From the University of Delaware – As the ice-capped Arctic Ocean warms, ship traffic will increase at the top of the world. And if the sea ice continues to decline, a new route connecting international trading partners may emerge — but not without significant repercussions to climate, according to a U.S. and Canadian research team that includes a University of Delaware scientist.
Growing Arctic ship traffic will bring with it air pollution that has the potential to accelerate climate change in the world’s northern reaches. And it’s more than a greenhouse gas problem — engine exhaust particles could increase warming by some 17-78 percent, the researchers say.
James J. Corbett, professor of marine science and policy at UD, is a lead author of the first geospatial approach to evaluating the potential impacts of shipping on Arctic climate. The study, “Arctic Shipping Emissions Inventories and Future Scenarios,” is published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
Corbett’s coauthors include Daniel A. Lack, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.; James J. Winebrake, of the Rochester Institute of Technology; Susie Harder of Transport Canada in Vancouver, British Columbia; Jordan A. Silberman of GIS Consulting in Unionville, Pa.; and Maya Gold of the Canadian Coast Guard in Ottawa, Ontario.
“One of the most potent ‘short-lived climate forcers’ in diesel emissions is black carbon, or soot,” says Corbett, who is on the faculty of UD’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. “Ships operating in or near the Arctic use advanced diesel engines that release black carbon into one of the most sensitive regions for climate change.”
Produced by ships from the incomplete burning of marine fuel, these tiny particles of carbon act like ‘heaters’ because they absorb sunlight — both directly from the sun, and reflected from the surface of snow and ice. Other particles released by ship engines also rank high among important short-lived climate forcers, and this study estimates their combined global warming impact potential.
To better understand the potential impact of black carbon and other ship pollutants on climate, including carbon dioxide, methane and ozone, the research team produced high-resolution (5-kilometer-by-5-kilometer) scenarios that account for growth in shipping in the region through 2050, and also outline potential new Arctic shipping routes.
Among the research team’s most significant findings:
- Global warming potential in 2030 in the high-growth scenario suggests that short-lived forcing of ~4.5 gigagrams of black carbon from Arctic shipping may increase the global warming potential due to ships’ carbon dioxide emissions (~42,000 gigagrams) by some 17-78 percent.
- Ship traffic diverting from current routes to new routes through the Arctic is projected to reach 2 percent of global traffic by 2030 and to 5 percent in 2050. In comparison, shipping volumes through the Suez and Panama canals currently account for about 4 percent and 8 percent of global trade volume, respectively.
- A Northwest Passage and Northeast Passage through the Arctic Ocean would provide a distance savings of about 25 percent and 50 percent, respectively, with coincident time and fuel savings. However, the team says tradeoffs from the short-lived climate forcing impacts must be studied.
- To calculate possible benefits of policy action, the study provides “maximum feasible reduction scenarios” that take into account the incorporation of emissions control technologies such as seawater scrubbers that absorb sulfur dioxide emitted during the burning of diesel fuel. Their scenario shows that with controls, the amount of Arctic black carbon from shipping can be reduced in the near term and held nearly constant through 2050.
“To understand the value of addressing short-lived climate forcers from shipping, you need to know the impacts of these emissions, the feasibility and availability of technologies that could be put in place to reduce these impacts, and then engage the policy-making community to debate the evidence and agree on a plan,” Corbett notes. “Our hope is that this study will enable better communication of emerging science with policy makers and aid the eight Arctic Council nations with climate policy.”
Corbett also has led recent studies to determine the global health effects of shipping, and more recently, a comparison of the daily release of oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Americans’ daily energy use.
26 Oct: West Australian: Paul Murray: Rock doctors are cool on global warming
Geologists remain one of the intellectual groups in which there is most concern that the science is not settled on climate change…
The latest earth scientist to weigh into the public debate is Phil Playford, the senior principal geologist at the WA Department of Mines and Petroleum. In a recent letter to the editor of the Petroleum Exploration Society of Australia’s newsletter, he uses a 130,000-year-old fossil coral reef on Rottnest Island to illustrate his point.
“The reef-building coral Acropora, which dominates this reef, shows that it grew when ocean temperatures were significantly warmer than now, as this coral no longer forms living reefs further south than the Houtman Abrolhos, some 500km further north,” Dr Playford wrote.
“The Rottnest reef grew during the last interglacial period of the Pleistocene, when the climate was warmer and sea level was at least 3m higher than today. Of course the atmosphere could not at that time have contained any human-induced CO2.”
