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
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“In the long run, CO2 would always prevail”
Well of course it would, that’s how the models are designed.
That’s a neat trick. It is not warming because the smog is reflecting heat back into space! I thought it was all the emissions which were causing the problem, or is that old hat?
I say AGW is directly caused by the widespread use of birth control pills just prior to 1970. Do you see the corelation?
I’ve never been happy with the concept of a “thought experiment”. If you could THINK the right answer there would be no need to do any real experiments. While cheap, it is hardly scientific.
I’m also uncomfortable with the concept of being happy to spray noxious sulphur compounds around the skies and call it a good thing. In the west, “clean air” legislation was thought necessary to remove acid rain and to improve the health of urban populations who previously had to live in noxious smogs. If cleaning up sulphur emissions is beneficial for us in the West, why should the Chinese have to live in pea-soupers? That’s racist!
Trading off an unknown but probably very small risk of warming by perpetuating a large, definitely risky form of pollution – Just goes to show that people don’t seem to matter much in these equations. Poor people will suffer if this idea goes ahead.
Pamela Gray (06:43:46) : Good analogy. To me, I find it similar to the “pee dance” my 5 year old son does, and proceeds to deny that he has to pee.
Nearly 50 years ago while working for a Ph.D at Cambridge, I had two publications in Nature. It was the pinnacle of my academic achievements, as I later left academia to work in industry.
Any suggestions as to how I might avoid the opprobrium of being associated with an organ which is now such a travesty of scientific integrity? You can resign a knighthood but how can I disown my publications?
CO2 causes global warming. CO2 protects us from global warming.
Can’t the warmists make up their minds or do all the sides on their climate dice display a single spot?
A simple question that I want Climatology to answer: What was the climate supposed to be if AGW hadn’t intervened?
They can really only argue that there would be stasis (impossible) of cooling (more deadly) if AGW was absent as the Jones argument (that all warming in 150 years is AGW) rules out that the globe would have warmed in that time.
Give a hoot, please pollute!
Mike Ramsey:
Yes, the soot is playing a part near and far and the Asian particulate emissions have the cooling effect while aerosols, but this Nature article appears to neglect entirely the warming effect once those aerosols are deposited on snow or ice.
Even Hansen has been a coauthor on a couple of papers attributing up to a possible 60% of ice melt in the Arctic to the deposition of soot on the surface changing the albedo (LOL, not by measurement, of course, but by simply modeling). Considering the feedback of changing from snow/ice albedos to open water albedo earlier, really, how much of northern hemisphere warming is the result of particle emissions? We don’t, collectively, know, but it is possible that it outweighs the cooling effect in the above article.
And the GISS crew, especially Koch, also were able to make an argument supporting the notion that most black carbon aerosols making the trek to the Arctic originate from Asia.
The latest: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/koch_05/
‘But I was thinking of a plan to die one’s whiskers green
And always use so large a fan that they could not be seen’
Lewis Carroll
Perhaps we can retrain the TEAM – (including NATURE)
They seem intent on their own survival –
Maybe they could become wildlife biologists and study the giant snakes of the world – accidents?
The TEAM is not going to go away graciously-
They are supported by the same folks that brought us the DDT ban and we know how that helped the world.
The problem the models had to explain the 1945-1975 flat/cooling period with increasing CO2 levels was nicely solved by introducing the cooling effect of sulfate aerosols.
But that introduced new problems: since about 1990, the world wide emissions of SO2 didn’t rise anymore, but shifted from Europe and North America to SE Asia. Where indeed the brown/black aerosols from wood/dung stoves in India causes more solar energy absorption in the lower atmosphere and on snow/ice.
