pandas and the Duke of Edinburgh? True. But they wouldn’t be saying this stuff if they hadn’t got the science nailed down, would they? The WWF report relies on an article published in the New Scientist in 1999 by Fred Pearce.
That’s it? One article from 12 years ago in a pop-science mag? Oh, but don’t worry, back in 1999 Fred did a quickie telephone interview with a chap called Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And this Syed Hasnain cove presumably knows a thing or two about glaciers.
Well, yes. But he now says he was just idly “speculating”; he didn’t do any research or anything like that.
But so what? His musings were wafted upwards through the New Scientist to the World Wildlife Fund to the IPCC to a global fait accompli: the glaciers are disappearing. Everyone knows that. You’re not a denier, are you? India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, says there was not “an iota of scientific evidence” to support the 2035 claim. Yet that proved no obstacle to its progress through the alarmist establishment. Dr. Murari Lal, the “scientist” who included the 2035 glacier apocalypse in the IPCC report, told Britain’s Mail on Sunday that he knew it wasn’t based on “peer-reviewed science” but “we thought we should put it in”—for political reasons.
I wonder what else is in that Nobel Peace Prize-winning report for no other reason than “we thought we should put it in.” Don’t forget, the IPCC’s sole source was the cuddly panda crowd over at the World Wildlife Fund. Donna Laframboise, a colleague of mine from the glory days at the National Post, did a simple search of the online version of the IPCC report and discovered dozens of citations of the WWF. It’s the sole source cited for doomsday predictions of glacier melt not only in the Himalayas but also the Andes and the Alps, as well as for a multitude of other topics, from coral reefs to avalanches. This would appear to be in breach of the IPCC’s own guidelines. The WWF is a pressure group. They’re not scientists. They’re not even numerate: one of their more startling glacier-melt claims derives entirely from an arithmetical miscalculation arising from a typing error.
Go back to that Berkeley professor mooning over the loss of that “magnificent landform” he once thought “immutable, eternal.” From his prose style, one might easily assume Orville Schell was a professor of creative writing or some such. In fact, he’s the former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism. Yet, for all the limpid fragrance of his poignant obsequies, professor Schell would seem to lack the one indispensable quality of a journalist: basic curiosity—the same curiosity that led Miss Laframboise to see just how much of the “science” in the IPCC report rested on the assertions of the panda-cuddlers. So instead, professor Schell bid a teary farewell to his beloved landform, even though the glaciers of the western Himalayas are, in fact, increasing.
Likewise, in the years since Syed Hasnain “speculated” about glacial melt, the BBC, the CBC, CNN and thousands of newspapers around the world have hired specialist Environmental Correspondents on lavish salaries. Yet not one of them gave any serious examination to the claims of the IPCC report, or the “science” on which they rested. And, now that the IPCC and WWF have conceded their error, the eco-correspondents are allowing NATO and other dupes to vacuum their records without having to explain why they fell for the scam.
V. K. Raina, of the Geological Survey of India, produced a special report demonstrating that the run-for-your-life-the-glaciers-are-melting IPCC scenario was utterly false. For his pains, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the self-aggrandizing old bruiser and former railroad engineer who serves as head honcho of the IPCC jet set, dismissed Mr. Raina’s research as “voodoo science.” He’s now been obliged to admit the voodoo was all on his side. But don’t worry. By 2008, Syed Hasnain’s decade-old casual chit-chat over the phone to a London journalist had become “settled science,” so Dr. Pachauri’s company TERI (The Energy & Resources Institute) approached the Carnegie Corporation for a grant to research “challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himalayan glaciers,” and was rewarded with half a million bucks. Which they promptly used to hire Syed Hasnain. In other words, professor Hasnain has landed a cushy gig researching solutions to an entirely non-existent global crisis he accidentally invented over a 15-minute phone call 10 years earlier. As they say in the glacier business, ice work if you can get it.
“Climate change” is not a story of climate change, which has been a fact of life throughout our planet’s history. It is a far more contemporary story about the corruption of science and “peer review” by hucksters, opportunists and global-government control-freaks. I can see what’s in it for Dr. Pachauri and professor Hasnain, and even for the lowly Environmental Correspondent enjoying a cozy sinecure at a time of newspaper cutbacks in everything from foreign bureaus to arts coverage.
But it’s hard to see what’s in it for Dan Gajewski of Ottawa and the millions of kindred spirits who’ve signed on to this racket and are determined to stick with it. Don’t be the last off a collapsing bandwagon. The scientific “consensus” is melting way faster than the glaciers.
