From Nature
Asian pollution delays inevitable warming
Dirty power plants exert temporary protective effect.
The grey, sulphur-laden skies overlying parts of Asia have a bright side — they reflect sunlight back into space, moderating temperatures on the ground. Scientists are now exploring how and where pollution from power plants could offset, for a time, the greenhouse warming of the carbon dioxide they emit.
A new modelling study doubles as a thought experiment in how pollution controls and global warming could interact in China and India, which are projected to account for 80% of new coal-fired power in the coming years. If new power plants were to operate without controlling pollution such as sulphur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOX), the study finds, the resulting haze would reflect enough sunlight to overpower the warming effect of CO2 and exert local cooling.
But this effect would not be felt uniformly across the globe and would last only a few decades. In the long run, CO2 would always prevail, and the world could experience a rapid warming effect if the skies were cleaned up decades down the road.
“The paper highlights the fundamental inequity and iniquity of anthropogenic climate change: ‘enjoy now and make others pay later’,” says Meinrat Andreae, an aerosol expert at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, who was not involved in the work. In fact, he says, dirty coal plants could be seen as “a very primitive form of geoengineering”.
The study, which is under review at Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, builds on a well-established idea. Global temperatures were relatively stable in the decades leading up to the 1970s, even as fossil-fuel consumption shot up. Then industrialized countries began curbing SO2 and NOX to reduce acid rain and protect public health — and temperatures increased rapidly. The latest work, led by Drew Shindell at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, looks at how the climate effects of air pollutants and greenhouse gases could play out over time and geography.
read the remainder at Nature
h/t to Leif Svalgaard
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Hmmmm.
Sooooo. -Pollution- is an effective counter to -Global Warming-??
Well then.
….
Is this really what the Warministas want to project now? Seriously? Because if this is the case then I have … a solution … to the “problem” of Global Warming.
And amazingly enough it won’t cost trillions of dollars.
So, India and China are controlling the temperature of the WHOLE WORLD.
Somewhere, Dr. Evil is laughing, planning to extort the UN for …. $10 Million Dollars!
“A new modelling study…”
Yup, that’s what we need. More climate models. They always work out so well.
Has anybody yet put a climate model on the market?
-Destroy your own world.
-See what what happens as you increase or decrease CO2, and water vapour.
– Watch as the ice melts and the polar bears drown.
– Track how sea level rises and floods out Al Gore’s seaside home.
Well, there’s the solution to global warming.
We just keep up what we have been doing all along; buying crap at Wal-Mart, who then restocks by buying from the Chinese, who make more crap in their factories, which factories are dumping crap in the atmosphere, which hides the warming.
According to this hiding the warming with crap in the atmosphere, we can delay the warming for decades.
So, you American consumers, get out there and do your duty! Run up your credit card debts.
Not only will you pull us out of this nasty little recession, you’ll put more Americans to work as greeters in Wal-Mart, more Chinese to work in their factories, give the Chinese more dollars to buy our junk debt, more demand for Arabic oil, translating into more funds for terrorism, creating more demand for American military action, and as a bonus: delay of global warming.
So the Chinese keep cool thanks to their SO2 by emissions!
And the problem is?
When will they learn that CO2 cannot drive the climate?
Not only does Beer’s law apply regarding its effect as a “heat-trapping” gas (it’s effects are largely spent already), but Misjkolczi appears to have elegantly shown a yin-yang relationship between CO2 and water vapor which yields their overall effect relatively constant.
Thus, CO2 is effectively irrelevant to climate – but the plants and oceans love it and the latter scoff at ignoramus predictions of acidification. [Protons produced by an equilibrium cannot shift its own equilibrium; a source outside the equilibrium (not CO2) is required; Chem 101.]
And the fact that this ‘unprecedented warming trend’ has happened many times before, even at least twice in the last century, and is not statistically relevant, according to the guru Phil Jones, we’re all going to die unless we buy Al Gore’s Carbon Credits
Well, colour me skeptical but…..
Looking at China in the GISS anomaly map for the 2000-2009 decade, I see no trace of this cooling effect.
Also, looking at the long record for Kew, London, the temperature curve seems to DROP after the clean air act was introduced in 1956 – shouldn’t that have been the other way round?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=651036720010&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
That SO2 and particulates have caused cooling is stated again and again, but is this really “settled science”? Lower troposphere emissions is something radically different from volcanoes which push SO2 into the stratosphere.
One thing is for sure: When I was a kid in Norway, the snow was often much dirtier than now because of airborne pollution from the European continent, and this dirty snow must have had a positive effect on temperatures, since the dirt made it melt much faster.