So what caused the warmer temperatures and the rising sea levels at Rottnest? And are those same causes behind our modern concerns, making cuts to our carbon emissions irrelevant?
Dr Playford agrees with Professor Carter’s conclusion that anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming is “the greatest self-organised scientific and political conspiracy that the world has ever seen…
My two years studying geology at the University of WA help me understand some of Dr Playford’s argument, but I remain as confused about climate change science as most laymen.
However, in the interests of keeping the debate open, readers should see another side of the debate that climate change alarmists would prefer to remain hidden.
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/opinion/post/-/blog/paulmurray/post/2502/comment/1/
This is an interesting subject as breaking up the ice to keep routes open and the soot particulates from engines are likely to be factors in future ice melt. How significant those factors will be however needs more research.
I came across a study once from around 1850 showing the soot from the US industrialisation was melting the ice in specific localised arctic areas.
tonyb
When I become dictator – I will BAN publication of any study with a conclusion that includes the words ‘could’, ‘might’ or ‘may’, and I am not sure about the words ‘model’ or ‘ scenario’. Oh, and ‘Climate’ will get you 10 years in jail. /sarc off
Just %$#@& publish what you found and what you excluded and if you can’t argue a consequene of worthwhile probability, just let the reader do the wild speculation.
In the meantime – Anthony, I am willing to sponsor an annual contest for the most outrageously speculative and obsurd climate-related study – called perhaps the “Gold digger” award. The recent McCright “Women more likely than men to accept global warming” is my first nomination.
Don”t worry, increases in CO2 do not have a linear effect. The increases have a logarithmic effect (declining).
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/
But it is still an effect and there may be positive feedbacks and amplification, but hopefully these are not as strong as previously thought.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/28/new-paper-in-nature-on-co2-amplification-its-less-than-we-thought/
dwright says:
October 25, 2010 at 10:27 pm
“Wow I can’t belove these people still think the ice cap is going to be gone in 20 years.”
You are correct, 20 years is a short period of time for the ice at the minimum extent to be gone. The decline from the 1979 to 2000 September average of 7.0 mllion km2 ( see: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/21/summer-2010-in-the-arctic-and-other-sea-ice-topics/ ) to the 2010 September average (for a recovery year) of 4.9 million km2 (see the October 4, 2010 edition of : http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ ) has taken 10 years.
At a declining rate, it may be 30 years or more before the September average goes below 500,000 km2, which would
(a.) prove there is no warming, or
(b.) prove that there is warming, but we can not predict the pace of sea ice decline which is affected by varying rates of in place melting from higher air temperatures and basal melting from warmer ocean currents, and by accelerated ice transport out of the arctic.
[snip] no no no . . try an alternative
So the temperatures at 80°N and higher north will be a bit (can’t say how much, uncertainties are to wide) higher than today, that would result in a period in wich temperatures above freezing would be longer than it is today, by how much, days, a week or a couple of weeks?
And isn’t a warmer artic leading to more condensation and cloudforming (helped by carbon soot particles), wich in turn will reflect more sunlight and cause more percepitation wich will most of the time be in the form of snow.
But even then, those route won’t be open all year around, especially not that one over the pole. Not in the last place since halve of the time it will be to dark, to cold and ice-conditions to bad. And no, the danger of kapsizing a large boat because of ice is a reality, and no that is not limited to smaller vessels like the crab-boats from “Deadliest Catch”.
Most boats if not all are finely tuned when it comes to their balancing point, large containers vessels (wich would benefit massively from sailing on pole-routes) need a constant ballasting in order to stay upright, they even have to do this in calm conditions when they are loading and unloading in a harbour. Now imagene several hundreds to thousands of tonnes extra on top of the boat, ice that forms in near freezing condition.
“…enable better communication of emerging science…”
Is that the same as the settled science?
Here are two stories that relate to high-sulphur bunker fuel and to scrubbing of sulphur from marine-diesel exhaust:
Seawater-scrubbing of diesel exhausts on cruise ship (2007 10 29)
K-Line announces shift to Low Sulfur Fuel in the Pacific Northwest (2007 03 23)
National Ice Services warn of continuing hazards to navigation in the polar seas:
http://nsidc.org/noaa/iicwg/IICWG_2010/IICWG-XI_News_Release_Final.pdf
You have got to keep that grant money rolling in. Bigger scares, bigger money.
It’s hard to believe that payment is available for this kind of “research”. Then again President Obama’s scientific advice comes from John Holdren. The Arctic Ocean being ice free in winter is something John Holdren apparently believes in.
