From the University of Washington some apparent confusion about what sulfates look like.
Injecting sulfate particles into stratosphere won’t fully offset climate change
IMAGE:A polar bear walks along an expanse of open water at the edge of Hudson Bay near Churchill, Manitoba, in 2011. The bears need pack ice to hunt for…Click here for more information.
As the reality and the impact of climate warming have become clearer in the last decade, researchers have looked for possible engineering solutions – such as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or directing the sun’s heat away from Earth – to help offset rising temperatures.
New University of Washington research demonstrates that one suggested method, injecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere, would likely achieve only part of the desired effect, and could carry serious, if unintended, consequences.
The lower atmosphere already contains tiny sulfate and sea salt particles, called aerosols, that reflect energy from the sun into space. Some have suggested injecting sulfate particles directly into the stratosphere to enhance the effect, and also to reduce the rate of future warming that would result from continued increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
But a UW modeling study shows that sulfate particles in the stratosphere will not necessarily offset all the effects of future increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Additionally, there still is likely to be significant warming in regions where climate change impacts originally prompted a desire for geoengineered solutions, said Kelly McCusker, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences.
The modeling study shows that significant changes would still occur because even increased aerosol levels cannot balance changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation brought on by higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
“There is no way to keep the climate the way it is now. Later this century, you would not be able to recreate present-day Earth just by adding sulfate aerosols to the atmosphere,” McCusker said.
She is lead author of a paper detailing the findings published online in December in the Journal of Climate. Coauthors are UW atmospheric sciences faculty David Battisti and Cecilia Bitz.
Using the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Community Climate System Model version 3 and working at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the researchers found that there would, in fact, be less overall warming with a combination of increased atmospheric aerosols and increased carbon dioxide than there would be with just increased carbon dioxide.
They also found that injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere might even suppress temperature increases in the tropics enough to prevent serious food shortages and limit negative impacts on tropical organisms in the coming decades.
But temperature changes in polar regions could still be significant. Increased winter surface temperatures in northern Eurasia could have serious ramifications for Arctic marine mammals not equipped to adapt quickly to climate change. In Antarctic winters, changes in surface winds would also bring changes in ocean circulation with potentially significant consequences for ice sheets in West Antarctica.
Even with geoengineering, there still could be climate emergencies – such as melting ice sheets or loss of polar bear habitat – in the polar regions, the scientists concluded. They added that the odds of a “climate surprise” would be high because the uncertainties about the effects of geoengineering would be added to existing uncertainties about climate change.
The research was funded by the Tamaki Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
It’s all a matter of scale, “in character, more or less” fall apart whether its a year or 100 millennia is the only question; the scientific term is sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Edward Norton Lorenz an MIT educated mathematician and meteorologist discovered this while developing computer models of a simplified planetary weather system
So where do seals go when the pack ice is thin?
R. Gates says:
January 25, 2012 at 11:56 am
Once you perturb a complex system, no amount of band-aid after the fact tampering can set things back to where they were. Decades of climate effects from the 40% increase in CO2 is already “baked into the cake” so to speak, and trying to turn off the oven won’t undue the baking that is already underway.
The atmosphere is a heat engine. If more throttle is given, it revs up, take off throttle, revs down. See it daily & seasonally. There’s no “baking” going on, and nothing to do with cakes whatsoever.
Gates, you’re a piece of work…
Latitude says:
January 25, 2012 at 1:34 pm
@R.Gates
What are your plans now that it’s over?
Cry-o-preservation? For eventual thawing in a boiling ocean, of course. The I-toldya-so’s will be sweet.
“there still is likely to be significant warming in regions where climate change impacts originally prompted a desire for geoengineered solutions,”
What regions? I’d love to know what they are because it is freaking impossible to locate any such areas because there has been no warming in 16 years! Only an egregious ignorance of how various regions work would lead these idiots to think that there are such areas.
It is patently arrogant to assume that we influence climate match at all, let alone to the level they would like to think. But, then, to also assume that we can fix it by geoengineering, with little understanding of the consequences and effects is just stupid.
As CO2 is harmless, beneficial, and has no downside, NOT causing changes in climate, it is a given that geoengineering efforts, if effective, would have undesired consequences, as there is nothing to counter in the first place and would have a stand alone effect.
So, the bottom line is that we have not been changing climate with CO2, but they want to change climate by geoengineering. I say, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it!
After all of the hand-wringing about altering climate by human activities, they want to actually do exactly what they are all upset about. However, they want to kick us directly to an ice age.
“Did it occur to you that points of stability can exist in complex systems?”
It is the understanding of those points that we relate mathematically.
And to be fair to R. Gates, I think his inference, was that some understanding of them is wrong.
We are rapidly, with a new perspective, codifying those very points of stability, that will allow us a more complex understand of the system as a whole.
R Gates,
You say “once you perturb a complex system…..” When the final wash is over our climate will be found to operate on simple principals. Research mostly has been intense on secondary principals that are the result or the eddy currents of the first principals.
Some what like trying to understand a forest, by the intense investigation of the leaves of one tree, and ignoring the forest, recent studies have given me some heart, that some are now starting to look at the forest.