Wouldn’t it be nice if it were all as simple as these two balancing feedbacks. What about albedo? What about cloud seeding? ocean fertilization? etc…..
This is just a silly study since the science is now completely settled… I don’t know how many trillions we have spent on these studies, but I think it’s about a trillion bucks for each tenth of a degree we have gained by the adjustments. I have an idea; remove the adjustments and give us our money back! It’s really so simple!
I thought aerosols only affected global climate if they were dispersed globally, such as when volcanic emissions reach the stratosphere.
So either one cancels the other – or possibly – neither account for anything. I see nothing therefore two very dangerous processes must be occurring and cancelling eachother out. KISS!
They need to stop blaming 3rd world countries for the lack of global warming. The sooner that they can admit that they were wrong, the sooner we can start undoing the harm from their brainwashing over the past 3 decades.
Yes, the role of sulfur aerosols reflecting sunlight has long been discussed — although the reliability of sulfur aerosol data bases is certainly suspect. Yet, a major concern of Asian use of coal has been black soot, and various studies, including a NASA study, blame noticeable warming and melting on black soot. It is not clear to me that this latest Nature paper considers the role of black soot.
here’s an article from Nature claiming “Warming trends in Asia amplified by brown cloud solar absorption”
Note that this 2007 article was based on actual measurements, so if the article claiming cooling because of the brown clouds is based on modeling only, I know which to prefer…
The USA and Western Europe significantly reduced air pollution since the 1970’s. But that has no effect on increasing warming. But more pollution in Asia reduces warming. Got it?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a load of aerosols. The blinkered faithful at Nature must be getting desperate.
So, I’ve seen reports lately that climate is changing faster than predicted and, now, slower due to coal plants.
It really is getting hard following this moving target …
Stephan (04:16:46) :
When will the editors of Nature wake up? Its over, finito, zilch, move on or become a trash journal.
Too late.
Hollard said he hacked the emails only after being stonewalled by the CRU.
http://www.newswithviews.com/Ryter/jon314.htm
REPLY: This writer is not very smart and this article is doubly wrong, he can’t even get the name right. It’s Holland, and to my knowledge he has NOT said he hacked emails. – A
Funny, back in 2007 Nature said the Brown Cloud was enhancing warming:
Ramanathan, V., M.V. Ramana, G. Roberts, D. Kim, C. Corrigan, C. Chung, and D. Winker, 2007. Warming trends in Asia amplified by brown cloud solar absorption. Nature, 448, 575-578.
Sounds to me like aerosols are still a wash.
Wasn’t there a CRU e-mail, that included Obama Science Czar Holdren, that talked about this cooling happening near a power plant in China ?
I unintentionally ran over a rattle snake once up on Minam Grade. After the bump, bump, I looked in my rear view mirror and the thing was thrashing about in a wild frenzy. That must of hurt. Maybe I ran over his rattle? Don’t know. Didn’t stop to check. Anyway, the above (gawd I hate to even type the word) “scientific” study reminds me of the rattle snake thrashing about the road because maybe it can’t rattle no more.
There was a CRU e-mail (1231350711), that included Obama Science Czar Holdren, that talked about this cooling happening near a power plants in China and India.
It has been well known for a decade or more that atmospheric sulfate causes cooling. The whitish haze in dry skies, or the increase in cloud cover and cloud whiteness in humid air, reflect back more sunlight than would be the case with less sulfate (a small portion of which has natural origins, in locations near an ocean).
What hasn’t been known until recently is that unlike black carbon and hazardous gas emissions such as PAHs, formaldehyde, benzene, etc., the latest science appears to say that atmospheric sulfates don’t harm human health as once thought (and as many still think on the basis of 20 years of unrelenting press). It appears that we thought sulfates were harmful because major studies of the 1990s found statistical associations between sulfates and mortality, but those studies didn’t include other pollutants such as diesel emissions (black carbon). Toxicology studies show that sulfates are biologically inactive, but that the many products of diesels (especially older ones) are biologically active.
Newer studies, which compare many different pollutants (including black carbon) against some health endpoint in the same model, mostly show statistical associations with black carbon and with other diesel emissions, but not with sulfate. A good example (which included 20 different types of tiny particles in the model) is:
M.L. Bell, 2009, Hospital Admissions and Chemical Composition of Fine Particle Air Pollution, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 179:1115–1120.
If readers ask, I will provide more references.
The science is never fully settled, but my own assessment is that the great majority of human health effects from air pollution come from tiny particles that are biologically active in the lung, and that these are mostly freshly emitted carbonaceous particles and gases.