From Los Alamos National Laboratory:
Wildfires may contribute more to global warming than previously predicted
They suggest that fire emissions could contribute a lot more to the observed climate warming than current estimates show.
Haze of smoke emanating from the 2011 Las Conchas, NM fire.
Particle analysis shows “tar ball” effect is significant
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., July 9, 2013—Wildfires produce a witch’s brew of carbon-containing particles, as anyone downwind of a forest fire can attest. A range of fine carbonaceous particles rising high into the air significantly degrade air quality, damaging human and wildlife health, and interacting with sunlight to affect climate. But measurements taken during the 2011 Las Conchas fire near Los Alamos National Laboratory show that the actual carbon-containing particles emitted by fires are very different than those used in current computer models, providing the potential for inaccuracy in current climate-modeling results.
“We’ve found that substances resembling tar balls dominate, and even the soot is coated by organics that focus sunlight,” said senior laboratory scientist Manvendra Dubey, “Both components can potentially increase climate warming by increased light absorption.”
The Las Conchas fire emissions findings underscore the need to provide a framework to include realistic representation of carbonaceous aerosols in climate model, the researchers say. They suggest that fire emissions could contribute a lot more to the observed climate warming than current estimates show.
“The fact that we are experiencing more fires and that climate change may increase fire frequency underscores the need to include these specialized particles in the computer models, and our results show how this can be done,” Dubey said.
Aerosol samples revealed “tar balls” in the skies
Conventional wisdom is that the fire-driven particles contain black carbon or soot that absorbs sunlight to warm the climate, and organic carbon or smoke that reflects sunlight to cool the climate. But in a paper just published in Nature Communications the scientists from Los Alamos and Michigan Technological University analyzed the morphology and composition of the specific aerosols emitted by the Las Conchas fire.
Las Conchas, which started June 26, 2011, was the largest fire in NM history at the time, burning 245 square miles. Immediately after Los Alamos National Laboratory reopened to scientists and staff, the team set up an extensive aerosol sampling system to monitor the smoke from the smoldering fire for more than 10 days.
High-tech tools enable analysis of smoke samples
Dubey, along with postdoctoral fellow Allison Aiken and post-bachelor’s student Kyle Gorkowski, coordinated with Michigan Tech professor Claudio Mazzoleni (a former Los Alamos Director’s fellow) and graduate student Swarup China to perform this study.
The team used field-emission scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X ray spectroscopy to analyze the aerosol samples and determined that spherical carbonaceous particles called tar balls were 10 times more abundant than soot.
Furthermore, the bare soot particles, which are composite porous fractal structures made of tiny spherical carbon, are modified significantly by the organics emitted by the fire. About 96 percent of the soot from the fire is coated by other organics substances, with 50 percent being totally coated. Furthermore, the complexity of the soot can be categorized into 4 morphological structures as “embedded,” “partly coated,” “with inclusions” and “bare.”
What was missing from the modeling and why it matters
Why is this important for climate? Dubey noted that, “Most climate assessment models treat fire emissions as a mixture of pure soot and organic carbon aerosols that offset the respective warming and cooling effects of one another on climate. However Las Conchas results show that tar balls exceed soot by a factor of 10 and the soot gets coated by organics in fire emissions, each resulting in more of a warming effect than is currently assumed.”
“Tar balls can absorb sunlight at shorter blue and ultraviolet wavelengths (also called brown carbon due to the color) and can cause substantial warming,” he said. “Furthermore, organic coatings on soot act like lenses that focus sunlight, amplifying the absorption and warming by soot by a factor of 2 or more. This has a huge impact on how they should be treated in computer models.”
This experimental research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
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Oh my. So from observations of one fire they assume
that “tar balls” predominate. In all fires.
Hey geniuses! The forests around Los Conchas are all conifers! They
put out sap that easily burns into tar. The huge Ponderosa pines there
put out lots of it.
I’m not impressed. Now if they also had data from a fire in a hardwood
forest, and it also showed “tar balls”, I might buy this more.
Not quite appropos the tar b*llocks, but on a related subjet, ie the burning of huge swathes of rainforest in recent years:
Has there been any research at all into any correlation between the cutting down and/or burning of huge wathes of rainforest in South America and Indonesia (for example), and the rise in carbon dioxide levels?
Surely before this destruction, these enormous forests – which as a shoolchild I was taught to think of as the ‘lungs of the world’ – absorbed vast amounts of CO2 which they converted to oxygen. The wholesale destruction of these forests in the past generation, as well as various largescale wildfires around the world, must substantially change the proportion of the trace gas CO2 being absorbed by vegetation, ditto the O2 .