R Gates – “Decades of climate effects from the 40% increase in CO2 is already “baked into the cake” so to speak,”
Are you calling this cake half baked?
(+/- 10%)
“”They concluded that it’s simply natural variability, augmented by increasing sulfate emissions from dramatically growing coal consumption by China.””
Nope, couldn’t be a natural phenomenon, as man are so powerful , we must be some cause of it.
The ice melts off of Hudson Bay every summer, but the folks in Churchill, Manitoba are up to their arm pits in polar bears. Every documentary film maker who wants to make a tear jerker about polar bears goes to Churchill for that reason. The bears must be eating at McDonalds.
If this is an example of University of Washington research, somebody should work on pulling their accreditation.
I wonder if these researchers even know what sulfates (sulphates for those in the UK and Oz) are? One good definition is a salt of sulfuric acid. That would be solids such as ammonium sulfate, copper sulfate, and etc. In the atmosphere the EPA classes these as particulates, and has ambient air standards for the amount allowed in the air. Liquid aerosols such as sulfuric acid itself are also measured as particulates.
And how do sulfates get into the air? A lot of them are formed by the conversion of SO2 in stack gases to the SO3 radial in sunlight. The SO3 combines with the water vapor in the air to form sulfuric acid- which comes out the air as- you guessed it- “acid rain”. Which is why the EPA has ambient air standards for SO2.
So for 40 years the EPA has been trying to get sulfates out the air, because they are unhealthy. And they have been successful at it. The EPA maps of those U.S. Counties that exceed the standards show very few counties exceeding the standard. See:
http://www.epa.gov/oar/oaqps/greenbk/index.html
And now climate researchers want to put sulfates back in the air to solve a non-existent problem? Madness! But is does keep the grant money flowing.
“So where do seals go when the pack ice is thin?”
I dunno. If you see a crowd of Polar Bears, or of Inuits, ask them.
Scott Brim says:
January 25, 2012 at 12:31 pm
R. Gates says:
January 25, 2012 at 11:56 am
Once you perturb a complex system, no amount of band-aid after the fact tampering can set things back to where they were …
===========================
Several million years ago, Mother Nature, in an apparent fit of reckless tampering with the earth’s climate system, initiated a set of climatic perturbations which resulted in a series of ices ages, each one with a cooling and warming cycle.
You mean to tell us that through the course of these multiple cooling and warming cycles, there was no point in time where the earth’s climate was similar in character, more or less, to a corresponding point in some previous cooling-warming cycle?
—————
Your analogy makes no sense. The climate responds to forcings. “Mother Nature” is a human created anthropomorphism, as is the the notion of “reckless tampering”. Some forcings on the climate system are gradual and cycle back and forth over long periods of time, while some are rapid, resulting in sudden changes to climate. In all cases, the Earth is never the same way twice, and the law of entropy and times arrow will guarantee that no two periods of Earth’s history are ever exactly the same as the conditions, arrangement of the continents, output of the sun, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere are never ever exactly the same way twice. The best thing you can hope for in studying the climate are close analogues between two periods.
In the case of the rapid climate changes, which, because they are such a shock to the climate system, they can also be quite violent and disruptive of course. One can think of events such a comet strike, a large supervolcanic eruption, etc as perfect examples. The world is rapidly changed and never the same again. The question remains open as to what the rapid build up in greenhouse gases will bring as the earth system repsonses to this have only begun. In any case, I do not support any sort of geoengineering attempts to “fix” things, as we don’t even know what might be broken or the unintended consequences of such a fix.
slow to follow says:
January 25, 2012 at 3:36 pm
R Gates – “Decades of climate effects from the 40% increase in CO2 is already “baked into the cake” so to speak,”
Are you calling this cake half baked?
——–
Yeah, something like that. We’ve got a lot of earth system changes still to be played out from the greenhouse gases already added, and of course, we are still inching up the forcing thermostat year by year.
beng says:
January 25, 2012 at 3:12 pm
R. Gates says:
January 25, 2012 at 11:56 am
Once you perturb a complex system, no amount of band-aid after the fact tampering can set things back to where they were. Decades of climate effects from the 40% increase in CO2 is already “baked into the cake” so to speak, and trying to turn off the oven won’t undue the baking that is already underway.
The atmosphere is a heat engine. If more throttle is given, it revs up, take off throttle, revs down. See it daily & seasonally. There’s no “baking” going on, and nothing to do with cakes whatsoever.
————–
Sorry you fail to understand the momentum of the climate system can take decades and even centuries to work back to equilibrium once a forcing has been initiated on the scope of a 40% increase in CO2, and similar large increases in methane and N2O. The analogy to a cake was a bit allegorical, but perhaps such things are lost on certain people.
Jeremy says:
January 25, 2012 at 2:38 pm
R.Gates – so you state that are against hospitals and against anti-biotics, as this all breeds resistance.
——–
Never stated I was against hospitals. Please quote me correctly, or don’t attempt to quote me at all.
R Gates is concerned about unintended consequences,
when his Lefties allies in Congress have been on a 100-year rampage
of unintended consequences of follies from rent control to high tax rates.
