Shocker: Global warming may simply be an artifact of clean air laws

Ed says:
August 19, 2013 at 4:11 pm
1) Does anyone believe that China’s air got cleaner between 1980 and 2000? I don’t.
It’s a common misconception that atmospheric pollution has increased in China. As China industrialized and urbanized, people moved out of rural and urban homes where coal stoves and fires were used for cooking and heating to apartment blocks where electricity was used. This shifted coal burning from inefficient and polluting stoves to efficient power stations. Resulting in much less black and organic carbon pollution, although as coal consumption greatly increased, SO2 pollution greatly increased.
This why India, where there has been much less urbanization, outside the monsoon season, has steadily cooled through the 20th century, while China has warmed over the last 30 years.
This also explains why northern China has warmed 2 to 3 times faster than southern China, where the need for domestic heating is much less.

Paulmur says:
August 19, 2013 at 5:35 pm
Hmmm….not convinced. It’s an interesting hypotheses but now you need to find a way to test it.
This theory can be tested in any city in the world over the weekly aerosol cycle (The Weekend Effect). I have remarked before that it is scandalous that climate science, where real world experiments are notoriously difficult, has completely ignored the opportunity to measure the effect of various kinds of aerosol pollution on temperatures over conveniently short timescales.
There has not been a single published paper in the last 20 years measuring the effect of urban aerosols on temperatures Excepting a few that show the effect of aerosols only the climatically meaningless DTR.

@ur momisugly Schrodinger’s Cat
if people want to get an idea of what smog was like in the 60s & 70s in Los Angeles area .. take a look at pictures of Bejing these days ..

From the paper it appears that solar energy would be absorbed by the ultra fine Particles in the stratosphere leading to stratospheric warming.
Otherwise the without a good level of particle reflectivity, if solar radiation is not getting through the layers of particulates to the ground, then a high amount of solar radiation must be absorbed by the stratospheric particulates leading to a long term stratospheric warming.
As the stratospheric particulate pollution slowly drifted down during the couple of decades from the late 1960’s on and the stratospheric particulates were not replaced after the 1970’s due to the cleaning up of the industrial pollution, the stratospheric temperatures, with less and less solar energy absorbing particulates, would start to cool.
Which seems to have been the case as it appears that stratospheric temperatures have very slowly fallen over the last couple of decades.
Following the atmospheric nuclear tests of the 1950’s and 60’s it was found that the radioactive stratospheric residues from these tests took up to 15 months to cross the ITCZ from the northern to southern hemisphere. From this it would also appear that the equatorial weather systems are a considerable barrier to northern hemisphere pollution crossing into the southern hemisphere in any significant amounts.
The Southern Hemisphere’s land mass including nearly all of South America, one third of the African continent, Australia and New Zealand, most of Indonesia and the Antarctica covers about one third of the global land mass area.
Without Antarctica, the southern hemisphere’s land areas are reduced to about 24 % of the global land mass.
Nowhere throughout these southern hemisphere land areas were there any large concentrations of polluting industry prior to the 1950’s when Australia and to some extent Argentina began to industrialise.
Brazil and Indonesia only began to industrialise in the 1980’s and southern Africa still hasn’t any large concentrations of industry except in some pockets in South Africa.
So compared to the huge industrial regions and high population densities of the northern hemisphere and their consequent capabilities to produce globe circling pollution and hypothesised cooling particulates, in the southern hemisphere such polluting capabilities from industry and populations were globally only of a very small consequence until late in the 1980’s..
From the barrier effects of the equatorial weather systems to the ingress of any northern hemisphere pollution into the SH and the lack of major population densities and the small industrial bases of the southern hemisphere, we would expect to see some quite large differences between the southern hemisphere and northern hemisphere upper atmosphere pollution levels and consequently the long term temperature records ie cooling in Northern Hemisphere in the 1960’s and 70’s and then warming from then on compared to a quite steady but very slow shift of temperature trends in the Southern Hemisphere over the same period.
If the hypothesis as provided in the paper is near correct, any global temperature trends should show very significant differences between the northern and southern hemispheres temperature changes and trends over a 5 decades long time frame from the 1950’s to the 1990’s..
All due to effects of the probable differences in the amounts of stratospheric particle pollutants between the NH and the SH.
The raw data temperature from both Australia and NZ both indicate an almost steady base temperature right through those 5 decades while the northern hemisphere was first cooling in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s and then supposedly warming from about 1977 through to 1997,
A short two decade long [ NH only ? ] warming period upon which the entire claimed proof of a catastrophic global warming is solely and completely based.
The Australian and NZ historical and raw temperature data has been severely corrupted and shifted to an upward trend in both countries by the more rabid warmists in both in Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology and by NZ’s even more notorious rabidly warmist cell at NIWA.
This site below has done a large amount of Australian temperature analysis and has a lot of information on the very substantial adjustments made by elements in the BOM to Australia’s temperature data.
kenskingdom
http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/
And for NZ, WUWT;
New Zealand’s NIWA temperature train wreck;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/09/new-zealands-niwa-temperature-train-wreck/
So summing up, if the claims of the amount of stratospheric particulates being the probable cause of first global cooling and now as those high levels of particulates drift out and down out of the stratosphere, allowing clearer skies for more solar radiation to penetrate to the surface and a consequent warming,. there should also be quite large and easily detectable decadal variations and trends between the changes in temperature in the northern hemisphere and the temperatures of the southern hemisphere..
And just for interest, Because of our location and the sparseness of land masses in the SH plus the only locations that have trustworthy weather data going back over a century, Australian and New Zealand’s historical temperature records as utilised by climate researchers cover close to 25% of the global surface.
So any adjustments, spurious or otherwise to our records have a very large impact on the historical global climate data and the flow on effects from the use of that data.