I had the following sent in a publicity email today by a food activist site: I’m no scientist but if what they write is anywhere near the truth, maybe here is another way in which the earth’s atmosphere is changing – adding to CO2 levels – which may not be incorporated into the models:
” … The rainforests of Indonesia are an ecological treasure: They’re home to critically endangered species like the orangutan and the Sumatran tiger, and they also store more carbon than the entire world emits in 9 years. Now snack and cereal giant Kellogg’s has made a huge deal with a company that’s wiping these forests off the map.
Kellogg’s has just launched a partnership with Wilmar International, the world’s largest palm oil trader. The palm oil industry has had a devastating impact on the forests of Southeast Asia, wiping out millions of hectares of forest and releasing hundreds of millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year. And even among palm oil companies, Wilmar is especially terrible: Satellite evidence recently proved that it’s been illegally logging on protected forests for decades.
Wilmar’s record is so bad that Newsweek named it the least sustainable corporation in the world — worse than Exxon Mobil, TransCanada, and even Monsanto…. “
How about mold spores and pollen, while we’re at it.
Chris R. says:
July 10, 2013 at 12:55 pm
Oh my. So from observations of one fire they assume
that “tar balls” predominate. In all fires.
Hey geniuses! The forests around Los Conchas are all conifers! They
put out sap that easily burns into tar. The huge Ponderosa pines there
put out lots of it.
I’m not impressed. Now if they also had data from a fire in a hardwood
forest, and it also showed “tar balls”, I might buy this more.
====
Another reason to keep reading WUWT: a wide variety of general and specific knowledge.
Chris R – many thanks!
Auto
Shouldn’t the question be “What does climate modeling handle well?”
Just all the O2 forcibly separated from the (immense!) primordial pool of CO2 by plants trying to rejoin its original partner. Carbon.
They need to factor in Mt. Charleston (Spring Mountain Range) burning just outside of Las Vegas where I live. An equivalent of over 14,000 football fields are already engulfed. It’s still out of control. It was started by a lightning strike (not global warming).
If i may add to the the comments about Australian bushfires -yes that’s what we call them. As a young man in western Queensland on a property 900 square miles we had a number of bushfires in 1955-6. One burnt nearly half the property; the fuel, Spinifex grass, is highly combustible. Early explorers frequently commented on aborigines association with bushfires the use of which is part of their culture. Of course they have only been on our large continent for 40,000 years – burning, burning. Cheers from sunny Sydney.
First of all – the science is settled. That’s why so many papers claim to show something new, unprecedented, etc. that greatly impacts our understanding of climate and has enormous implications. But somehow none of these new things are in the “settled” climate models. (Yes, I know that you can’t put something in a model until it’s discovered.) My point is that it is stupid to say it is settled. And even more stupid to think that you will get accurate “projections” from models that leave out so much.
Gary Pearse says:
“The fire, for example is stored sunshine from a previous time and naturally it adds to the heating of the atmosphere, no matter what the smoke does or doesn’t do.”
I like this way of looking at it. If timber is an energy bank, which it seems to be, how significant is it? Unfortunately, some deforestation is happening. While we know the Atmosphere and the Oceans probably dwarf the ability of trees and grasslands to absorb and release energy, we might phrase the question as, Man versus Plants. Who has the bigger effect? And to make tinfoil hat comment, Who says the plants adapting to any change in the climate, aren’t on our side? Are they going to suicide themselves to prove the Alarmists correct?
Yep, glad you caught up with that one Anthony, it’s one of the feedback mechanisms that dd to the climate change process, to deny forests burning don’t affect climate would be preposterous. On their own they wouldn’t do much harm other than to the species living there, but added to the already excessive CO2 levels, twice what they were a century ago, this has to be seen as an extra feed in, and most likely caused by increased temperatures and thus dryness andsusceptibility to fire. Seems like a no-brainer, but plenty of no-brains seem to have difficulty just with the concept of carbon dioxide being anything but a good thing.
[snip . . for that to be carried here you would need to add references to who is being quoted . . mod]
More on Salby:
After many years of operation of the first company, the subject created a second, for-profit company that acted as a subcontractor to the first company. The subject was the sole owner and employee of the second company, which existed solely to receive grant funds from the first company and pay them to the subject as salary.
In relation to the time sheets, a report of the investigation said:
When we asked him (Dr Salby) to supply supporting documentation for the salary payments, the subject provided timesheets reflecting highly implausible work hours—for example, the subject claimed effort averaging nearly 14 hours a day for 98 continuous days between May and August 2002 (including weekends and holidays), and in other instances claimed to have devoted as much as 21 hours per day to the project.
So a crook, not a fearless defender of truth, certainly not someone you should be siding with. But then you’re desperate for anything these days as evidence piles in from every corner, and few but the truly challenged believe any of your fossil-fuel funded disinformation. One thing is for sure, when the next generation are looking for scapegoats, for those who delayed action and sentenced them to a chaotic, dangerous future, your name with be high up the list. If you’re still alive then they’ll come for you.