This makes me wonder if the temperature dip in the 1970’s where everyone was worried about global cooling wasn’t partially driven by atmospheric aerosols. With the advent of pollution controls, certainly we have cleaner (and more optically transparent) skies since then.
From the National University of Ireland, Galway comes this:
New research initiated jointly by NUI Galway and the University of Helsinki reveals the true rate of greenhouse gas induced global warming has been masked by atmospheric aerosols (otherwise known as Particulate Matter), through their formation of reflective haze and cloud layers leading to an aerosol cooling effect.
The new investigations show that the present-day aerosol cooling effect will be strongly reduced by 2030 as more stringent air pollution abatements are implemented both worldwide and at the European scale and as advanced environmental technologies are utilised.
These actions are projected to increase the global temperature by 1°C and temperatures over Europe by up to 2-4°C depending on the severity of the action. This is one of the main research outcomes of the recently concluded EUCAARI (European Integrated project on Aerosol Cloud Climate and Air Quality Interaction) project funded by the European Commission.
The EUCAARI project, originally initiated by Professor Colin O’Dowd at NUI Galway’s Centre for Climate and Air Pollution Studies, who resided on the project’s management team, and led by Professor Markku Kulmala of the University of Helsinki, has provided new understanding of the impacts of aerosols and trace gases on clouds and climate.
According to Professor O’Dowd:“The quantification of the effect of aerosols on the radiative balance (cooling or heating) of the planet has been one of the most urgent tasks to underpin more informed projections of future climate change. Now that we have this data we need to reinforce European political decision-making to develop new strategies and implementation plans for global air quality monitoring and to take Europe a leading role in developing and applying environmental technologies. Furthermore, it is urgent that higher-resolution EU-scale projections are conducted using a new generation of regional models nested within the global models.”
EUCAARI has been the most extensive atmospheric aerosol research project in Europe so far. The total budget of the project was € 15 million, of which € 10 million was provided by the European Commission Framework Programme 6. In all, 48 research institutes from 24 countries participated in this project over the period 2007-2010. The project has led to significantly more information on the whole physics background related to aerosol formation and impacts at all scales; from nanoscale to global, and from milliseconds to centuries.
The project performed extensive studies from ground-based, aircraft and satellite platforms, not only in Europe, but also in China, South-Africa, Brazil and India (i.e. significant developing countries). These studies have improved the theoretical understanding of the aerosol life-cycle, enabling scientists to make major improvements in climate and air pollution models and present new air pollution scenarios over Europe.
Professor O’Dowd added: “The positive impacts of aerosols are partially off-setting global warming while the negative effects impact on public health. Abatement of the negative health impact is complicated due to the diversity of sources, even within Europe.”
EUCAARI found that the reduction in ammonia emissions is one of the most effective ways to reduce aerosol mass concentrations in Europe. Reduction in nitric oxides is also effective, but might lead to higher ozone levels, thereby leading to another negative impact on air quality. Reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions will reduce particulate air pollution especially in the Eastern Mediterranean area.
Reduction of organic aerosol concentrations is a lot more challenging and will require reductions of gas and aerosol emissions from transportation and biomass burning. Furthermore, it is now shown that a large fraction of organic aerosols in Europe is of modern origin (as opposed to fossil fuel origins), for which the main sources are biogenic secondary organic aerosol (boreal forests), biomass burning and primary biogenic aerosol particles.”
Professor O’Dowd concluded: “All these emission sources are expected to respond to climate change, although we are presently unable to gauge the strength of the multitude of feedback mechanisms involved. The uncertainties in feedback highlight the need for improved Earth System Climate models to encapsulate feedback processes generally lacking in current projections.”
-Ends-Author: Press Office, NUI Galway
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Braddles;
Isn’t he reason there’s been more warming in the 1980s in the Northern Hemisphere, because there’s been more burning of wood and other biomass from China, India and Indonesia over that time?
The Asian brown cloud was ever-present year after year, while the Indonesians burnt the rainforests to make way for the palm oil plantations to feed the demand for palm oil from Europe.
Brazil was burning the rainforests , during the same period to plant soy crops etc, and it still is, but that produced less soot.
There doesn’t seem to be any mention of black carbon in the story of this research, —although they did mention aerosols from burning of biomass from China, India, Brazil etc, but seemingly in the context of cooling aerosols.