So let’s say there’s something to this. Combined with banning of certain CFCs starting in 1978 which University of Waterloo’s Qing-Bin Lu said coincided with temperature rise until 2002. Then take into account the population growth and huge use of unscrubbed coal plants and soot from cooking stoves in India and China which could fully account for anomalies in China and India data (see figures above) that stopped overall heat gains post-2002, and we may have a more wholistic sense of what’s happening. Add in the polarity shifting of our sloshing, spinning liquid iron core and that potential set of effects along with the sun’s changes, and it sure looks like wasting time and energy on minuscule CO2 percentages is 100% pure foolishness.
It would be more effective to array large mirrors (or even solar arrays, perhaps) on deserts to reflect heat back to space while planting more trees and using dark roofs in colder places where we want more heat, to enhance life and growing seasons in northern US and Canada. (I’m not advocating the mirrors, just sayin’ .)

I am glad some readers are measuring actual particles instead of just talking about them.
There are neighbourhoods in Ulaanbaatar (from where I sometimes write) with an annual average of 600 micrograms/cubic metre (PM2.5). Beijing is clean in comparison. The temperature in the city has been rising rapidly over the past 60 years but is now tumbling. I do not see any relationship between the PM and the temperature. It is pretty clear on extremely cold days and the worst pollution is in November when it is not all that cold.
More than half the PM2.5 in Beijing comes from the farmlands around the city. That brings up the question of land use changes, not aerosols.
My conclusion so far is that local effects are of little consequence. The brightening is real and some of us may remember the global dimming scare that was a kite flown for our attention some years back. It did not sell as well as CO2.
Water droplets are very effective at scattering light. Agricultural methods have changed – is that not a large factor over that time period. Black carbon is a very effective air-warmer and sunscreen at the same time but it is almost always co-emitted with organic carbon. Maybe there is an interplay between the ratios of BC to OC that swamps all other considerations. Prof Liu here in Waterloo concluded it was Antarctic ozone that dominated temperature. Can ozone dim or brighten as well? At which frequencies? High energy UV for sure. Was the brightening gained and lost full spectrum or visible? Enquiring minds want to know.

Urban aerosols cause ozone production locally and for a large distance downwind.
Atmospheric production of ozone and visibility reducing aerosols continues long after their primary precursors have been dilute to low concentrations.
http://capitawiki.wustl.edu/images/0/0a/76j10.pdf
Clearly, some complex and poorly understood chemistry going on.
I agree that we have little idea of the effect of various atmospheric substances,loosely called aerosols, have on temperatures, individually or in combination. The forcings ascribed to aerosols by climate science, are just the fudge factors used in the climate models.

“”””””……Chip says:
August 19, 2013 at 4:32 pm
I would disagree with one point. The air didn’t get cleaner because of laws, but because technology and wealth enabled us not to pollute…….””””””
Well I don’t know about where you live; but in California, our air has gotten cleaner, in spite of the clean air laws.
First they gave us MTBE and ETBE in our gasoline to “oxygenate it”.
That meant that less “oxygenation” could take place in your automobile’s under the hood “oxygenator” , aka “Engine”.
So we got about 15% less mileage, for the same tank full of “reduced fuel.”
That meant that we had to buy and burn more fuel, as well as getting rid of the oil company’s garbage for them. it had the added benefit, in that the fuel tanks leaked, and polluted about half the ground water wells in California.
So we got the to remove the MTBE; but they replaced it with another “reduced fuel” oxygenator; Ethanol; which then placed greater strain on clean water availability, growing and converting all that maize.
So we still get our quota of reduced gas mileage, causing us to burn more fuel along with the faux fuel. The ethanol fuel, has one advantage, if you leave the tank open a bit, if not driving, you can evaporate some of that junque, and get a better blend og gasoline, with less “oxygenator” in it.
Well you can’t get around having to buy the oxygenator, anyway.
Can’t blame the oil Companies though. They say they can meet all the fuel standards, without any ersatz fuel.
Despite that, the car companies have made their cars much more efficient, despite being hamstrung by the unfuel gasoline.

Mike Abbott says: “Wild is clearly in the AGW/GHG camp.”
Wild pays lip service to AGW/CO2 in order to prevent his funding from being cut off. But those statements aren’t backed up by anything in his papers.
The science in his papers contradict AGW/CO2 if you had read them.