Hell, the unintended consequences of Big Government of the last century
has been a reduction of present GNP by at least a factor of 10,
to say nothing of rampant illiteracy, illegitimacy, and fatherlessness.
One thing all Lefties never care a whit about is unintended consequences.
If hysteria takes hold and aerosols start being placed on purpose, those responsible may end up being mass murderers of billions of people. We’re already nearing the end of the interglacial (geologically speaking) this would really be tempting fate and could pull in the end point by thousands of years.
I think that we should take this research very seriously and listen to what this young researcher has to say.
If I’m not very mistaken, her main conclusion is that there is more to this world’s glories and mysteries, dear Horatio, than you have ever dreamed about. More even than the quantity of yon aerosols, forsooth. So DO NOT, under pain of expulsion from the great cult of AGW ….. Do not go meddling with things that you do not understand in any which way.
now who could quarrel with that?
R. Gates says:
January 25, 2012 at 11:56 am
Take a closed container of air at room temperature and inject into it sufficient CO2 to raise the CO2 concentration to 5,000 PPM. After two weeks time what will be the temperature inside the container? After one month? One year?
Human-induced versus Natural Changes
The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 and the subsequent effects seen in the stratosphere from all those natural sulphates happened despite the hand-ringing of R Gates and others in any event.
Nature’s mighty inventions in the stratosphere in form of Krakatoa, Tambora, Pinatubo, (unlike the FRAUDULENT computer-modelled CONCOCTIONS of Mann, Tremberth & Co) actually result in observable phenomena with verifiable consequences.
Personally, I still believe that events are not random in the least but behind all the events that we witness there is a determining and directing hand.
As Einstein put it so eloquently, God does not play dice with the universe.
With undying gratitude to Newton, Darwin and Einstein, mankind can understand the phenomena we witness.
We not longer have to fear the wrath of Zeus or sacrifice humans for the sake of soil fertility.
The extent of nature’s interventions are in most cases many orders of magnitude greater than the pathetic and ultimately futile proposals of the self-serving warmista freakshow and their hangers-on such as their fervent supporters, including Lehman CEO, Dick Fuld.
When all else fails, there is always the carbon trading fall-back position to fleece a few more sheep.
The opportunity to pick the pockets of the unwary was to good for the present Australian Government to resist.
Next year, the sheep of Perth, who have not cottoned onto the extent of the fraud perpetrated upon them, will find that they cannot run their air-conditioners because of the extortionate carbon tax on electricity and the subsidies being paid for supposedly green power.
The warmistas are purporting to solve a problem that clearly does not exist except in very localised circumstances in the real world. The IGNoble prize for cherry picking data is richly deserved.
Anybody remember King Canute and his claim to fame?
Unfortunately some forms of Human Bio-engineering in the form of deforestation, stripping the world’s oceans of its fish, unsustainable industrial agricultural practices, air pollution resulting in the formation of the Asian Brown Cloud and the list goes on, are truly catastrophic!
Those who adapt to the coming cold will survive. The mammoths, unlike their cousins the elephants, despite their woolly coats did not make it.
The cake as R. Gates has correctly pointed out is already baked.
The bed has been made and for better or worse you have no choice other than to sleep in it.
The cold is well on its way. Be prepared.
Robert in Perth (soon to be back in South Africa) says:
January 25, 2012 at 7:15 pm
Human-induced versus Natural Changes
The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 and the subsequent effects seen in the stratosphere from all those natural sulphates happened despite the hand-ringing of R Gates and others in any event.
____
Sorry, but I wasn’t around in 1883, and had I been, I’m not the type for “hand-ringing”. Yes, natural forcings from volcanoes, the sun, and ENSO have relatively short-term impacts on climate. But the largest and most rapid increase in CO2 in 800,000 years, and likely several million years, is a much different kind and degree of forcing, with longer-term impact that will be felt in the climate system for far longer than even Krakatoa.
Interstellar Bill says:
January 25, 2012 at 5:26 pm
R Gates is concerned about unintended consequences,
when his Lefties allies in Congress have been on a 100-year rampage
of unintended consequences of follies from rent control to high tax rates.
Hell, the unintended consequences of Big Government of the last century
has been a reduction of present GNP by at least a factor of 10,
to say nothing of rampant illiteracy, illegitimacy, and fatherlessness.
One thing all Lefties never care a whit about is unintended consequences.
______
While you prattle on, let those who are wise see that some of the most profitable companies in the world right now…Google & Apple, are run mainly by “lefties” and all those liberal types from California, who know both how to make tons of money, and that the old models and old ways of thinking are just that…Old. Moreover, the notions of “liberal and conservative” are also old ways of thinking, and those who continue to use them indicate that they just don’t get the way the world is changing…just as those who still refer to China as “Red China”. It’s all about how to make money, and the “lefties” seem to be doing quite well at it, thank you very much. It took a person with a brilliant mind and a new way of thinking to become the youngest self-made Billionare in history. Facebook was a new way of thinking about what is possible and how people want to live.
Looks like time to drop this thread–all of the useful information had been exchanges and we are down to the mindless drivel.