The thing is, NASA research [ Dr Drew Shindell and others, including James Hansen ], has concluded that ~50% of the Arctic, glacier and permafrost warming is from black carbon—and they testified to Congress on that and on the urgency of mitigation of that
http://www.igsd.org/documents/PR_JacobsonBCstudy_29July2010_000.pdf
The advice:
[ “We will have very little leverage over climate in the next couple of decades if we’re just looking at carbon dioxide,” Shindell said. “If we want to try to stop the Arctic summer sea ice from melting completely over the next few decades, we’re much better off looking at aerosols and ozone.”]
So are these other researchers taking into account the warming aerosols , mitigation of which will stop some of the warming—or are they only taking into account the cooling aerosols, mitigation of which will have a net warming effect, and would be useful for warmists once again to say ‘it’s worse than we thought’?
I can’t understand why there’s so little written and spoken about the black carbon warming effect, when they’re obsessing about loss of the ice—-if they want to stop the melt.
2Kevin wrote: “Is it just me, or is everything viewed as a no win situation by environmentalists?”
I call it AAS – Asymmetric Apocalypse Syndrome. The vocabulary of scaremongering is much richer than that of, er, finding no cause for alarm (what’s the word I’m looking for?). Timebombs, ozone holes, biblical floods, melting icecaps, acid rain, global climate disruption, carnage, plague…. all rich colourful words to strike fear into the people.
What are the chances of newspaper headlines saying “Coral Reefs in Robust Health” or “Reservoir Water: Nice and Pure” or “Next July We Will Not Collide with Mars”?
There used to be strange individuals wearing sandwich boards proclaiming “The End is Nigh!” I’ll maybe try reviving this practice in my town: my sandwich board will read “The End is Not Nigh!” Might get some funny looks, though…
So, essentially, now we should worry of the same emission polutants volcanoes spew out in the sea and air. But not only that, we’re supposed also paying for research that leads to us being able to control those emissions with political policies where EU is starring in a leading roll.
How is it that when a volcanoe blast stuff into the atmosphere it has to be of a certain magnitude to reach a global impact, but not so for the man made combustion engine who just has to idle to make acid rain on the other side of the planet?
Chas says:
July 1, 2011 at 1:42 am
According to a Metoffice analysis, annual Sunshine Hours (Campbell Stokes) are the highest they have ever been in SE and Central England. They rose steeply in the 1980′s (see Fig 15) in:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/about/UK_climate_trends.pdf
———————————————————–
Well thats interesting…..so why have we had 4 (maybe soon to be 5) of the coldest, and most miserable summers I can recall, in Southern England? Are increasing sunshine hours related to orbital changes?
On BBC Breakfast on Monday this week, there was a piece about temperatures in the UK (unfortunately I did not catch the beginning of it) where the interviewee, who seemed to have been recording daily temperatures for 30+ years, was asked about the current hot spell. I think he said that we were about to have 4 or 5 days in a row, where the temperatures were going to peak at 30C. This was, he said, exceptional in the last few years….BUT…. was nothing like the famous 1976 summer when we had 18 (?) days in June, which exceeded 30C.
I think at this point the BBC interviewer decided he should change the subject….
I expect the interviewee was taken away and shot, as soon as the piece ended…
2kevin says:
July 1, 2011 at 1:07 am
Is it just me, or is everything viewed as a no win situation by environmentalists? ))
Thats the problem with being part of a larger demographic phenomenom. The good ol Marxist Hippie trash of the 60’s & 70’s and their sycophants can only see the world through eye’s that were trained to hate the society they were raised in. Remember, these Eco clowns were the Uni students who on graduation took up work that was a continuation of their training. So they became the sociopaths that are demanding the whole world bend over or, the world will end in fire & brimstone. Standard religious ratbags. Nothing new here.
regards
rbateman: There is a detectable fever associated with living under a dark cloud of environmental doom.
One could go Enviro Mental.
Sweet!