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MELTING BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Ricardo (23:17:34) :
could not have summed it up better. Thank you.
vibenna (23:51:35) :
I can’t get very excited over yet another study based on a “simulation” that almost certainly misses a myriad of climate feedbacks to the forcing functions being simulated. Glaciers have advanced and retreated cyclically throughout history. As of this moment, some are advancing while others are retreating. Although I think it sensible to assume that both the recorded modest global temperature increase of the past century and manmade aerosols might have some effect on the glacial process, quantifying either is well beyond the current state of human knowledge. So the reported study is probably yet another example of your tax dollars funding “garbage in and garbage out”.
TerryS (03:28:42) :
They pulled it out of their ***, like all their other bogus bologna.
vibenna (23:51:35) :
However, this study suggest that the people who will suffer most from their industrial emissions are … Themselves.
What suffering? I see only benefit from their progress.
If you think there is no benefit then you should go to living in a shack with no electricity and raggedy clothing.
Would you find suffering then?
If you would not like to do that then why would you ever begin to contemplate requiring the Indians to do it?
vibenna (23:51:35) :
Again, since you do not know the consequences you should not speculate that bad is coming to them. Because in fact you do not know.
Ron Broberg (02:54:53) :
Could you cite some one other than James Hansen? He does not have a good scientific reputation. He is involved in politics and environmentalism too much to be able to consider him an unbiased source.
You did know that already.
Ron Broberg (02:54:53) :
Some models predict
Some models predict something else.
This could be exclusively the result of the earth emerging from the Little Ice Age.
You are citing James Hansen and modelling. You shouldn’t think that a lot of attention will be paid to you.
Met Office Bias In Publishing Data About Scotland’s Coldest Winter
I apologise for introducing another topic to this post but I wish to bring it to your attention immediately. The BBC has just posted an on-line article stating that Scotland has had its coldest combined December and January temperatures since official records began in 1914. The reference is the UK Met Office. The story has been picked up by thr ICECAP website.
There is no mention on the Met Office website of this story. I have just spoken with an official from the Met Office and she confirmed the story stating that data from the Met Office did suggest such a cold winter for Scotland. When I enquired as to why this srory was not put out as an official press release I was told there was no need to do this. I was told it was not the Met Office’s policy to make such statements: “…we just provide the data”
When I asked if the Met Office would have produced a Press Release if the Scottish winter had been the warmest on record the officer was equivical: ” I don’t know” was her hesitant reply. She argued there was no need to make a statement about the Winter being the coldest on record: ” Why… what for?” she asked.
I ask readers to make up their own minds. For the Met Office, the coldest Scottish winter on record does not merit a mention.
Would the warmest Scottish winter on record have meritted a mention?
“Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for 100 years…”
Not according to this paper.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V12/N31/EDIT.php
“In a paper recently published in the international peer-reviewed journal Energy & Fuels, Dr. Robert H. Essenhigh (2009), Professor of Energy Conversion at The Ohio State University, addresses the residence time (RT) of anthropogenic CO2 in the air. He finds that the RT for bulk atmospheric CO2, the molecule 12CO2, is ~5 years, in good agreement with other cited sources (Segalstad, 1998), while the RT for the trace molecule 14CO2 is ~16 years. Both of these residence times are much shorter than what is claimed by the IPCC.”
If they think CO2 “stays in the atmosphere for 100 years”, it makes me wonder what kind of bogus data made its way into the simulations. Sounds like GIGO.
We really do need to clean up the toxic environmental mess we’ve made, and keep it clean, but we should do it with eyes wide open, not half shut. Compact fluorescents laden with mercury is one example of the half shut approach.
peace,
Tim
I think the article omitted a minor, but relevant, detail:
“Suspecting CO2 apostasy, and email having proved to be an unwise method of threat delivery, Ben Santer in Livermore hopped into his Smart Car to deliver a tongue-lashing in person to LBNL researchers.”
It’s important to note what this implies about a solution:
Firstly, most of the BC in Indian comes from their burning wood, dung, and crop residues for cooking:
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/BiomassBurning_files/image007.jpg
This is the kind of pollution problem (because the pollution in question is actually a direct health hazard, too) which is solved by economic development!
Secondly, this means that international treaties regulating US and Western emissions will do no good whatsoever for this issue, AND there are sensible things that can be done locally that do not involve any kind of global regulatory organization.
Looking at world COLA temperatures certainly seem to be falling. Oddly enough usually this is paralleled by AMSU temps but this doesn’t seem to have held for the past year. I wonder just if the AMSU data is drifting again. this time upwards?.