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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Mikel Mariñelarena (04:32:07),
“…there is no other way to explain the contradiction between models and observations pointed out by Lindzen than to plug in a high negative aerosol forcing.”
It might be that models simply cannot predict changes in a chaotic system. No climate model has been accurate yet in its predictions. For example, no GCM predicted the non-warming of most of the past decade; they all predicted steady increases in temperature [no doubt due to the way they were programmed].
Clouds could also explain much of the contradiction between models and observations, as could changes in the AMO/PDO.
The more we learn, the more insignificant one particular forcing appears: that of carbon dioxide. The IPCC still insists on a preposterously high number, 3 – 4.5, or even higher.
Svante Arrenhius started the whole CO2/climate sensitivity issue in 1896, postulating that a doubling of CO2 would cause a global temperature rise of 5°C. [In a follow-up paper in 1906, which climate alarmists never mention, Arrenhius drastically lowered his estimate to 1.6°C.]
Hansen’s 1988 estimate was 4.2°C; the latest IPCC projection is 3.2°C. [it has been steadily declining in every subsequent IPCC assessment report]. In 2008 Hansen lowered his estimate to 2.5°C. And numerous climatologists, including Prof Richard Lindzen, Dr Roy Spencer and many others estimate climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 to be less than 0.5°C.
Any number at or below 1°C means there is really nothing to worry about regarding CO2. Burning all the world’s fossil fuels would not double atmospheric CO2 from current levels.
And based on James Hansen’s routine wild-eyed predictions of catastrophe, I seriously doubt his claim that the effect of aerosols is as dire as he claims [although aerosols – like almost everything else – are more of a problem than CO2].
The information above, and many more references are here if you need them: click
Good call.
The more we learn, the more insignificant one particular forcing appears: that of carbon dioxide. But less than 1C is not a problem.
You guys need to realize that the minimun raise on “average” temperature means increase of energy on the atmosphere.
Again, another “conclusion” based on computer models, not on observation. It was enough to assume values that were convenient to their man made global warming story.
If sarcasm causes global warming, then irony causes … ?
I just heard Obama give a speech in Vegas where he stated that China is well ahead of the USA in so-called clean energy. What a joke.
Given that these are the same numpties who eagerly published Mann’s article about the hockey stick, but refused to print a more erudite article by McIntyre, Nature magazine needs a major overhaul of its approval process. Its credibility has been severely diminished by its unscientific approach to AGW.
As an after-thought, does Nature receive any funding from the IPCC, Greenpeace or Al Gore?
“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.”
Oh please!
When we’re completely bankrupt as a nation we will either start making our own disposable plastic tampon tubes, or not, or we will learn to get back to basics, or not. And we will pay the consequences, whatever small personal mistakes we are overlooking in all the colossal, global furor over something as uncontrollable as humans..
Let’s have a moratorium on any interpretations of their research by scientists for five, no TEN years. Better yet, off with their heads!
Until they recognize that humans are an absolutely uncontrollable part of nature, just as are volcanoes, earthquakes, and weather, I’ll not partake of their catastrophic fairy tales, no not even one, as life is 100% fatal. Your very birth was a natural catastrophe as you were dead meat from the moment you were conceived. Get over it. Have a baby, grow up.
I still think these sycophants are sophomoric transhumanists. There, I finally stooped to name calling.
Anthony knows, by now, how to rile up the base. Well done.