I presume it must have been some time since this lot published their last paper. Sometimes I wonder if anyone apart from a sceptic or two and a lazy enviro journalist or three pays any attention to this kind or stuff any more.
The ifs,buts and coconuts and “scenarios” scientific paper.
Maybe it will get revisited the day someone sets up a regular shipping route…that is to say, not any day soon.
Is it me, or do Professors all look so young these days? Has science died? Should we not have been told? Why do I feel so weary about it all?
They could learn to play piano.
I gather Tom Lehrer had quite a successful career as a musical satirist.
This is satire isn’t it?
DaveE.
An article in Scientific American “What will space tourism mean for climate change?” describes the possible effects of future “Space Tourism” on climate. Michael Mills of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Darin Toohey of the University of Colorado at Boulder modelled the effects of black carbon from hydrocarbon-fuelled rockets in the stratosphere. They conclude that the carbon would be mostly confined to an irregular band centred over the launch sites (mostly in the USA), and that while insolation below that band would be reduced, the effect on the ozone layer would result in a warming at the poles.
They say that the cooling would be of the order of 0.4°C beneath the “sunshade” (2/3 of 20thC warming!) and around 1 degree increase at the poles. The original article used a figure of 600 tonnes per year of soot deposited at around 40 km altitude, and a suggested residency time for the soot of 3-10 years. That range immediately caught my eye – what figure did THEY use? The extremes would produce vastly different outcomes for the soot level. So I did a few calculations:
Area of Earth 510,000,000 sq.km (though somewhat more at 40km altitude)
Amount of soot 600 tonnes p.a., persistence of soot in atmosphere 3-10 years (from article)
Assume 10 years residency (be generous) which leads to 10% reduction per year, stabilising after 20-odd years at around 6000 tonnes, when of course loss and addition balance.
Assume area covered is 1/5 of surface area = 102,000,000 sq. km
– giving an average of 6,000,000,000/102,000,000 = 58.8 grams per sq. km (about 2 ounces)
This would be the equivalent of 1/17th of a milligram per square metre, or a dot on paper from a not-too-sharp pencil (my estimation).
This an interesting contrast with the gigatons of soot and likely effects mentioned in this post. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
The SA article can be found and the American Geophysical Union press release .
My browser seems to have screwed the link tags:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=what-will-space-tourism-mean-for-cl-2010-10-23
http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2010/2010-34.shtml
1.) Identify problem.
2.) Seek money to hire experts to study problem, and propose anwers.
3.) Search for experts.
4.) The experts you locate happens to be the persons doing 1.), 2.), and 3.)? How handy!
Hey Anthony I missed your analysis on this post.
“~4.5 gigatons” – the paper, not behind a paywall, is gigagrams. The press release is wrong.
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.org/10/9689/2010/acp-10-9689-2010.pdf
Tim – emerging science is before they’ve decided what spin to put on it. Settled science is once they have figured the angle.
As I stated earlier, this is nonsense but it set me pondering if I were a scientist, what would I study? Observation and curiosity were the great drivers of discovery in the past but I see little of that in such papers as this one. Would I want to do this kind of science? No, because it is science as a job not as a vocation. We appear to have two levels of scientists, those who are looking into the next big questions out of inate interest and those that are filling time sheets. And it is the latter that need the press releases. Discover something big and the news will get out but all we get are these nebulous can/could scenarios wrapped in mumbo-jumbo and given a patina of science by acceptance from peers. A new lab coat does not a scientist make: be careful lest someone points out, as above, that you in fact are not wearing any clothes at all.
Gosh! Does this mean that diesel ships passing through the Arctic will need particulate filters just like my diesel car. Looks like a good news story to me with 25% reduction in fuel usage on some current shipping routes.
Wasn’t there a volcano in iceland that just blew millions of tons of dust and soot into that sensitive arctic environment? The soot emitted by ships would have to be absolutely insignificant by comparison.
By the way – if the ice has melted to the extent that ships are sailing through the arctic in large numbers then presumably there isn’t much ice left up there for the soot to settle on and melt, so I’m not sure what the issue is with soot.
Nuclear powered ships? … anyone?
Sorry, Mercahant Bankers!
Global mean temperature trends for 120 years:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:1910/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1940/to:1970/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2000/trend
Given this is true, then the authors are calling localized warming global warming. Yet, have we not been told the Medieval Warm Period was not global warming, but just localized warming?
I’m confused.[join the club]