David Suzuki was talking about global dimming quite a lot in the mid 1990s. This was one of the reasons I switched from being an alarmist to a skeptic. I wanted to know how much of the warming was due to reduced aerosols. The fact that the IPCC largely ignored this issue frustrated me at first. — John M Reynolds
Hmm. I thought the cooling in the 70’s was pretty much proven from sulphate-based aerosols. It was all that smog work that led to the proliferation of atmospheric science. But then I’m a child of the current atmospheric chemical thinking and might have swallowed that line a little uncritically! I do know enough about aerosol chemistry and physics to know it could have an effect and that it’s hard to study it in a real-world system, they’re sticky, react with surfaces and allow all kinds of seemingly improbably chemistry to happen. All these annoying feedbacks and cross overs. So much easier just to model it. It’s a shame if the science is settled we feel the need to look harder at this stuff though. you’d think at least the grant bodies would swallow the line?
Of course aerosols cause cooling, and of course that was the reason why some (a minority) in the 70s were predicting cooling. We’ve known of the cooling effect of aerosols for some time, though our ability to accurately measure their radiative forcing value is limited (Hansen has been pushing for a relatively inexpensive piece of satellite equipment that would do just that for more than 20 years). I thought the cooling effect of aerosols was well known by those who follow the climate issue. It is somewhat ironic that the success of the Clean Air Act was to remove much of the aerosol and particulate matter (ond ozone) pollution from the atmosphere. We knew both the cooling effect of aerosols and the warming effect of GHGs in the 1970s. The scientific debate then was over which would become a dominant forcing. By a 7-to-1 margin, peer reviewed articles from that decade which made a predicition one way or the other were predicting warming (a couple mainstream magazine covers notwithstanding). One of the proposed ‘fixes’ for AGW (short-sighted in my view) is to inject additional aerosols into the atmosphere).
This sentence is especially revealing:
“All these emission sources are expected to respond to climate change, ”
For these people, warming is not only unquestionably real, it’s the ONLY REALITY. No other causes are conceivable. Everything that happens in the world is either a cause or a result of warming.
Perhaps the use of electronic communications devices are now hiding the cooling..
Global temperature does not exist. The sooner science takes this red herring out of the literature and stops making the general public fear about a mythical number the better.
Its frustrating, as a member of the ‘sceptic’ community, to write a whole book on this issue that so few people in this community appear to read! As far as I know, Anthony, you have never mentioned it! Any reasons? In ‘Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory’ you will find all of this rehearsed with full references to the peer-reviewed literature. You wonder whether the ‘dip’ from 1970 wasn’t created by aerosols….it was, but not by human sources as in the IPCC range of models (mostly sulphates) – see below:
yes, to Henry P. – there is clear evidence that the recent global warming is largely natural – and it comes from three papers in Science during 2005 (Wild, Pinker and Wielicki – referenced in Chill) which found:
* that ‘global dimming’ was truly global and occurred in pollution free zones such as the southern Pacific – this was later admitted in IPCC-2007, though well-buried, hence all the models that used anthropogenic sulphur to explain the dip were erroneous;
* the ‘brightening’ was also global and even occurred in China, despite the pollution there – and it began BEFORE the major initiatives to reduce sulphur emissions took effect…these were only ever of local significance in relation to atmospheric budgets – the brightening (increased insolation at the surface of the earth and oceans) occurred also in cloud-free measurements, hence indicating increased transparency of the atmosphere (there were also lower cloud levels…4% reducation from 1980-2000).
* sulphur abatement was in any case only regional, the emissions of Asia made up for the reductions in the West….global sulphur flatlines from 1980-2000, and in any case is it is emitted effectively at about 100m it is not likely to affect the relation of atmospheric/surface temperatures as in the case of a major volcanic eruption (as per the models).
The 1950-1980 ‘dip’ in global temperatures and the erroneous treatment in models represents a huge error on the part of ‘warmist’ thinking and modelling, yet it is effectively covered up…even more effectively when none of the critics reads the critical science!!!
You will find detailed analysis of the surface insolation data…due to lower reflective cloud cover and more transparent atmosphere, there was a roughly 4 watts/square metre excess Short Wave radiation running from 1980-2000 compared to 1 watt/square metre Long Wave computed for CO2. Being generous, the extra GHG could account for 20% of the warming – unless you argue that CO2 managed to thin the clouds as a feedback…which has been argued, despite the improbability. If that were the case, then post 2000 you would expect the trend to continue – it did not, cloud cover came back by 2%, ocean heat storage flatlined and so did sea-level rise.