If you look at the influence on temperature (some 0.6 C) of the Pinatubo injection of SO2 directly in the stratosphere, where it lasts several years (due to the lack of water vapor) and you compare that to what humans emit over a year (which lasts average 4 days), then the effect is maximal 0.1 C cooling. Not very important. Especially if that is compensated by brown/black soot, even the sign of the effect is not known for sure…
Have a look at the change in SO2 emissions in Europe 1990-1999: The maximum effect of the change in SO2 emissions would be found near the Finnish/Russian border, according to the HadCM3 model. But one sees only the effect of the NAO switch around 1975, when more westerlies cause warmer and wetter winters in Northern Europe:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/aerosols.html
Temperatures in India increase faster than in the SH south of India (Diego Garcia), although this is from an island (the others from coastal places), thus not to be taken as absolute proof:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/india_temp.html
But 90% of all human aerosols are emitted in the NH, thus the NH should warm less fast than the SH. But as the NH has more land, this can influence the difference in warming speed. That would be so, but even the oceans in the NH are warming faster than the SH ocean parts, if compensated for area:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/oceans_heat.html
Conclusion: aerosols are used in the models as compensation for the lack of warming in the 1945-1975 period, but as the current period shows, there were and are other (natural) factors at work which should explain the observations. Aerosols have far less impact that currently included in the models and even the sign of the overall effect is questionable…
A new modelling study doubles as a thought experiment…. demonstrating how to construct self-serving “just so” reveries so necessary to the continuance of an infantile mental state throughout adulthood and call it “Climate Science”, “Progressive”, and, Yea, even “Post Normal Science”.
This article is pure bs without accompanying data. I’m not listening to any handwaving assertions unless they can be corroborated via satellite data on incoming/outgoing radiation.
If, as CERES shows, there has been less reflected sunlight over the past few years how does that square with the article which blames aerosols for more reflected sunlight thus less warming than expected?
Claude Harvey (04:45:51) :
There is a better prediction, that is 100% safe, and will probably come from NASA next;
“Pollution causes DELAYED global CHANGE”.
Impossible to falsify.
So… cleaning up emissions caused global warming? That seems ironic.
Ferdinand Engelbeen (08:26:00) :
less fast = more slow
Grey (pollution) clouds are more reflective than white (water vapor) clouds?
Pull the other one.
Ferdinand Engelbeen (08:26:00) :
Thanks, Ferdinand, much appreciated!
Wonderful CAGW theory at work:
SO2 and NOx emissions have a very short term effect where they “hide” the CO2-driven warming.
Meanwhile the CO2 is still there, will persist for a hundred years or more with effects felt for millenia.
Therefore if we shift to “clean energy” that removes the SO2 and NOx emissions, the warming effect of the CO2 will return quickly, and we will fry.
Is this a message they want out there? “Dirty” power protects us from CAGW?
Suphur dioxide/Nitrogen oxides = acid rain.
Brilliant idea.
So now we are told potent green house gases are good? This what Hansen previously said.
“The effects of soot in changing the climate are more than most scientists acknowledge, two US researchers say. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they say reducing atmospheric soot levels could help to slow global warming relatively simply. They believe soot is twice as potent as carbon dioxide, a main greenhouse gas, in raising surface air temperatures. … The researchers are Dr James Hansen and Larissa Nazarenko, both of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of the US space agency Nasa, and Columbia University Earth Institute.”
V. Ramanathan has testified to Congress about the role of atmospheric brown clouds. As pointed out earlier in this thread, he has many papers in this area.
http://www-ramanathan.ucsd.edu/testimonials/BlackCarbonHearing-testimony.pdf
The testimony purported to speak of black carbon, but considers mainly the soot-aerosol mixtures resident in the atmosphere.
V.Ramanathan’s hypothesis then, was to blame black soot for atmospheric warming at 1000-3000 meters range which then melted the glaciers in the Himalayas.
It is interesting to note that the testimony contains to references to any paper to support its conclusions of alleged glacier retreat in the recent past.
Ramanathan has also claimed that black carbon (BC) is the second most important factor after CO2, to prduce warming
“Thus, with a combined forcing (from items i, ii, and iii) of
1 to 1.2 Wm-2 (± 0.4 Wm-2) BC is likely to be the second most important contributor (next to CO2) to global warming.”
Now these guys at the Atmos Chem Phys are saying
” 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.”
Ramanathan, moreover says
“In addition, we integrated into the model, the emission history of soot for the last 70 years and simulated the Asian climate from 1930 to 2005 with and without ABCs. These simulations showed that ABCs contributed as much as greenhouse gases to the warming trend of the atmosphere between 1 to 5 km,”
at the same time, he also says:
“Our ability to model the effects of BCs in climate models is severely limited. One of the main reasons is the large uncertainty (factor of 2 or more) in the current estimates of the emission of organic (OC) and elemental carbon (EC) (See Bond et al., 2004; 2007). “
Make what you want, of it all. 🙂
Shub
“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.”
So the cooling for the next 30 years we all know is coming, is actually man-made as well. How convenient.