And regarding the reason why the northern hemisphere heats up more than the south – that is also in the book: it is because 80% of global warming heat is held in the upper 200m of the ocean and then released to land…to be ‘held’ it has to be stored and this takes place in two major gyres in the north Atlantic and north Pacific…these are formed as the ocean’s coriolis force is constrained by the northern continents. In the souther hemisphere there is no such constraint and the circumpolar current dissipates the heat as it moves southward from the equatorial regions.
This heat storage is therefore not global, but regional. It is subject to long term cycles such as in the MWP/LIA dictated I suspect by the location of the jetstream, insulating cloud, and heat-extractive vortices (cyclones). The location of the jetstream is sensitive to the solar magnetic cycles as a proxy for UV output.
Carbon dioxide is, of course, a GHG and will contribute to these natural cycles but there is little empirical evidence that it amplified natural cycles in the Holocene, and no statistical treatement yet published to show that it did so during the glacial/deglacial episodes either – its effect is too weak. As we enter what may become the next Maunder Minimum (also treated in the book), CO2 ‘s weak effect might just save us from tipping into the next ice-age! But don’t try and tell Greenpeace!
An alternative interpretation would be that the “unprecedented rate of temperature rise since the 1970’s” was actually part of a natural fluctuation, which was artificially suppressed by particulate pollution – take away the particulates, and the temperature returns to the natural fluctuation curve that’s been in place since WW2
just a thought like!
Braddles says July 1, 2011 at 12:22 am ” If the particulates theory is viable, there would need to be obsevable regional effects.”
That assumes there is no rapid dispersal of the aerosols
China, India, Russia, etc don’t give one squat what the EU says……
When the GCM’s do not forecast sea level, it’s because the sea floor is sinking and the land is rising….
When GCM’s do not forecast the temperature, it’s because of the sun, oceans, whatever
When GCM’s can’t find the troposphere heat, it’s hiding
When GCM’s do not forecast the snow, it’s warmcold wetdry….
Now it’s dust in the air………………………………
Every day we learn they don’t have a clue, can’t even figure out what’s happening right now….
…and claiming certainty about predicting the future
The only problem with the theory that it was aerosols that led to the cooling seen in the 70’s is that the areas with the most aerosols did not see the greatest cooling.
“The uncertainties in feedback highlight the need for improved Earth System Climate models to encapsulate feedback processes generally lacking in current projections”
I could have sworn the alarmists have been claiming that the climate models are perfect? After all, the “accurately predicted” past climates based on past data. If there are such significant unknowns, how could the models have made such “accurate” predictions. And why should we believe their “projections” of the future?
Tony B (another one) says:
July 1, 2011 at 3:47 am
“gaken away”
Is that a British thing?
rbateman: There is a detectable fever associated with living under a dark cloud of environmental doom.
One could go Enviro Mental.
Over on Junkscience there is an article on how environmentalists are driving themselves crazy. Written by a psychologist who has been treating prominent environmentalists.
Here in the US, the something like 90% of the pollution has already been removed from the air. I suspect that Europe is similar. How much more reduction do they expect to get between now and 2030?
That assumes there is no rapid dispersal of the aerosols
—
What would be the mechanism behind this rapid dispersal? Remember these pollutants are confined to the lowest level of the atmosphere. Also remember that the first rain storm will almost completely wash these pollutants out of the atmosphere.
Good stuff, Peter Taylor.
Anthony, aerosols have always been the fudge factor and you’ve just tasted a perfected recipe.
=========================
Hmmmmm! Trying to figure out then why the southern hemisphere, with a much smaller share of global industry, showed less warming than the more polluted north during the 20th century!
@Anthony
“This makes me wonder if the temperature dip in the 1970′s where everyone was worried about global cooling wasn’t partially driven by atmospheric aerosols. With the advent of pollution controls, certainly we have cleaner (and more optically transparent) skies since then.”
I wrote the same thing here months ago except I phrased it more like:
If it weren’t for the environmentalist whackos ginning up an acid rain catastrophe back in the 1970’s we’d still be burning our fossil fuels as God intended with greenhouse CO2 accompanied by anti-greenhouse sulfate particulates which nullify the GHG component. But noooooo… those sulfate particulates were evil incarnate so now they are filtered out of smokestacks and tailpipes.